troydarr

[troydarr]

Information Supporting Military Children

This survey is to help a new nonprofit organization focused on supporting military children. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YQ9PRTG #TheyServeToo #militarychildren #army #navy #airforce #marines

Purple Up USA is a nonprofit organization focused on celebrating military children and serving as a clearinghouse of information in support of military children and those who care for them. The purpose of this survey is to gather information that will help Purple Up USA communicate better with our customers. All responses are anonymous. Thank you for participating in our survey. Your feedback is important. You can find out more about Purple up USA at our website https://purpleupusa.org.

[troydarr]

Part 11: Short Videos

The news of the day in 30 seconds or less

I have spent the last three months thinking about how I want to renovate my organization’s social media program. For the last 44 years, Fort Polk’s public affairs program has revolved around the weekly newspaper, the Fort Polk Guardian. For at least the next three years, and probably much longer than that, the newspaper will continue to make money through advertisements in the 14,000 printed copies distributed across post and in local communities. That means the office will continue to write news and feature articles and shoot photographs to illustrate those articles.

What I want to do is slowly shift the office’s focus from print to video. This morning I scanned my Facebook news feed and a bit less than half of the posts were videos. And the content was engaging. I have to share some of it with you.

The first video was six minutes long and had what looked like a professor talking about world poverty and immigration using gumballs to help illustrate the problem.

The second video was seven minutes long and featured a modern-day Ninja Warrior negotiating an obstacle course.

The third video was 2.5 minutes and told the story of two men who making a living rescuing cats from trees. In their defense, they are tall trees. And the guys were wearing GoPros. My office just bought two GoPros. :-)

The next five videos were briefly, a very short video about workplace productivity, Justin Trudeau talking about a successful Canadian business, a great TED Talk explaining that the people most likely to succeed are those who have grit, a lady who runs a cat sanctuary, and finally a world champion cliff diver.

Why are you telling me all this?

World poverty, immigration, ninja warriors, jumping from high places, workplace productivity, grit and all those other videos are completely unconnected to the life of an American soldier, but an American soldier can relate to all of those subjects. In many ways the videos on my Facebook feed this morning define the life of a soldier. Soldiers deal with refugees and poverty; they are warriors and jump from high places. Sometimes they get stuck in trees when their parachutes blow them off course. And here at Fort Polk, we even provide a sanctuary for red-cockaded woodpeckers and Louisiana pine snakes. I just wanted to share my morning Facebook feed and my thoughts about what an American soldier might see on social media when he has a few spare moments to look at his phone. What I am seeing each day motivates me to move from print to digital if we want to engage our soldiers and provide them the information they need to live and thrive at Fort Polk.

But what about your blog two months ago denigrating television news?

That was television news. This is video on social media. Stick with me here. Soldiers don’t have time to hang around connected to a cable, and lugging 50-inch televisions in their rucksacks is out of the questions And, I am only going to say this one time, no one has 30 minutes to hang around listening to a bunch of people talk about news that is probably important to someone but likely not particularly interesting to everyone. In the year 2017, we do not need someone to curate our news down to a 30 minute block and push it through a fiber optic cable or thin strand of copper. We can curate our own news and pull it from a 4G and soon to be 5G network. And when 5G arrives, we will need that fiber optic cable even less than before. 5G will change the world. No more waiting for videos to buffer. Time to cut the cord and get on board the video train?

Who watches online videos?

According to Statista, 78 percent of Americans watch online video content. That is a lot of people, but of China’s 1.4 billion people, 88 percent watch online video content. That’s about 1.2 billion people. There are more people watching video content online in china than exist in all of North America. That big number, while fascinating, is not particularly useful to me. What is useful to me is that any American soldier not watching online videos is almost certainly an anomaly, and not one that I am likely to reach with my communication program under any circumstances.

Percentage of internet users who watch online video content on any device as of January 2017, by country

What brands are using video?

Here is where I usually talk about what great brands are using video to communicate with their customer. I think a better question would be who is not using video to communicate with their customers? The answer is, “no one.” Video has been the standard for decades for those who can afford it. In the 21st Century the craft reaches its peak every year, at least in the United States, during the Super Bowl. One of the best Super Bowl commercials of 2017 was from Wix.com combining action, famous actors and humor.

