The following was a piece written for Army.mil and can be seen here.

‘Geo’ is this year’s Twitter

If 2009 was the year of Twitter, then 2010 is ramping up to be the year of location-based social media services. Geo-location services like Foursquare, Brightkite and Gowalla have rapidly been adopted by users, and many of the sites you’ve likely already heard about like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter have either already integrated this capability or plan to do so in the near future. These services typically let users ‘check-in’ at their current location, identify where they are on a map, share that information with their social network, and provide additional comments on what they are doing.

Location-based social media services access your current location either through GPS or a cellular signal. Most of the major cellular networks have the ability to pinpoint your location, and the social media applications that utilize this capability are available for most cell phones on the market. These geo-location websites can either be used alone or can be linked into your other social media feeds like Facebook.

The video here is from the most recent South By Southwest Conference hosted in Austin, Texas and is a great visual that shows a large number of people checking-into eight different social media sites over the course of one week.

Why do it?

Sharing your current location within your social network is just an additional way to connect with friends and family. Most people already provide written updates about where they are and what they are doing, and having a virtual ‘push-pin’ on a map is just a natural progression. In addition, photos that contain geo-data can be integrated into services like the one Flickr provides, in order to plot your photos on a map for yourself, your own network or the general public.

As for its organizational use, these services have large potential for the private sector. For example, businesses can provide incentives for ‘checking-in’ at their various location. As for its application towards the Army, we might want to utilize it for community relation events, FMWR or Family Readiness Group events just to name a few. As the usage increases, the collective ‘we’ will undoubtedly identify more ways to effectively use this type of service.

Proceed with Caution

As a member of the military, you may have some concerns about you, your family or your Soldiers broadcasting their current location in real time. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. PleaseRobMe.com was created earlier this year and it aggregated publicly shared check-ins in order to help expose the dangers of location-sharing. Every new technology brings about its own concerns, so here are three things you may want to consider before posting your current location on a social network:

1. Who are you informing? Remember the extent of your network and whether it’s closed or open to the public. You may not mind revealing real-time locations with close friends and family, but you may want to be somewhat guarded with your check-in’s if your network is large and/or publically viewable.

2. Where are you checking in? A good rule of thumb is to never check-in at your place of residence or at work. Revealing these locations, even with a limited network of people, can enable those with bad intentions.

3. What are you revealing? In addition to privacy concerns, those of us wearing the uniform need to remember Operational Security (OPSEC). There are times when we don’t want anyone to know in real-time where we are or what we’re doing. Just be aware of what your sending, when your sending it, and keep in mind your fellow Soldiers who also have the capability to broadcast sensitive information.

As with any new technology, people are experimenting with these services and finding new ways to integrate them and increase their potential. ‘Proceed with Caution’ should not be taken as ‘do not do it’. On the contrary, when it comes to social media my opinion is ignorance is not bliss.

If you are already utilizing these services or just want to give it a try to see what it’s about, feel free to connect with me on my Foursquare account.

Some info to share on my recent migration from Ning to WordPress. About a year ago I really got into Ning because at the time offered everything that I wanted in a ‘blogging’ platform. It offered the ability to blog, create forums, groups, have members, videos, photos and a number of other things all in one space. Flash-forward a year and it’s time to make some changes.

So here’s what under the hood of the new site:

• Self-hosted WordPress blog
• Video channel on Youtube (still migrating content to it)
• Photos on Flickr
• My news off Netvibes
• Feedburner
• Odiogo for my audioblog
• Friendfeed for my Lifestream
• Twitter as my only microblog (I had 2 other Twitter accounts and a dozen other microblogs cross-posted on with Ping.fm)

So here are some of the reasons I moved off Ning:

1) Cost. Ning charges $5 a month to have your own domain name, $25 a month for no ads, and $25 a month for no Ning promotional links. Thee are also some additional premium services which I did not use. Considering all the Ning sites out there, and many of them having some premium services, that’s quite a nice little business for them. I just spent $60 for a domain name and a years worth of hosting from GoDaddy.

2) WordPress’ flexibility has improved. Even 1-2 years ago, I knew that WordPress was the best blogging platform after trying all of the major ones out there. At the time it just didn’t seem to offer everything I wanted. Probably a combination of my increased knowledge, better themes, and better widgets, and WordPress now can do what I want.

