I appreciate a combination of wit and geeked-out science. Especially in a blog post.

PR 2.0 posted an article under the heading “The Twitter Star: Nova or Supernova?” earlier today. The first lines of the the post define exactly what a nova and a supernova are:

Nova: a star showing a sudden large increase in brightness and then slowly returning to its original state

Supernova: a star that suddenly increases greatly in brightness because of a catastrophic explosion that ejects most of its mass

Science! It’s cool! And cute!

But the article has a point: traffic on Twitter sunk 27.8% between September and October of this year — despite the fact that we send around 27.3 million tweets a day and that Twitter receives so much free media coverage (around $48 million of free media coverage in June 2009 according to a VMS estimate cited in the post).

One of Twitter’s problems is retaining users. We see it all the time in higher education. Faculty and staff hear about Twitter somewhere, create a profile, maybe post two twice, and then walk away. They forget to do one of the most important things. One of the things that makes tools like Twitter useful: finding people you know who are active members of the community and following them. Because if your tribe isn’t using a social media tool, then you’re probably not going to use it. Why would you? You’re tribe isn’t there (maybe they are, but you just haven’t found them). Most of them don’t.

And yet, there is another good point buried in the subtext: the tool, Twitter, is the fad. Even if Twitter continues to evolve, the tribe most likely will move on in a period of time. It’s the lessons that tools like Twitter bring us (for most of us in higher education, a sometimes-neglected lesson is the importance of connecting to students, faculty, donors, and prospective students as individuals) that should leave a more permanent impression.

Cross-posted at GWU’s Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet.

Last week, I trekked northwest to Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy for an event on The Internet, Free Expression, and Authoritarianism.

Evgeny Morozov, Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University, discussed the ways in which authoritarian governments benefit from the Internet (check out Morozov’s TED speech to watch him outline some of his points). Morozov argues that totalitarian governments appear to be using the Internet in three ways to protect their own interests.

Morozov’s first point is that authoritarian regimes can use the Internet to spread propaganda and the state’s perspective. They can also attack personalities instead of spending time censoring and/or arresting people. “Just because the space is decentralized, it doesn’t mean that it’s hard to manipulate,” said Morozov. Some of his examples include:

• China’s 50 Cent Party, whose members join interesting conversations online and steer them in more patriotic directions for the the government.
• Russia’s School of Bloggers, which enlists the young and technologically savvy in the government’s efforts to translate its ideology into language that appeals to other young, technologically savvy people.
• Iran’s Bureau for the Development of Religious Weblogs trains clerics to blog in an effort to counter more progressive voices online.

Developing tools that encourage citizens to deliberate online is another way that authoritarian states can use the Internet to increase their legitimacy. “It’s hard to find a case where governments don’t want to be tech savvy,” said Morozov. “Even Burma is building a Silicon Valley.”

These kinds of tools, many of which encourage the public to comment on policy ideas, can help the government generate truly useful information, such as how to improve technological infrastructure, for example. However, they can also be used to share the blame for failed policies and engage in spin about unpopular policy decisions, warns Morozov.

Finally, argues Morozov the Internet is an incredibly powerful tool to monitor dissent and identify individual dissenters — all through information that we share freely with each other using social networking tools and websites.

“The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control,” said Morozov. Or, as he put it in his TED speech, governments used to torture people for days to get the kind of information they now find online.

• ACLU’s Facebook widget, “What do quizzes know about you?”
• The study “8 Friends are Enough,” which uses social graph approximation of the eight friends shown in search engine listings of people on Facebook to suggest that it would only take 800 days of effort to create a social graph of everyone on Facebook.
• MIT’s Project “Gaydar,” which uses information on Facebook to predict whether or not someone is gay.
• A Wired.com Danger Room post about In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, buying stock in a firm that monitors social media, called Visible Technologies.
• A tool being developed by the EU to scan CCTV images and the web looking for “abnormal” behavior.