Troy’s Tantalizing Tidbits

I started testing some social media sites, some video formats and some equipment, and I was very surprised to find that the iPad Pro was not a great tool for running a social media site focused on videos. My colleague, a video producer, posted a video on the Department of Defense’s Digital Video Distribution System, originally set up to distribute video from the Middle East to news outlets in the United States. Using my iPad, I could see the file on DVIDS, but I could not download the file to my camera roll. With a Lenovo TAB 10 that cost almost exactly 10 percent of the priced of the iPad I had no problem downloading the video and posting it to Instagram. On the other hand, when I tried posting the same video to Snapchat, it failed to load on multiple attempts. Of course, if it was easy, anyone could be a social media manager.

Takeaways from ClickZ

The future of digital video: short, branded content on social platforms

A quarter of total ad budgets are going to digital video (and this will increase)

65% of agency respondents see an increase in use of digital video in the next 12 months.

65% of marketers think social platforms are the most important media for digital video campaigns

Live video content is expected to increase (with Facebook Live being the first choice)

Branded content is the most likely to see an increase in the next 12 months (45%)

Short form content is the most popular choice for video content.

 Video is the future and the future is now

Fort Polk is going video. It’s not easy. We have to get buy in. We have to get the right equipment. WE have to figure out how to use the apps and supporting software. And the biggest challenge is figuring out what our customers want and producing engaging content.

[troydarr]

Part 10: Yelp

Start helping others by sharing your experiences

As you may recall, I said I would cover Yelp this week, and I plan to remain true to my word. But, I want to be honest with you; I woke up this morning thinking about video. Specifically, short 30-second videos with the latest news of the day posted on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. But, since I promised Yelp, Yelp you shall have. Next week I will talk to you about how I plan to revolutionize Fort Polk’s internal communication program 30 seconds at a time.

About Yelp

My favorite source of social networking statistics, Dreamgrow, lists Yelp as number nine on their Top 10 Social Networking Sites by Market Share of Visits leading me to add Yelp to my list of social networking sites to review. At number nine on Dreamgrow’s list, Yelp has 0.85 percent of market share visits. That miniscule 0.85 percent does not sound like much until you realize it represents about 31.5 million visits per week. Yelp started about 13 years ago when the two founders raised a million dollars to start the company. Since then, the company has grown to a value of around $2 billion, down from a high of around $5 billion three or four years ago. The name Yelp comes from a pseudo-portmanteau of yellow pages and help.

But, what is it?

I also added Yelp, because the site was useful when I first moved to Louisiana two years ago. The part of Louisiana where I live was previously a no man’s land between Spanish and French-held territories. Because of that, Fort Polk has a reputation as being in the middle of nowhere, with swamps, alligators, and cottonmouths. But right in the middle of nowhere sits Leesville, Louisiana, population 6,000; but somehow supporting dozens of restaurants including some unforgettable selections such as Fat Boy and Skinny’s, BubbaQue’s, The Mustard Seed, Schnitzel Haus and Wagon Master Steak House. This blog post is not a restaurant review for Central Louisiana; I just wanted to point out that upon arrival in Louisiana, I might get eaten by an alligator or bit by a cottonmouth, but I was certainly not going to starve to death. And I learned that thanks to Yelp. I mostly use Yelp as a place to find out about restaurants, but information is available about a wide range of businesses from locksmiths to doctors.

Who hangs out on Yelp?

What do you call people who hang out on Yelp? Yelpies? Yelpers? Food critics? According to this article, Arizona Restaurateur Launches All-Out War Against Yelpers, at Eater newsletter, Yelper is the most commonly used word to describe a Yelp food critic. A quick scan of the Internet shows that Yelpers are not universally loved and appreciated for their efforts to provide useful information on places to eat and other area businesses. Obviously, the critics of yelpers are not too concerned about starving to death or being eaten by an alligator. But, I am getting off track.  According to Yelp’s online factsheet, 37.7 percent of Yelpers are between the ages of 35 and 54, perhaps a bit older than the average Snapchatter. What I find interesting is that almost 60 percent of Yelpers have a college education and 45 percent earn over $100 thousand a year.

