Every month I share a short list of ideas that I think deserve your attention, or at least commandeer my own.  This month I’ve included a few extra as an early holiday gift to readers.  I want to wish everyone a Happy Holidays, and hope to see you in the new year.

Blog: Framing Science. Matthew Nisbet will change how you understand science.  We take for granted that the facts should speak for themselves, but our understanding of these complex subjects are largely a matter of communication.  His blog covers so much of what I learned in his classroom, and it is recommended reading if you care about climate change, public policy, or evolution.

Colleague: Nina Keim.  I met Nina as a Graduate student at American University (maybe Classmate is a better title), and have always been impressed by her initiative.  Unlike some of my peers, Nina displays an endless curiosity; she seeks out new ideas in communication and isn’t afraid to try them out for herself, often before their value is readily apparent.  Rather than merely acting as an informer, Nina embodies the role of an opinion leader in her own right.

Meme: PR does not equal “Press Release”. Sure Press Releases still work, but the question is “should you send one?“  At #PRCamp we first realized that the words Press Release should never be used near anything Social Media.  PR practitioners build relationships and tell stories, and in today’s media landscape that cannot be limited to broadcast and print news releases.

Music: Bob Dylan’s “Christmas in the Heart”.  I’ve made many jokes over the past month about the music video, which I’m convinced will soon become another Rick Roll.  What convinced this unassailable icon to record his first Holiday album may have been a favorite charity, but I’m convinced it must’ve been Santa.

PR Agency: 2ChicksInc. Full Disclosure – I’ve been working (as an intern) with this start-up PR group over the last month.  Working with the women who are its namesake, I’ve learned how a boutique PR firm can use their expertise to innovate online campaigns.  And their generous part-time position has helped me continue my own career search (thanks again for the opportunity).

Shameless Plug: The Brew Noob. My side project has evolved from 140 charecter beer reviews on Twitter into a Tumblr blog of own right.  As usual, I’ll test the brews so that you can enjoy tasty beers.

Social Network: Hot Potato. Why use hashtags or checkins if you only want to talk about an event while it’s happening?  It’s not meant to replace Twitter or Foursquare, but its a new take on an old idea. Another revelation we made at #PRCamp was that not everyone will use Twitter (the brand), but that SMS/mobile messaging (the idea) were here to stay.  Try it.

Thanks for reading through; please consider these next ideas my holiday gift you, my loyal readers…

App: Tweetie. I’ve been loyal to Twitterific since I bought a Mac, and since I started using iPhone OS since it’s free. I wouldn’t usually pay for an App on a service that can update via SMS, but this app is worth it.

Charity: Water. You already know I care about People to People International and the Living Classrooms Foundation.  But please check this out; they bring a gift that is fundamental to all life, and they could really use your help.

Video(s): Besides the wig in a aforementioned video to Bob Dylan’s “Must Be Santa”, this  beard seems to be making the rounds. Also James Lipton wants you to Give It A Ponder before Sexting, using his beard and all.

Full disclosure: I’ve been addicted to Twitter since I started using it in September of 2007. Since then I have witnessed its explosive growth as a daily user of this social network, growing from thousands of daily users to millions now.  These attacks are evidence of Twitter’s importance, and like Facebook before it this social network is gorwn large enough to be experiencing a backlash.

Unlike many social networks before it, Twitter has become an agenda-setting media.  This might seem obvious because broadcast and print newsmedia about Twitter have been nonstop, frequently breaking news stories or framing an issue through its social media context. As a social network (although many of its users of Twitter do not think of it as such) Twitter facilitates interpersonal communication in which opinion leaders, or at least some with a large number of followers, introduce new ideas to their network which help set the public’s agenda.

Because Twitter serves an audience that is constantly engaged in the discussion of new ideas, frequently accompanied by hyperlinks, Twitter has succeeded at become agenda setting media like none before it.  To be sure Facebook, itself a much larger social network, only recently overtook email as the primary means for most individuals share news stories and links to websites.  But rarely have these social media, including social bookmarking websites like Digg and Delicious, taken part in constructing the news agenda with the wider public much less offline as Twitter does.

The explosive growth of Twitter is not necessarily because of any special function the site offers (there have been other microblogs before) but because of it’s core of users, who themselves have set the tone of what Twitter should be used for.  This isn’t to say there is a right way or wrong way to use media, just that some practices seem to work better. The critical difference in using a social medium comes from those who are using it; in this case the core users who serve as a social model are opinion leaders in diverse subjects such as communications, celebrities, and politics.  And it’s easy to see the appeal; opinion leaders are provided a platform to introduce ideas about culture (and even about themselves), while the accessibility of the platform allows individuals to interact within their network of connections which make even celebrities (who continue to lead the way onto Twitter) seem approachable by any fan.

Perhaps this model of influence offers a clue to one recent trend on Twitter, in which power-users remove all of the users they follow in order to reconstruct a list which better reflects a tightly-knit social network.  While some organizations scramble to create a list of followers on Twitter which seems to be the largest, these users illustrate the power of influence over a small agenda-setting audience they want to stay tuned into.  Because in social media influence is not measured as the number of followers who might read the monolougue you’re broadcasting to them, but by the relationship between individuals which is built through a dialog.