CRAFTING BETTER RESEARCH

Later during the discussion, Shanthi Kalathil, the author of Open Networks, Closed Regimes opened a discussion about building better research methods to analyze activism and advocacy on the Internet:

“We’re still looking at this through the perspective of blocking and censorship. Our metrics of “free” vs. “not free” exert a phenomenon effect: we’re only understanding what’s going on through the one frame. What are we missing? We’re missing the parts of the web in these countries that are being used for the public sphere and good governance. We need to get beyond the metaphor of dissidents and governments because we miss a broad landscape of changes, including vibrancy, communalism, nationalism, and the changing nature of discourse online. . . We need more evidence-based studies, not anecdotal studies that correlate (or don’t) social media and political change.”

Marc Lynch, who teaches at George Washington University and blogs for Foreign Policy, continued the discussion. “We need to test claims about the impact of new media on behavior and attitudes,” said Lynch. “Where is the causal relationship?”

Lynch argues that our current data on social media and political change is anecdotal and evidence free. It’s drawn to where evidence exists, and not to where evidence is important. It doesn’t usually include counter-factual and cases of non-success with social media and political change. Further, it doesn’t usually look at the causal mechanism – what connects something on Facebook to an action?

“More doesn’t equal more impact. It can just equal more noise,” said Lynch.

Lynch suggested that academics focus their social media and activism research in several different levels of analysis:

• The individual level, which looks at attitudes, competencies, and behaviors of activists and participants in activism online.
• The level of collective action. Are different types of online activism actually bad forms of organization? Do they collapse under the weight of authoritarian governments?
• The regime level. Is generating lots of Internet activity a net positive for democratic, citizen activism groups? Or does it allow the government to better monitor and counter different forms of activism?
• The level of international attention. When the West pays attention to online citizen activism does it bring with it the attention of the aggressive regime?

Last week, our Association for Social Media in Higher Education hosted its inaugural event, Trust and Authenticity in Social Media: The Case of the U.S. Military (check out the video). Instead of writing a “normal” recap of the event, I decided to do something different. I spent the entire event live-tweeting under my Twitter handle @JulieG, so I thought it would be interesting to look back on the event through the frame of Twitter, following the tweets — and retweets (with a few grammatical and syntactical changes, and a few explanatory notes).

To make it easy to follow the conversations, here’s my “cheat sheet” of Twitter handles — including some of the people in the audience and watching online:

• @talan – Scott Talan, our moderator. Talan is the director of communications at the National Association Schools of Public Affairs and Administration and an adjunct faculty member at George Washington University.
• @LindyKyzer – Lindy Kyzer, a panelist who also tweets under the handle @USArmy. Kyzer is public affairs specialist at the U.S. Army.
• @fieldsteven – Steve Field, a panelist. Field is a former spokesman at the Pentagon and blogs at The D-Ring: Where the Military and New Media Collide.
• @nicoleschwegman – Nicole Schwegman, a panelist. Schwegman is a former Navy Public Affairs Officer.
• @lovoles – Lorraine Voles, an audience member. Voles is the Vice President of External Relations at George Washington University.
• @imjamesdavis – an attendee.
• @tjohns06 – an attendee.
• @NavyNews – listening to the conversation.