Yelper Elite

I was digging around on Yelp trying to find out who in Leesville is using Yelp socially, but no luck. New Orleans, on the other hand, has some action. Owen H. a Yelper Elite from Sydney, Australia, posted a note about two weeks ago thanking all the Yelpers from New Orleans for the advice that made his tour group’s visit fabulous. There are also posts from people looking for rental cars, conference rooms and other types of businesses. Everyone receives a response from a NOLA Yelper. Overall, I would say a lot of people who are interested in talking about food hang out on Yelp. I will end this section with a New Orleans Food Bucket List by Morgan F. I am embarrassed to say that the one place I ate in New Orleans is not on her bucket list, though they certainly had a wonderful oyster po-boy.

Images and Text

There is nothing fancy about the media format on Yelp. I find mostly photos of food with a bit of text about the facility and staff. A giant plate of crawfish boil and a cold beer are visually tempting enough that most people probably don’t need any fancy gifs or mpegs.

What brands are on Yelp?

Let’s talk about the crème de la crème of great brands, Apple. As you would expect, lots of Apple stores can be found on Yelp. The New Orleans Apple Store is claimed, but I found no employee interaction on the reviews. And the reviews indicate that particular store has a lot of unhappy customers.

Finding brands on Yelp can be difficult. Yelp always wants to know where you are searching for a brand, and if you leave the location blank, the search function unhelpfully searches the last place you searched. I found Coca-Cola in Atlanta but the page was unclaimed. Mercedes-Benz of New Orleans is claimed. It took some convincing, but I finally forced Yelp to show me Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. Disney has claimed the page, but I could find no example where Disney staff interacted with Yelpers, not even those who had complaints that could have probably been mitigated with a well-crafted response.

Troy’s Tantalizing Tidbits

Yelp has an online guide on how to respond to reviews. According to Sharon Elise, a former account executive at Yelp, some business owners believe if they ignore Yelp, it will go away, some don’t like to use the Internet and others think that Yelp is a conspiracy to extort business owners. According to How Small Businesses Should Be Using Yelp on Forbes, “businesses that claim their free Yelp business page generate, on average, $8,000 in incremental revenue each year.”

Conclusion

We have not talked about what businesses operated by the Army on Fort Polk have claimed Yelp accounts. Oh! There are none. I cannot think of any reason why facility managers of business operations should not claim their businesses and at the very least ensure operating hours, address, and telephone number are correct, and even occasionally interact with a customer.

[troydarr]

Part 9: Last week’s note to self

Consider doing Yelp and Quora

In my original post I stated up front that my plan for these blog posts was likely to change. Other than changing up the order, I have so far stuck with the list of platforms I planned to consider; however, in last week’s note to self, I decided to add Yelp and Quora to the list. I was working on a niche community analysis, and I came across the Top 10 Social Networking Sites by Market Share of Visits [June 2017] by DreamGrow. An up and coming social networking site, Quora, had recently moved up to number 10 on the list. I have seen Quora popping up a lot in my google searches recently and decided I needed to learn more about the platform. And, then, Yelp was at number nine on the list, and it was useful when I moved from Germany to Louisiana a couple of years ago. So I decided to add them both to my list of social media platforms. This week, let’s talk about Quora.

How much is 0.71 percent?

You can do the math just as well as I can, but in case you do not have a calculator handy, 0.71 percent of 37.2 million visits equals 26.4 million visits per week. That’s chump change compared to Facebook’s 1.46 billion visits per week, but still, 26.4 million eyes on a web site is nothing to laugh at.

What exactly is Quora?

Directly from the chief executive officer of Quora, Adam D’Angelo, comes the answer: “Quora connects you to everything you want to know about. Quora aims to be the easiest place to write new content and share content from the web. We organize people and their interests so you can find, collect and share the information most valuable to you.” That answer feels wrong. I know it cannot be wrong because, you know, the CEO said so. Wikipedia has a different answer: “Quora is a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users.” We know that cannot be the right answer, because, well it’s from Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s answer feels right to me. Maybe Wikipedia’s answer is how most people perceive Quora, and D’Angelo’s answer is what he wants Quora to become.