Never before has there been such a media tool to listen to the audience’s ideas, and to engage them in conversations about them.  The backlash may have been inevitable, but it has almost always come from those unwilling to participate in a dialog; it would seem from what I’m hearing that Twitter is here to stay.

In the past the music industry has relied on taste makers such as DJs, critics, and marketers to help introduce new music to would be record buyers (or downloaders).  However over the last decade Opinion Leaders, those most influential individuals in your social network, have played the most important role; think of these people as your friend who is usually the first to introduce you to a band that you go on to love.

Online these opinion leaders have started popular music blogs, their influence measured by their expertise within genres and their appeal within their blogging audience.  Offline these taste-makers usually have the largest music collection among your friends, and they make frequent recommendations that are just for you.  Opinion leaders are the arbiters of new music in a marketplace no longer limited by the label-centered distribution, serving agenda setting roles with their personalized recommendations that mirrors the shift from mass-media driven popular music (radio, Rolling Stone, MTV) to online distribution meant for niche fans and private listening (iPods and YouTube).

As our experience with music increasingly takes place in social media, the relationship between opinion leaders and their social networks shifts significantly.  While I’m still taking recommendations from my friends, chances are you’ve tried using a peer-recommendation website of your own, such as Last.fm or Pandora.  The former, Last.fm is a service I’ve been using for over 4 years (then known as Audioscrobbler), has tracked over 20000 songs played on my computer and iPod.  In return for music listening data CBS (who owns this social network) can use, I get personalized recommendations from my friends and musical “neighbors” along with occasional suggestions from Last.fm .  This hybrid of the opinion leader model with the narrowcast of media distribution is actually quite seamless, if not organic at the consumer level.

On the other hand is the model of Pandora, the popular free* streaming music service which uses analytics and social ranking to make its music recommendations.  Pandora remains extremely popular service**, although I should admit that I am relatively new to the experience of tuning into user created “stations”, in which individuals do not control playlists but can configure them through a thumbs up/down rating system.  Many consumers rave of the recommendations this analytic system can provide, and I must admit I have been turned on to some music that was outside my sphere of influence otherwise.  However Pandora doesn’t always provide the high quality recommendations one might expect from an opinion leader; although the site offers the ability to skip songs you don’t like, it must limit the number skipped tunes before it forces one to listen through the entire song.

Opinion leaders play the most significant role in sharing music outside these two social networks, where music sharing is changing as quickly as the rest of social media.  Leading the charge are sites like Blip.fm and 8tracks that allow these Opinion Leaders become would be DJs for their friends, publishing playlists and sharing individual tracks with friends on Twitter and other social networks. Meanwhile Myspace remains a significant place for new bands to break their music to a wide audience, albiet Opinion Leaders sharing music through their own profile page cater to a much smaller social network than earlier.

This list of music sharing services  is hardly definitive, since music tastes are as diverse as the communities of fans who listen to them.  Although it’s hard to predict exactly how people will listen to music or using what online services, it is clear that Opinion Leaders will continue to play their significant role in influencing their network of friends.

Any one of these projects could warrant a blog post of it’s own, and I will be glad to share more about them after each is completed.  In a meantime, here’s a little insight into what a Graduate student in communications can accomplish.

• Practicum: My team has been building a long-term strategic communications plan for Living Classrooms, a non-profit that serves communities in the DC-metro area with hands-on environmental education and workforce development; they call it “Learning By Doing”.  This group does amazing work with young people who live in underprivileged areas, but one of the drawbacks of their success is having so many diverse programs it is difficult for newsmedia to make a clear focused story about what it is they do exactly.
  One solution I have contributed, which fits the group’s communication strategy, is by making a Blog and Twitter for them to get the word out. I’ll cue you in on how we plan to help a non-profit grow as donors face a recession soon.
• Management: We’ve been given a mock assignment in this class, responding to an RFP from the American Red Cross.  Our group has been designing a complete response, including plans for a multi-city festival and a localization model for more than 700 chapters of the Red Cross.  We’ll be competing with another group for the contract in an upcoming presentation, which I’ll try to share here.
• Social Marketing: Diabetes is not “Your Grandparent’s disease” any longer; it increasingly impacts younger people.  I’ve conducted an environmental scan of the issue, and conducted original primary research through in-depth interviews with students.  From there we’ve designed a comprehensive social marketing campaign, that doesn’t just change attitudes but people’s behaviors as well.  I’ve already built a mock-up of the online network presence, which is key to our strategy.
• Seminar/Capstone: My thesis involves original research of a scholarly nature, but with real-world application to the problem of energy conservation.  Although I am exploring an academic subject, exploring through case study and interviews how individuals are motivated to change their behaviors, I am writing it so that anyone can understand the issue.  Hopefully my research will help me build the soapbox I need to come out of my degree with specialization in opinion leaders, agenda setting, and marketing as they apply  to the salient public issues that brought me into PR.

I’ll be sure to tell you a little more about what I’ve learned… just as soon as I finish working through them of course.  Stay tuned.