ARTICULATED

I’ve been asked a number of times by colleagues and friends why and how I use Twitter and Facebook.  My participation in social media is for very precise reasons, which vary by outlet.  Here’s my best attempt to explain them:

Facebook:  Personal branding.

I love Facebook for the same reason everyone else does – to stay connected to friends and family. But well aware that everything we do online contributes a thread to the fabric that is our “personal brand,” I try to keep my updates to a set of thought-out tones and topic areas. No updates about what I’m having for dinner. I seek to put forth the aspects of my life for which I want to be known – being witty, smart, principled, in love with recreational sports, etc. It’s my objective that any post illuminates at least one of those things, and to do so in a somewhat clever or interesting way.

Twitter: Professional development.

Of the just over 1,000 people who follow me on Twitter, I probably know only 75 of them. The rest are complete strangers. It’s an around-the-clock cocktail party where new best practices in PR is the constant discussion topic. I join in when I can, and I pick up gobs of tips and resources. When I participate, I follow the quirky rules of Twitter, which is to respond and retweet more than I blurt out. And occasionally I offer glimpses into my personal life to show I’m human. But the purpose is all about being a better PR pro.

LinkedIn: Connect to high-value former colleagues.

I keep my LinkedIn profile up to date for the same reason I might keep my resume up to date (if I bothered). It’s a place to go to find credentials. But more importantly, I’m connected to many former colleagues on LinkedIn, the kinds of folks who over time have proven to be far and away the richest sources of new business. So every month or so, I send an email to those people pointing out recent posts on my blog that they might find interesting or entertaining. This is probably my single highest-value activity in social media. (And it’s the one I spend the least amount of time on … hmmm.)

Blog: Reveal what makes Kinkennon Communications uniquely me.

The primary purpose of this blog is to remind folks whom I’ve known and worked with for years that I’m still here, I’m still me, and my gears are still contantly turning. It’s a place where I can show them a bit of thought leadership on topics I care about and show them how I’m engaged in the most current of PR thinking and practices. The blog doesn’t have a huge following, and that’s fine, because the primary audience is people I know. Most of them don’t read blogs, as a rule, including mine — but will when I suggest a specific post I’ve written that they might find useful.

The blog’s secondary purpose is for people in the PR world who I don’t know.  When I blog, I tweet that I’ve blogged.  Some of the people who follow me on Twitter actually read some of my posts, and for better or worse get a better sense of who I am.   For folks who might have heard my name and would even considering hiring Kinkennon Communications, this blog also helps me reveal a bit about me.

…….

Do any readers see this the same way?  Think of it differently?  If so, I’d love to hear it.

By the way, the sum total of this activity resulted in my two largest new clients in 2009. Both were significant projects from people who I’ve known for years, but they thought of me for these particular endeavors only because of the “currentness” of all of this activity and the possible “top-of-mindness” that may flow from that.  Lucky me.

I’m devoting a good amount of time to studying the latest thinking, guidance and examples of organizations – corporate, nonprofit and government – that have embraced the growth of social media to advance broader goals. I follow a bunch of social media thinkers and experts on Twitter, which really helps in discovering this kind of material.

Here are a very few examples of what I’m reading right now:

• This excellent blog post by Janet Fouts (“Do you need a corporate social media policy?). It provides links to the social media policies of some well-known corporations. For instance, here’s Intel’s.

• A detailed presentation of the Red Cross’s social media policy, as featured on the Beth Kanter blog “How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media.”

• The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) new “Transparency Blog.” I’m keeping a close eye on this one.

• The “How To” lists/channel on the preeminent social media website, Mashable.

• The social media “How To” articles channel on the Marketing Profs website (requires signup).

These only scratch the surface. But they are good basic reading and ongoing resources for anyone trying to wrap their head around what the future of communications, PR, public education, issue advocacy and marketing look like.

The second iteration of this Kinkennon Communications website I love launched today.  We’re getting serious about using this as a place to reveal our thinking on just how much communications, marketing and issue advocacy are changing – and the degree to which KC intends to stay on the edge of it.

We’ve re-launched and re-purposed this blog to provide analysis and reflections on the astonishing evolutions at the intersection of communications and media (along with other meanderings on favorite topics of mine, like work-life balance).

We’re participating at a considerable level on Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets … and we’re using those social media outlets to draw attention when appropriate to our thoughts and reflections here.

It would be naïve to think that KC’s successes to date at calling reporters and generating news stories for our clients is going to matter five years from now.  By that time, marketing and other institutional communications will be near impossible to control, centralize, “manage” or even “message.”   It’ll be about keeping customers and employees and members and other engrained stakeholders happy … REALLY happy … so the information they publish on their own is helpful to organizational goals … or at least not destructive.

Attempts at spin doctoring will be seen as dated and trite.   Transparency will be king. Authenticity and integrity will go from nice-to-have to root requirement.  It’ll be a whole new world.  KC is helping clients maneuver all of that now, and the fun has only just begun.   Let’s go. 

“Transparency succeeds when it is embedded into the culture of a company, not implemented as a program designed to be exercised by only a few.” So says Shel Holtz and John Havens in their book Tactical Transparency: how leaders can leverage social media to maximize value and build their brand. It’s a great read about brand management in the web 2.0 world.

But that concept isn’t just for brand managers at Fortune 500 consumer-product companies, which is who Holtz and Havens largely write for in this particular instance. It’s for communications and PR folks at B2B companies and nonprofits and membership organizations and government entities. For those of us who work for or interact with organizations like that, it is largely up to us to convince our executives and board members that “message control” and “opacity” as we have known them are obsolete. Doing PR like it’s been done for decades won’t work any more.

Technology has created a reality that forces us to interact with our stakeholders in entirely different ways – to free the reins on our people to establish new, nontraditional, far more authentic conversations between the organization and its stakeholders.

Check out this story by freelance writer Michael Estrin.

He lifts up three brands that “get” Twitter. I’m particularly intrigued by his description of the way Texas Instruments is using it. The company opened the door for customers with product questions to communicate directly with the Texas Instruments engineers that designed the product, via Twitter. It’s sort of call-center style dialogue, but directly from the horse’s mouth, and for all to see. What’s more, the engineering team ends up with insights they never would have gathered otherwise.

Estrin asserts the common denominator is “helpfulness” – licensing individuals internally to use Web 2.0 applications (like Twitter) to be helpful to the broader customer community … or by proxy, the marketplace. That very well put premise can apply in about any and every organization conceivable today.