Who is using Quora?

Trustworthy demographic data on Quora users is difficult to find because Quora does not publically post demographics on its users. Laura Hale, a social media researcher, posted on Quora that in 2016, more than half of Quora visits came from the United States and India with small but significant percentages coming from the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

Hale also posted that Alexa data indicates Quora users are overwhelmingly male at around 80 percent. Alexis Silvers at Precision Marketing Group writes Alexa data supports her contention that Quora viewers are highly educated, and Adweek data shows the average age of Quora users is 35, and they are primarily located in college towns.

My Quora Profile

As it was with Pinterest, Quora knew who I was without me creating an account. I assume I logged on at some time in the past with one of my other social media accounts. Probably Google or Facebook, but I cannot find any clues that tell me how Quora knows who I am.

The information Quora knows about me is very eerie. When it asked me to add profile credentials, the second choice was American expat in Germany. I left Germany 27 months ago, but I spent most of my adult life there. On the other hand it also thought I might be a theoretical physicist or novelist living in California. I wish! Quora definitely knows my affiliation with the military. The Top Stories Quora offered me were related to military aircraft, tanks, sniper rifles, fake soldiers and special forces soldiers. All of that information without me even making an account.

What are they saying about Fort Polk?

Two specific results from a search for Fort Polk on Quora are: What is the cheapest way to get to Houston from Fort Polk if I do not have a personal vehicle? and What was basic combat training like in the 1960s at Fort Polk, LA? Those two questions and answers are fairly innocuous. The answers to generic questions people ask about the Army receive mixed responses. One respondent claimed one of his worst experiences in the Army was the swamps at Fort Polk. Another respondent credited the low number of U.S. casualties in Iraq in 2003 to the training soldiers received at the Army’s three major training centers in Fort Polk, Fort Irwin and Hohenfels, Germany. I searched Quora for Fort Polk and also JRTC and only found about 20 to 25 posts for each. That made me a bit suspicious. Could there really be only so few posts on Quora about Fort Polk? A quick Google search of the site turned up 203 hits on the phrase Fort Polk, unfortunately most of those were false hits. A bit of Boolean logic narrowed the search down to 58 hits. So, of the approximately 13 million questions asked on Quora since its found, two have been specifically about Fort Polk, and 58 have had Fort Polk in the answer. The answer, then, to the question, “What are they saying about Fort Polk on Quora?” is “not very much at all.”

What brands are on Quora?

On March 24, 2014, Quora rolled out verified accounts. It took me a few minutes of searching around to find a verified account, Barack Obama, just to be sure I knew what a verified account looked like. Then I started looking for the best global brands of 2016. A lot of people were talking about the top brands on Quora, but none of the top 100 have an official account. Four companies with official presences on Quora that I found interesting are Business Insider, Fort Dummies, The Huffington Post and Time Magazine.

Troy’s Tantalizing Tidbits

Quorum is the singular form of quora. Do we have a quorum? is probably the most asked question using the word quorum. A quorum is the minimum number of members of congress necessary to conduct business. A funny thing happened on the way to the quorum is a play on words used by some journalists in America to poke fun at the legislative branch of government. “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” is a 1962 farcical musical set in ancient Rome. Man, I’m killing it today.

Conclusion

Quora is a fun place to hang out and read people’s interesting answers and personal reflections, but if the top brands in the world are not interested in investing their time and resources into Quora, I cannot in good conscience justify recommending Quora. The platform’s time has not yet come, and it remains to be seen if it will ever.

[troydarr]

Part 8: Down Periscope!

Or ganging up on the poor Meerkat

Two months ago, I wrote in my introductory post that I was planning to explore Periscope. Most of the digital media platforms I listed in that post came from Dreamgrow’s Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites and Apps. As I was reviewing the list for this week’s analysis, I wanted to check where Periscope is on the list. What? It was nowhere to be found. I remember now. I found it on a list of apps. It was purchased by Twitter and ultimately defeated Meerkat, a very similar social networking platform. I like the name Meerkat, and since I cannot explore a dead network, I put Periscope on my list.

