Matthew Hurst is Public

Think of the last album you bought, and compare it to the your first record. If you’re like me the first album you bought was a favorite from the radio (The Simpsons Sing The Blues), whereas the last album I bought (Bitte Orca by The Dirty Projectors) was a recommendation from a friend. It’s not just the music formats that have changed, but what we listen to and the experience with music that is transforming online.

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).

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Any company can use online media to connect their brand with their audience, but how does a non-profit grow their organization despite expected declines in charitable contributions?   Even with a limited budget online media levels the playing field to free and earned media for non-profits, like Living Classrooms a client I had the privilege of consulting for last spring.

Along with a team of classmates at American University, we set about creating a strategic communications plan for Living Classrooms, a non-profit organization serving underprivileged youth in the DC-metro community since founding in 2001.  One of the challenges unique to this client was their difficulty distinguishing not just from a successful parent organization, but also standing out from other non-profits in DC currently struggling for funds; branding would become a strategy.  Their hand-on education approach meant almost all of their funding was used in their programs, but was a challenge to developing new sources of fundraising. Meeting these budget limitations helped us build a strategy with specific objectives (met through some work on our own part).

As discussed in our presentation (and memo), creating and using a Blog and Twitter were critical tactics to meet the campaigns goals.  First these online tools serve an agenda-building relationship with the local newsmedia, through which Living Classrooms would try to earn media without expensive advertising. However social media is not synonymous with free media: even though these platforms are free to use, they require thoughtful and persistent work from dedicated professionals in order to work well.

Any organization can ask someone to Twitter for them, but only a professional can make it relevant to reporters, bloggers, and others who would want to tell Living Classroom’s story.  My role in this process was to build these media tools for them, and to start using these so that Living Classrooms would could model on them; unfortunately they did not have the budget to hire someone to write  so my model was key.  While new media levels the playing field, a public communications professional can lift an organization above from the rest, so that a non-profit like Living Classrooms can stand out online.

These tactics also play a critical role in winning and retaining new donors, since they allow Living Classrooms to provide regular updates which demonstrate the value of their donation.  Because Living Classrooms, like so many non-profits, is involved in so many programs donors don’t always know about all the work their donation allows an organization to accomplish everyday.  These regular updates demonstrate the compelling work Living Classrooms does through stories told in words, videos, and pictures in the channels which new donors are likely to discover this cause.  This serves as a compliment to the newsletter and mailer our group designed, usually adapting the same material for online use.

We’re still waiting to see which parts of our strategic plan will be used by Living Classrooms this year, so in the meantime please check out the blog I set up or follow @LCNCR on Twitter to learn more. For a communications professional with a strategic approach, online tools can become a successful tactic for non-profits to  overcome limitations and expand their communications budgets, ultimately changing minds and lives of those most in need of help.

Just when you though 2009 couldn’t get any more crazy, this last month saw witness to revolutions taking place in the streets and online, overshadowed by celebrity deaths and iPhones.  So it’s time once again for me to share some of the trends and ideas that have emerged  in my sphere of influence recently:

Comic: Superhouse. A new webcomic, illustrated by the Chris Maue.  Required reading if you like to LOL.

Meme: Michael Jackson. Did anyone even remember how much they enjoyed the King of Pop as an entertainer anymore? Within minutes of his death millions of people reacted in shock, and later celebration of this musical icon. In the wake of the news, websites like CNN, Twitter, and even Google received spikes in traffic that nearly took down their servers.

Music: Beck’s Record Club project.  Every week Beck releases a cover version of a song through each sequential track from a record album. First up he’s recording The Velvet Underground & Nico. These cover songs are accompanied by original music videos they make themselves. Beck has always been and will probably remain the most significant musical influence in my life.

Politics: Iran Election. Maybe you remember hearing about this before a bunch of celebrities died? For a little while it looked like real democratic reform was about to take place at the will of it’s people.  People around the world rallied to their support, and Twitter became really important.  This last month has been heartbreaking.

