Periodically, I check to see if I have new followers on Twitter, and was surprised to find out that Bessie Coleman,Matthew Henson and Benjamin Banneker were waiting for me to follow them back. Something about that was intriguing and after a closer inspection I learned that a toy manufacturer was also following me. H.I.A. or History in Action is the brainchild of D.C. lawyer Sterling Ashby, who developed the line of historical action figures in response to a dearth and to give parents and children a way to engage based on a simple question, “Who is this?” Read more →
rt me @blackweb20 social media police: toying with history on twitter
what i learned on @blackweb20 this past week
This past week was a cool content week on Black Web 2.0. The most shocking story to me was about Anne Sempowski Ward resigning from Johnson Publishing Co. (Ebony, Jet). I wrote that post and in hindsight, I’d rather write about a resignation than a firing or a black-owned media company folding. That’s just me.
Still, Black Web 2.0 published two articles this week that contained public relations lessons.
Apple Will Issue Free Cases or Full Refunds (Author: Rahsheen) Essentially, Rahsheen reported one of the biggest PR coups of the decade coming out of Silicon Valley. Apple actually concedes to failure. Sort of. After weeks of telling iPhone 4 users that they needed to buy a rubber case and that everyone was holding the glitched product wrong, they put on their big kid pants, held a press conference and conceded. Kind of. Sort of. And wouldn’t it have been nicer if they’d just done this in the very beginning?
Gizmodo’s Right (Author: Sherri L. Smith) Sherri, the managing editor of Black Web 2.0 responded to Gizmodo’s Joel Johnson’s blog post about following a black woman on Twitter. Joel’s post is awkward and well-meaning and Sherri was cool and merciful in her retort. I love her writing but it wasn’t the post that interested me. It was the comments that followed that totally captivated me and therein I found something that appealed to me intellectually. Lynne d. Johnson wrote,
What would have been interesting though is to hear more of the conversation he and Anil had about blacks on Twitter. The background of that conversation could have set up exactly why and how he was thinking about black people on Twitter and how black people use Twitter.
More PR practitioners and publicists should write about how they use Twitter for their black clients and take the time to analyze their clients’ personal use of Twitter for the sake of sociology. This is a social experience that is changing the way we relate and are related to as people. Believe it or not, PR people have the propensity to contribute to intellectual conversations on social media, which is why I loved Lynne’s call to dig deeper.
commenting continues the story… sometimes.
Comments are a form of social media in and of themselves. Systems like Disqus enable comments to fall into the public timeline and be found in a simple Google search. A system like Disqus allows a comment to be posted on a comment as in a reply. Some systems enable a user to tweet out or post their comment on Facebook. Most commenting systems will alert the user on activity on a comment thread, which is great for keeping a discussion going. Read more →