I am so embarrassed

I guess I am not a Media Maven like some people. Until two months ago I had never heard of Periscope or Meerkat. Apparently Meerkat was the star of the South by Southwest Conference of 2015. Then along came Periscope purchased by Twitter at a high price, and 18 months later the Meerkat had officially expired. Anyways, this blog is about Periscope.

Your mileage may vary

I could not log on with my desktop computer so I broke out the tablet. Tried to log on using my Twitter account. I could get on the site, but I had to create an account if I wanted to post anything. Downloaded the app and the first thing I found was a live concert of a band named, Phish. The next live video was of an attractive Spanish speaking woman playing the piano. Most of the comments were about her physical appearance, and she seemed to be enjoying the comments. The top 20 or so live posts were people performing music. As I was scanning the list of musicians, a breaking news story popped up live from Minneapolis where a policeman apparently just shot someone.

Map View

I switched to the map view and zoomed in on Fort Polk. There was one post two days ago from Fort Polk. Scotty Bullock  was rapping a song. Mr. Bullock may be the only soldier from fort Polk who uses Persicope. Not a good sign. I skipped to my hometown, Southlake, Texas. Only one recent post from a church service. Let’s jump across the ocean to my favorite city in the world, Heidelberg, Germany. Nothing in Heidelberg. The closest post was from Friedrichsfeld about 10 miles away. A short video of IceCube smoking a shisha or Turkish water pipe. Enough of the map.

Trending

There are some buttons along the bottom of the screen. No idea what they do. It’s like opening a treasure chest. The button that looks like a crowd of people is for trending posts. They do not seem to be in order of most trending to least trending. The top post is Senate Republicans. I really do not want to click on it, but I feel obligated to do so. It is a press conference on health care. Next! I am really not finding much of interest. I see Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. Surprise! It’s a post on how to solve America’s health care problems. I don’t want to get too political here, but he is putting forth a radical idea. Let the people solve the health care problem rather than relying on Congress. Let’s check out one more before we move along. It’s ZDF, the second public television channel in Germany. The top story is What is it about Isis that fascinates young German women?

Who is periscoping?

Data is tough to come by as Twitter is apparently not releasing much on the platform, but Omnicore comes through again with stats on Periscope. As of Jan. 22, 2017, Periscope had 1.9 million daily active users and 200 million broadcasts. Top three countries where Periscopes are live are the United States, Turkey and Brazil. Many of the “normal” people on Periscope seem to be far out on the edge of what I would consider normal. Not the musicians, but the people who talk to the camera while other people make inane comments.

Great Brands on Periscope

Google has multiple accounts but not much content as does Coca-Cola. Toyota USA has 15,881 followers and four posts since the account was created six months ago. Microsoft has 19 official accounts with not much activity. IBM also has a lot of accounts, but those accounts have a lot more activity than Microsoft including an entertaining video of their robot, Pepper, performing at a convention. McDonald’s has an official account with 67, 000 followers and no activity. Number 94 on the list of the Best Global Brands of 2016 has a direct link to music, MTV. The official MTV account has 279,000 followers and 11 posts starting a year ago and ending four months ago. Seven of the 11 posts are from the Video Music Awards.

Troy’s Tantalizing Tidbits

I am seeing a lot more trending stuff from Europe than I see in my Facebook trending list. That is most likely accountable to Facebook targeting and not that Europeans use Periscope more. The Los Angeles Lakers have 99,000 followers and Senate Republicans have 12,000. That probably makes sense.  Here’s a great article, How a Singer/Songwriter Doubled Her Income From Periscope, about a talented young musician who is making a living performing on Persicope.

Conclusion I was not initially impressed with Periscope’s offerings. The individuals who hang out on the platform seem to be on the edge of acceptable social behavior or perhaps over the edge. On the other hand, I was very impressed with the musician, Clare Means. My wife stopped in to listen to the live concert as I wrote this last bit. As to using the social networking site for Fort Polk’s social media program, I see no value.

[troydarr]

Part 7: Be the change you wish to see in the world

Or pin it on Pinterest

I have put it off too long. I REALLY wanted to look a Pinterest as part of this exercise, but I really did NOT WANT to do the work, because I have never felt drawn to Pinterest. On the other hand, one of my colleagues, an award-winning feature writer, has mentioned to me that she likes the social media site. So, off I went to Pinterest.