3) Ning is not for blogging. I did a post on this back in February. Ning is more like an intranet and the blog platform is for people within the network.

4) Specificity. Finally, my posts were becoming more and more about the military.  Social media and the Army has had a slow start but the momentum has picked up. A year ago  did not feel comfortable being out here as ‘Major Mike Nicholson’. Today I have no issue with doing it and have been increasingly moving towards it anyway. There are tons of social media and communication gurus out there in the world of corporate communications. I just want to now take this and apply what I know specifically towards a more specific segment.

Still have some work to do and expect there will be some minor tweaks along the way, but so far I’m happy with the move.

**Photo taken off of Dirk.Jan’s photostream

*** The below post has been transferred without comments from another blog which was hosted on Ning. The post has been backdated to its original publishing date ***

Hard to believe that it has only been a week since the Iran election and subsequent explosion of social media as the primary method for getting information out there. You cannot turn on any of the major news networks without hearing the anchors talk about Twitter, Youtube and Facebook. Everyone in the social media world has been blogging, tweeting and posting photos and videos related to Iran all week.

There has been a few things over the past few months that have thrown social media into more of the visible mainstream. The two that come to mind are both Twitter-centric: Ashton Kutcher and CNN battling it out for 1 million Twitter followers and Oprah joining Twitter, both of which got mainstream cable news coverage.

These events have been fun to watch and were probably more or less a blip of information for the average, every-day, semi-connected person. But this week we have seen all these sites, ones which might have been considered fun sites used only ‘socially’, take a huge leap forward in the eyes of many.

I have no data to back this up, only a conversation I had with our network administrator today.

For a network administrator, social networks are nothing but a pain-in-the-ass. They are peer-to-peer, security nightmares. Until recently most social networks on a U.S. government network have been blocked and been off-limits. A recent decision has decided to open some of them up, but it is still a struggle to gain access at the lower levels.

I noticed that Youtube was blocked today after being turned on for about the previous 2 weeks and I mentioned it in passing to our network administrator. Having had the same conversation multiple times before with multiple different network administrators in multiple locations, I could almost repeat verbatim the reasons he then gave me for those sites being blocked.

As with all those conversations before, I begin to explain how important social media is to modern day public relations/public affairs/public information. This time was different though. After I started with my explanation I stopped, started over, and just said: “Look at Iran. The primary method of news gathering and information over the past week has been from Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. This is where I work, these are my primary tools, and these social network sites are the job.”

Instead of ending in a ‘we agree to disagree’ like so many times before, I saw a little lightbulb go off in this particular network administrators head. He got it.

Facebook, Youtube and Twitter have been plastered all over the mainstream media, and these sites have been the primary methods of information gathering. Because of this, I think that more people will not look at these sites merely as a hobby for people wanting to share too much information about their personal lives, but they will start being seen as a valuable, viable and essential by the non-communication professionals.

There have been so many things happen this week politically, socially, and within the context of the internet that you could write a book about it, and Im sure somebody probably will. For the public relations/public affairs practitioner, social networks have been elevated to a new level.

Using the words of Hilary Clinton this week (cant believe Im quoting Hilary Clinton), “I wouldn’t know a Twitter from a tweeter, but apparently it is very important.”

My network administrator who viewed social networks as a pain-in-the-ass now knows that for what I do…’apparently it is very important’.

All the members of an organization don’t need to know all the in’s and out’s of what we do, but as long as they know ‘it is very important’, the bar has been moved forward.

*** The below post has been transferred without comments from another blog which was hosted on Ning. The post has been backdated to its original publishing date ***

A recent post on ReadWriteWeb says that Paul Buchheit, the man that built Google’s Gmail and Adsense, says that real-time, multi-person conversations is the ‘next big thing’. I made a quick joke about this on my Twitter account about everything coming full circle. We have all these web tools like blogs, twitter, video conferencing, etc, and the ‘next big thing’ in technology is…wow! actually talking to someone!

Im a bit skeptical about this claim, as I cannot see joining some kind of chat-room where people are speaking on any number of topics; no way for anyone to take charge, no way to know who is speaking, trying to jump in on the conversation. If you’ve ever conducted a phone conference with a number of different offices, you know you have to have someone in charge of the conversation and give each person their turn to speak, otherwise it is a jumbled mess.