@talan asked his first question: when did you join twitter and what was your first reaction?
@nicoleschwegman responded that her use of social media came out of necessity — connecting to peers at the Naval Academy on Facebook (they didn’t have any phones in their dorm rooms) and later connecting to friends and family when she was out to sea.
@lyndykyzer stressed the trends involved in social media, not platforms. The trend is microblogging. The platform right now, is Twitter. Platforms change, but the trend can have a longer-term impact.
@lyndykyzer continued that as a platform, Twitter is only a secondary response mechanism for the Army. “Unless media relations responds, Twitter will not respond. We don’t want it to be our official form of communication.”
@lovoles asks the first question: “Does new media put more pressure on military to get information out in the context of the recent Ft. Hood shooting?”
@lindykyzer answered. “Putting out accurate data an hour later was more important than being the first on Twitter.” When it comes to reporting official information, social media has to be concurrent with tradtional press releases. Her department fact checks everything before publishing it — whether it’s a press release or a tweet.
@talan: asked, “With the decrease in mainstream media, do you see an increase in citizen media covering the military?”
@nicoleswegman answered that military reporters want information now to beat their competitors — which includes bloggers and new media. Because it’s a race to get information first, reporters online and offline aren’t always careful in their reporting and fact checking.
An audience member asked, “Can’t bureaocratic processes get in the way of rapid response to disinformation online?
@lindykyzer answered “There are multiple layers of chain of command between me and my general. Welcome to the Army.” She continues to discuss the need for speed and delegation of authority — with some guidelines. All social media posts must be “Public Affairs Ready” before they are released.
@lindykyzer continued with the thought that the military should push the authority to tweet down to the lowest level, but make sure people at that level are trained and qualified. She says, “You want to get info that is unclassified into the field quickly – single biggest multiplier there is.”
An audience member commented that the Fort Hood shootings and the misinformation spread on social media made a lot of people question social media as an effective medium.
@talan said, “Facts have no perspective.”
@fieldsteven said that in the future, official communications channels need to get the facts right, but they shouldn’t ignore social media. It can build trusted connections between service members and the public.
@lindykyzer concurred, “Our best spokespeople are servicemembers. We need those authentic voices. Not every day is a great day to be in Army. When we lose 13 service members in their home, that’s a bad day for the Army. ” We can’t just have PR flaks and policy people talking. If we send out corporate crap, we’ll get flamed for it.
@lindykyzer continued, “Soldiers are not dumb. We can give them training and let them communicate online. They speak in honest voices.”
@nicoleschwegman said, “In the end, the web prevails. If you say something wrong, people will discover it.”
@fieldsteven said, “A blog with no negative comments is suspect. Good organizations learn from mistakes.”
@nicoleschwegman said, “We’re trained not to go too far out on our own to break the news, but the Navy relies on sailors to get the news out there to friends and family.”
An audience member asks, “how are different branches of the military using social media to talk to service members? Is it cleared through a Public Affairs Officer first?
@lindykyzer answers that social media has been a great medium for feedback to the Army on institutional issues. Service members and their families engage in a lot of back-and-forth on issues like a potential smoking ban.
@fieldsteven added that there is a ton of risks and costs for not engaging in social media. Most executives and leaders understand this.
@tjohns06 tweets some of the ways the military is engaging in social media: “See@navynews and @mcponpao fb page for great #Navy examples!!”
@lindykyzer agrees with @fieldsteven. “It’s not as difficult as you think to convince military leaders of need to use socmedia – they just don’t think it’s fun – yet.”
@NavyNews tweets that there are up to 186 Navy social media sites so far.

Scott Talan (@talan), who moderated yesterday’s event on Trust and Authenticity in Social Media: The Case of the U.S. Military, just sent us a few follow-up articles on some of the topics we discussed yesterday — and some of the topics our association will look at in the not-so-distant future.

• Reuters posts a short item on the California gubernatorial debate via Twitter.
• Business Week covers the Facebook generation & learning.
• The NY Times looks at students who officially blog about their school as part of admissions strategy.

We received a question for our panel via email from Roger Pociask (Twitter: @roger_pociask), managing director of the African Affairs Advisory Group, who is unable to make today’s event. Lindy Kyzer was kind enough to respond.

Here’s Robert’s intro and question:

My organization has offices in the United States and Africa. I have tweeted about U.S. Africa Command since the beginning of Twitter. While it is refreshing in recent months to see many subordinate military commands embrace social media, I see an absolute incoherence in how the Pentagon as an organization uses it to achieve its goals. Case in point: several weeks ago I sincerely attempted to have an open public discourse with @USArmyAfrica on the issue of #AFRICOM’s credibility and motive. This is something about which U.S. Africa Command is EXTREMELY concerned. When I pointed out some glaring PR inconsistencies the debate deteriorated towards freshman name calling at which point I disengaged. All this came from a real Army PAO whose mission I support and am trying to help achieve success. I received numerous private and anonymous direct messages from others even within DoD who have encountered the same thing. At this point, the hashtags #AFRICOM & #USAFRICOM (which I created) have been invaded by @USArmyAfrica and turned into nothing more that auto RSS twitterfeed blast machines for PR purposes which do nothing to further public discourse and in effect decrease the command’s credibility – while sadly increasing the risk of U.S troops on the ground.