Imagine my surprise when I saw that Pinterest already had an account for me. I must have logged on to Pinterest sometime in the past using either my Facebook or Google account. Based on the information Pinterest has on me, I believe it was Facebook. A quick review of my previous searches reveals I must have checked Pinterest as part of my social media monitoring efforts. The only two searches I have made on Pinterest are Fort Polk and Fort Polk Army. I have no followers, am following no one and have no boards or pins. It’s like a fresh start all over again.

I just had a great idea

Well, it might be a good idea not a great idea or maybe a bad idea. I need to talk with my colleagues tomorrow and hear what they think. So, I am reading that websites are so yesterday. Young people are getting all their information on social media apps, and they are getting most of their information from people they trust the most, their friends. Fort Polk is struggling to produce a new website because the Army shut down the contract that provided us with the infrastructure for our old website. I was reading a few weeks ago that developing countries are completely skipping over the whole home page for the new business and leaping directly into social networking. I know you’re saying. What’s your idea?

Pinterest is described as a virtual, visual scrapbook, but also as a place to curate a collection of images, infographics, blog posts and how-to instructions. My idea is to forget about the website and use Pinterest to curate the best virtual content about how to survive and thrive at Fort Polk. Other popular social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Reddit are not as good for curating content as Pinterest is. Pinterest just might be a solution that will allow Fort Polk to disengage from the static website of yesterday and maintain a dynamic virtual presence where young soldiers and their families can feel comfortable finding and sharing information.

What are they saying about Fort Polk on Pinterest?

At first glance, it looks promising. At the top of the search page are 15 Unforgettable Things You Must Add To Your Louisiana Bucket List, The Local Guide to Visiting Baton Rouge, Things to do in … Natchitoches, Louisiana, and 12 Perfect Places to Go In Louisiana If You’re Feeling Adventurous. I also found a couple of pins from Vietnam-era veterans reminiscing about their time training at Fort Polk before shipping off to war. As I scanned down the page, I found something that was a bit disconcerting. One pinner named Jerry Genesio maintains online memorial walls of seemingly every Soldier who died in Afghanistan and Iraq for the last 14 or 15 years. While it is important to remember those who have given their life in service to their country, most soldiers and their families do not need a daily reminder of the hazardous profession they have chosen. I am definitely having second or third thoughts about whether my idea was anywhere near great.

One account called Army Wives Club has a Fort Polk board with 1,511 followers and 21 pins including two pins to official Army information and multiple pins to tourism sites maintained by local tourism offices.

The not quite official Fort Polk presence on Pinterest

The Fort Polk Directorate of Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation Marketing Office has a semi-official Pinterest page with 90 followers. The content on this page is very different from the DFMWR Facebook and Twitter sites. While it does have a couple of posters replicated from the other social Fort Polk marketing networking sites, the Pinterest page focuses on food, crafts and Louisiana culture. The site has 36 boards and 836 pins. The site contains almost no customer interaction and, except for six posters, does not communicate anything about the Fort Polk mission. Additionally, the URL on the page leads to a now defunct version of the DFMWR website. While the page is pretty, the lack of customer interaction is making me seriously doubt the value of my “great” idea.

Who are the pinners?

Pinterest has 150 million active users with 70 million of those from the United States. The content includes over a billion boards and 50 billion pins. 81 percent of Pinterest users are females. 30 percent of all U.S. social media users are Pinterest users. 79 percent of people who use Pinterest actually make food and ingredient purchases as a result of what they find on the site

Great brands on Pinterest

I have a new way of looking at what great brands are on various social networking sites. In previous blog posts, I chose some brands that I was thinking about, reading about or just using and looked if they were on that particular social networking site. This week I discovered in the notes pages of What Great Brands Do by Denis Lee Yohn a link to rankings of the best global brands of 2012 by Interbrand. The 2016 list is available, so I will use it to see who is on Pinterest. The number one brand in 2016 according to Interbrand is Apple, and no surprise, lots of Apple products are on Pinterest, but no official page could be found. The remaining top five brands in order are Google, Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Toyota. , Google has an official page with one board, 19 pins and 1,499 followers.