But this did get me thinking about Media Relations. My ‘rolodex’ is Facebook. I use Facebook professionally as well as personally and for me it seems to be a bit better than something like LinkedIn. Facebook allows me to not only have keep up with them through their own tweets, but have one-on-one chats with my contacts on any number of topics, whether they be work-related or just idle chat. I don’t disregard the idle chat either because it is what keeps up the ‘relationship’.

There are nice tools out there like Vocus that have millions of media contacts out there. Vocus allows you to put together a news release and blast it to a ton of people who have signed off on having interest in your particular subject area. Yet Vocus is also close to being a SPAM pusher. The contacts in Vocus know they are in the database and can opt-out of they choose, but the software does allow anyone with an account to blast out all kinds of info. My thoughts on Vocus is that it is nice as a starting point – identifying some of the people, writers, outlets that have interest in your subject area – but it is up to an individual to start a relationship. I highly advise making contact not through a mass-distributed email, but through a direct, unique email. An email that when the person who is receiving it reads it, they know that you have taken the time to write an email that is unique to them. Use something like Vocus as a starting point, but in order to really have a relationship, you need to engage the person individually.

The Vocus-effect came to a head recently with Michael Arrington of Techcrunch. Arrington said he would honor and then break media embargoes from PR contacts because basically he was getting mass distributed emails with a header saying something like ‘this information is embargoed’ and a distribution list of thousands. Shel Holtz wrote about the incident on his blog and the PR blogosphere had a field day with the topic. Arrington took some heat for saying this and if memory serves had to back track a little bit on his statement, but on the flip side those who sent out a mass distributed embargo had no point in doing so. The news embargo is done between a person and a PR rep from an organization that has a relationship together. It can be useful for both parties, and its basis is done out of mutual trust. Arrington made a statement publicly that ensured that Techcrunch would never, ever get an embargoed story before anyone else did, but the people sending out mass-distributed embargoes mistake the sending of emails and using the web tools to be a ‘relationship’ with him and others.

Whatever the next big thing in communication is, it will still boil down to whether or not it improves your relationship(s) and communication(s) with the people you use them with. We have things that enable us to reach the masses; information distributed to thousands of contacts through the web, sending news releases to someone like Michael Arrington and hundreds of others believing you are conducting media relations. The tools of communications are only tools, and we need to understand each ones strength and weakness and make sure we use them appropriately. The ‘relations’ part in media relations comes from a true, individual, one-on-one dialog and no amount of internet-based tools will replace the work needed to be done in order to start and maintain an actual ‘relationship’.

*** The below post has been transferred without comments from another blog which was hosted on Ning. The post has been backdated to its original publishing date ***

I got a Tweet the other day and it was from someone I did not know in a field I was not interested in. The post said something to the affect of ‘I have followed you, now follow me and then unfollow in order to complete the opt-out process’. When I started my Twitter account, I went to some of the communication and PR twitter accounts that were of interest to me and then followed some of their followers. The thought was that since I was interested in PR, communications, etc, there would probably be some interesting posts from other people interested in the same topics that I am.

I had been thinking about Twitter accounts before I received this message, but after receiving it, it only reinforced my original thought – Twitter is just about getting the most number of followers, no matter how you do it. It seems like a competition, or a one-ups manship. If you have a lot of followers, you are seen as a person of ‘influence’ in your respective field. Since professionally I would say Twitter is used primarily by communication professionals either as themselves or as a member of an organizational team, it becomes a competition of who has the most amount of followers.

I followed about 800 initially and at the moment have about 400 followers, and there is no way I am able to keep up with all the traffic. Whenever I get onto Tweetdeck, it is just a matter of luck whether or not someone else is on at the same time and sends something I see of interest to me.

It is still fun. I like the direct messages with random people; a sort of brief meeting, or an exchange between people while passing in the online hallways of Twitter High School. Unless I want to create a new Twitter account and follow only those individuals that I have the time to scan through their tweets, I am stuck in the land of follower numbers. Looks like my current ‘influence’ ratio is 877/418 (following to followers), slightly under 50%. Am I concerned? No. Can I keep up with all the traffic as is? No.

Oops, got to go, I just saw I have a new follower…