Social Network: TIE – Reddit & Kirtsy.  Social Bookmarks are the agenda setting mediums for the 21st century.  Whereas Reddit serves an audience more engaged with newsmedia, with measurable influence in this community.  Kirtsy offers many of the same great shared links, but without the misogyny that prevails on Digg (among others).

Theory: Image Repair Discourse.  Benoit provides a model through which reputations can be repaired through appropriate responses to each crisis.  Depending on the nature of the crisis, there are several strategies through denial, evading responsibility, reducing offensiveness, mortification, and taking corrective action.  These are strategic approaches to communicating with the public about your impact during a crisis.

Video: DTV Transition.  On June 12th, broadcast television signals were   switched from analog to all digital signals.  Believe it or not, millions of people did not know about or how to make the switch to DTV.  After all my work helping to spread the word online last year, I was happy to tune in for the last night of analog TV.

Picking up on my friend Gabe Bullard‘s tradition (in turn borrowed from the Thomas Crone), here’s a monthly list of 7 things I’m enjoying these days. There is no particular order to the list, just a chance to pass along some genuinely worthwhile ideas and trends that wouldn’t warrant a blog post otherwise

Blog: Dork Yearbook.  This is why Tumblr is great;  Like Mortified, only geekier.  I could probably submit my own pics here, except I didn’t have a computer until I was 9 years old.  Just because a good blog doesn’t fit into a professional website’s blogroll doesn’t mean it need remain my guilty pleasure.

Meme: #sillyhats .  It started out innocently enough when @laurenreid photoshopped a whimsical hat on top of @gbullard‘s profile pic.  At some point, we’re not sure when, it became a meme of sorts.  You’re more than welcome to join in of course, with the right hashtag.

Music: Cover songs.  All my favorite musicians are making cover songs (or having their songs covered). Nothing new there, except there seems to be a dearth lately, or at least I finally have taken an interest.  This started well before Beck/Sonic Youth’s split-single covering each other’s songs.  Why re-invent the wheel when you can acknowledge your influences directly.

Social Network: FourSquare. Before I moved to DC I couldn’t really use Dodgeball, now resurrected as FourSqaure.  So I was skeptical about the usefulness of the network, versus my beloved Brightkite. Something about the gaming aspect, earning badges like Mayor of local establishments, makes this incredibly addictive.  Try the iPhone app, connect with Twitter, and see you around town!

Theory: Social Marketing. Contrary to the online connotations of it’s name, social marketing does not describe social media marketing.  Applying marketing techniques to positively change behaviors that benefit the public good has impressed me with it’s results. And it’s not Plato’s Noble Lie.

Video: Let Me Twitter That. As if my obsession with all things Twitter weren’t enough, this Andy Milonakis video has become something like a theme song. The video itself is ironic, original, and full of in-jokes that Twitterati will recognize immediately.

Word Game: Scrabble. I never thought I’d give this Hasbro classic a try after the Scrabulous fallout. But now that I can play with friends on Facebook, and make plays on my iPhone, this game is hard to put away.

If you’ve been wondering what’s been keeping me from updating the blog lately, there need no be any mystery: this is the home stretch of final projects for school. Not the least of which is my masters degree Capstone Thesis paper.

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.

Here’s a few updates to previous posts, and some news on my professional life:

• The Twitter Internship is soon to become simply An Internship.  Last week I was happy to join New Media Strategies as their intern, starting in May 2009. I’m looking forward to learning more about how they use new media tools, including Twitter where I got their attention to begin with, to participate in online communities where they promote and protect brands for their clients.  I think we’ll be a good fit together since we share the same inclination to try new online tools for ourselves so that we can understand any opportunities they offer for those we represent.
• I have signed up for summer semester at American University.  The two last classes of my Graduate degree in Public Communication will be Crisis and Political Communications.  And since they take place in the evening, it shouldn’t be any trouble for my internship.
• Rock the Vote, which I had previously applied for an internship, has begun to offer a fellowship program for young students like myself.  This largely self-defined fellowship encourages individual innovation using social media to reach young people and engage them in civics.  Although I probably will not be able to become part of their program because of my internship responsibilities, I hope to join their team and help out via Telecommuting over the course of their campaign.  Ask me or tweet Chris Kennedy for an invitation if you’re interested in joining the program.
• To date I was able to raise $195 from 7 donors for People to People on Facebook.  Although this did not reach my goal, it surpassed my expectations, and has raised the bar for non-profits like PTP online.  I am proud of what I could contribute using these social media tools as an individual, and look forward to helping them in the future.

While some of these updates might warrant a post of their own, thanks for letting me be a little self-indulgent.  If you’re dying to keep up on the latest as it happens, why not join me on Twitter already? After all, it did help me get this internship, etc…

12for12: The 12 second Tweet on 12seconds.tv

Everyone already knows that putting a video on YouTube might be a good way to get the word out about your campaign. Of course it’s not very easy for yours to stand out, so it’s important to explore the new venues where your message could be seen and heard.

To be sure YouTube is still where it’s at: for most internet users it is the default site to visit when you’re looking for a video, making it the second most popular search engine behind their parent Google. But although YouTube is supported with the largest collection of video in the world, it is not well designed to support productions of high-quality content from the Entertainment industry; their video ubiquity does not equal market dominance in video forever.

Even as YouTube prepares to launch a new video platform for premium content (ie broadcasters and advertising), HULU has begun to establishing itself as a successful haven for broadcast programming and advertising on the internet. In a little over a year HULU has become the #2 video site (behind YouTube of course) with 34 million viewers in February, and is expected to earn at least $120 million in ad revenue for their operating partners – NBC and FOX. And while many platforms for online video have launched in the past few years, HULU is backed with a marketing budget of $50 million from their partners.
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Sure Twitter is great for getting feedback from your work and building relationships online, but what if Twitter actually helped generate work opportunities instead of just creating work for you? That is exactly the opening I discovered for myself, and all I had to do was make a comment on Twitter to find it.

In my search for a summer internship in DC, using Twitter has become indispensable for learning about the social media and PR firms I might apply to for work.  Not only does it help me understand those communications companies on the cutting edge, but the participatory nature of Twitter helped a company find me.  Before I knew it I had the inside-line on internships offered to me, even as no such positions are being publicly offered.

About 3 weeks ago I bookmarked the website for New Media Strategies, using a service which publicly shares my bookmarks through Twitter.  I was surprised when NMS, who must have been following public discussion of their company using Twitter (as they would for any of their clients), replied almost immediately to my update on Twitter directly.  I was impressed, and we started to follow each other on Twitter.

Almost a week later I had finished a short internship inquiry application, with the intent to discover any more job openings at NMS, but their website did not make it entirely clear where such applications might be sent.  So I sent another message on Twitter directed towards NMS, inquiring about where to send my application, which replied to me a name and email address of the right HR rep for social media.  Their employee was also polite enough to include their personal Twitter feed, giving me access to someone inside of their organization that could help keep track of my application.

After a few modifications to my resume and a new cover letter, I am happy to say my application has earned the attention of New Media Strategies.  I am definitely excited in learning more about this possible internship, although I am still seeking and applying for positions around DC.

To me the most revealing aspect of this whole development is how new communication tools, like Twitter, mirror the process of networking in real life.  While NMS took advantage of Twitter as a tool to monitor public opinion about their organization, it also gives individuals like myself powerful access to information that might otherwise have been achieved with a phone call or a fishing letter.

At the very least, the counselors at American University were impressed with the job offering I found outside of those being posted online.  Perhaps a little initiative and novelty in communication might help me stand out from the rest of the job market in my internship applications for this summer.

Please excuse the mess while I set up the future home of my professional, public website.  In the meantime, feel free to follow my progress on Twitter.com/MattHurst .