The question is this: Does the senior military leadership truly grasp what social media is all about and how it is a force for truth akin to the pamphleteers of the 1770’s? Do they realize that if they see social media as another tool in the psychological weapons toolbox that it will backfire? Thanks for your comment on the issue.

Here’s Lindy’s response:

The issue of whether or not Pentagon senior officials really “get” social media is a good one, and can certainly be asked of most major CEOs, as well. Across the board I think we’ve reached a point where folks understand the power and need to engage via social media, but aren’t necessarily great at marrying that effort into their larger mission goal in a way that makes the platforms most effective. So, everyone wants to be on Twitter because it’s a great way to send out quick, timely updates, but they might not always understand that conversation and community building are at the heart of effective social media outreach. We @USArmy and victim of the same RSS-esque issues however, and why? We’re simply understaffed. A bad excuse, but a real one. With limited personnel, good conversation building takes some time and if you’re an overstretched public affairs officer – and especially one with a limited grasp of the medium – it’s clearly easier to push out one way communication.

From a senior leader perspective, we’re really working hard – and well – when it comes to get our most senior ranking officials on board with social media. In the case of U.S. Army Africa, I know first hand that Maj. Gen. Garrett, the commanding general there, is a proponent of social media engagement. But there is an element of resourcing and education that needs to take place in the public affairs field in order to do this well, and that’s an area where we’re struggling.

For the U.S. Army, we have three pillars in our social media engagement – presence, relavance, and penetration. Presence is just being there. That’s a “check” for most public affairs offices – they’re out there
engaging. Relevance is much tougher for us – how do we adapt “military speak” into real, social media conversations? How do we engage in good conversations and accept criticism in the social media sphere? We’re slowly getting there, but it demands effort and good strategy. Penetration is the final area, when we’ve gained prominence and succeeded in providing value-added engagement with our community, fully disseminating that information through the appropriate medium. For most of us in the military social media sphere, we still dance between the first two pillars of that model.

So, I think our senior leaders are starting to get it, but they’re senior leaders for a reason – they require high-speed staff and advisors who REALLY get the medium and can make it happen within their command. And that’s coming along, but at the slower pace of government. And where social media is being done poorly, it will backfire, or prove completely useless, and that’s a part of the education process that will hopefully help improve our efforts.

Hope that helps – this is a big, complex issue for us, and really the heart of why government sometimes struggles with social media.

Join the Association for Social Media and Higher Education for our inaugural event. As a group, we’re fascinated by the ways in which the U.S. Military adapts new technologies and tools to reach the public, provide better services to its members, and recruit new servicemen and women. Details below.

Trust and Authenticity in Social Media: The Case of the U.S. Military

WHEN: Thursday, November 12th at 3-4:30 p.m.

WHERE: Elliott School of International Affairs, 1957 E Street, NW, Room 602 (Google map)

The Association of Social Media and Higher Education (ASMH) invites you to a panel on the nature and role of social media in the military. The panelists, who include current and former U.S. military officers, will address the ways social media can be used effectively, efficiently and transparently to connect the military, civilian and veteran populations. The conversation will also address the ways Twitter, Facebook and blogs can:

• offer a more nuanced view of military life;
• generate public support for veterans;
• serve as a support system for wounded soldiers;
• increase transparency through social media;
• build authentic dialog about military issues and defense policy.

Panelists:

- Moderator: Scott Talan (Twitter: @talan), director of communications, National Association Schools of Public Affairs and Administration and adjunct faculty member, GW

- Lindy Kyzer (@LindyKyzer, @USArmy), public affairs specialist at U.S. Army

- Steve Field (@fieldsteven), former spokesman, Pentagon, blogger, The D-Ring: Where the Military and New Media Collide

- Nicole Schwegman (@nicoleschwegman), former Navy Public Affairs Officer

RSVP here (and see full bios of the panelists): http://tinyurl.com/yc3tb3p

For live updates on Twitter, follow @JuliG or the hash tag #ASMH. For a live webcast of the event, click here.

The event is cosponsored by The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, Graduate School of Political Management and Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, and George Washington Today, GW’s official online news source.