Coca-Cola has a slightly more robust presence with 11 boards, 195 pins, and 17,901 followers. Microsoft has 21 boards, 879 pins and 7,455 followers. I could not find the official Toyota Pinterest presence with a native search. I had to use Google. Toyota USA has 31 boards, 387 pins and 7,442 followers.

Troy’s Tantalizing Tidbits

On my third time to log into Pinterest, two topics were recommended for me to follow, Face Shapes and Shipping Containers. I thought the two subjects would be boring, but they were quite fascinating. Face Shapes gives a lot of advice on hair styles and makeup use based on the shape of your face, and Shipping Containers has thousands of uses for shipping containers that do not include filling them full of stuff and loading them on a train or ship.

The hottest news on Pinterest is the swineapple. “Take a pineapple, core it, peel it, stuff it with pork, wrap it with bacon and grill it.”

Pinterest and Fort Polk

I am undecided. If I could get rid of my old-school website and replace it with Pinterest, I would be onboard in a heartbeat, but since I am stuck with the website for at least another couple of years, I will have to make a soft pass on Pinterest for now. It might be a good idea to create an account and start building up some casual followers in preparation for a full commitment in the future, though that flies in the face of the advice to “commit and stay committed.”

[troydarr]

Part 6: Is an Instagram picture really worth a thousand words?

This is only test

I wrote in my introductory blog post that I would be looking at Instagram, so I guess the time has finally arrived. Full disclosure: I created my Instagram account about two years ago when I started working at my current job. The boss at the time was pressuring the PAO staff to use “instant” social media to lure people to our events. The concept was to take a photo of an event just as it was starting, post the photo to social media with some text like “Come on out. Look what you’re missing!” So, I dutifully created an Instagram account and posted the graphic below. This was only a test for me to get a feeling for how Instagram worked and how my office could execute the boss’ concept.

Success! The test worked.

The following Monday I met with the two PAO team leaders to talk about how we could take my test and turn it into an ongoing program. That is when the failures started. One team leader was concerned about staff members posting inappropriate content if the content was not first approved by the supervisor. Of course, operations security is very important to the Army, but we were talking about posting photos of community events like pony rides and Earth Day events. My counter-argument was two points. First, the staff needs to be trained to recognize what they are allowed to post and what they are not allowed to post. Second, if we cannot trust our staff, we need to consider getting some trustworthy staff. That made my point. I guess we can trust our staff to make good decisions. Then came the real argument. The second team leader pointed out that we do not have mobile devices that can be used to post the photos on Instagram. Staff members would have to use their own personal devices. That was a show stopper, or at least a slow roller. Eighteen months later, we managed to acquire one mobile device that can be used to post live on the Internet. Since then on my personal account I have made four posts. I am following 106 people and have 50 followers. We never did create an Instagram program, but we did use the mobile device to push out Facebook Live videos. But that’s a story for another time.

Speaking of stories

On August 2, 2016, Instagram announced Instagram Stories. The stories gather together the user’s moments and share them in a slideshow format. After 24 hours the photos and videos disappear. I clicked around for about 10 minutes, but I could not find any stories from the 106 people I am following. That leads me to my next question…

Who is using Instagram?

I went to my favorite DreamGrow page with the Top Social Networking Sites, and I see it was updated yesterday on July 3, 2017. The graphics have not changed, but they posted an update on Facebook from Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook is growing by 20 million monthly active users each month and reached the magical 2 billion monthly active users on June 27. The subject this week is Instagram and you can see the DreamGrow graphic on Part 1 of this blog. Instagram is at number three on monthly active users with 700 million. Dreamgrow offers a great infographic to put the number of monthly active users in perspective.

Can you be more specific?

Don’t you hate it when you are digging around the Internet for demographic data and you find an article that claims to be updated last week, but the numbers look like last year? Yeah? Me, too. At least Omnicore Agency gives some dates for most of their statistics. All of these statistics except number two are about U.S. usage.

68% of Instagram users are Females.

80% of Instagram users come from outside of the U.S.

77.6 million Instagram users are from U.S.

Instagram is used by 31% of American women and 24% of men.

32% of all Internet users are on Instagram.

59% of internet users between the ages of 18 and 29 use Instagram and 33% of internet users between the ages of 30 and 49 use Instagram.

38% of female internet users use Instagram and 26% of male internet users use Instagram.

17% of teens say Instagram is the most important social media site (up from 12% in 2012).

#fortpolk

I know everyone wants to know more about how all these 700 million people are using Instagram, but what is most important to me is what they are saying about Fort Polk. There are 16,740 posts under #fortpolk. To put that in perspective there are 1,598,275 posts using about #fortlauderdale. Just joking. Of course, Fort Lauderdale is a tourist destination and Fort Polk is purposefully designed to be a soldier’s worst nightmare. Here are the top nine posts from #fortpolk.

The nine posts from left to right and top to bottom are a soldier graduating from air assault school, the salute battery firing on Independence Day, a soldier who just finished jogging, a soldier and his wife getting ready to move to Fort Polk, British paratroopers training at Fort Polk, a young girl waiting for Maren Morris to perform at the Independence Day celebration, soldiers conducting live fire training, a soldier in full gear taking a selfie in front of the American flag, and finally a soldier posing with a Heinz ketchup display at the commissary.

What brands are on Instagram?

Coca-Cola has two million followers. Mercedes-Benz has 10 million followers. Starbucks has almost 15 million. Trader Joe’s, a newbie to social media, has reached 55 thousand followers since their first social media post ever on March 22, 2017. Apple is being talked about with almost 18 million posts and no official presence to be found. Some companies using Instagram Video include Ford, MTV, Disney, Intel, Cisco Systems, Avon, Burberry, Dell, eBay, Facebook, Gap, General Electric, Nike, Starbucks.

Troy’s Tantalizing Tidbits

Some of these tidbits are a bit dated, but I found them quite fascinating in spite of that. Pizza is the most Instagrammed food in the world with sushi and steaks taking second and third place. I might be old fashioned. I prefer to post photos of food on Facebook. I found one tantalizing tidbit that claimed Instagram videos are seeing significantly higher (over 2X) engagement than Instagram photos, suggesting brands should focus more time and energy on them. Selena Gomez is the top Instagram user by followers with 123 million followers.

Where do we go from here?

In Part 2, I wrote that Snapchat might be a good fit for Fort Polk’s social media program, but if I had to choose between Snapchat and Instagram, I would definitely go with Instagram. Instagram has more monthly active users. The content of Instagram lasts longer online than Snapchat, and Instagram does not have the negative sexting reputation enjoyed by Snapchat. And, probably most important, the posts on from soldiers and their families on Instagram match more closely with the Army’s values. Finally, to answer the title question for this blog, “Is an Instagram picture really worth a thousand words?” Sorry, that was a rhetorical question. I do not know the answer.

[troydarr]

Part 5: Reddit

To aggregate or not to aggregate

As the week was approaching, I was not leaning any particular direction on what media to cover. That’s a change from past media switch ups when something occurring in my life lead me to the next media to consider. This week, I read an interesting article by Brian O’Connor, The Traffic King of Reddit, about a guy who is Reddit’s top curator of gifs, photos videos, and snackable content. The article is a great read, well worth the estimated eight minutes to read plus the 30 minutes or so to consider how the article applies to me personally.

Social media monitoring

I have not created a Reddit account until this week, but I have spent some time on the social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion web site over the last two years. The first few times I visited the site was to monitor social media discussions about Fort Polk. More about that later. My Reddit visit that was most interesting to me personally was when I discovered the Ask Me Anything (AMA) post on Reddit by U.S. Army Col. Steve Warren, the spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, the military counter-ISIS coalition. At the time, I remember thinking that to offer to Ask Me Anything on Reddit requires a brave person. Since then I have come to realize that the colonel does not seem to fear much of anything. A search of news sites will readily reveal that he has been an official spokesman at the highest levels for the U.S. government for some time.

Fort Polk: Home of Heroes

But back to my social media monitoring of Fort Polk. Fort Polk has a bad reputation among U.S. Army soldiers. The main source of the bad reputation is that soldiers go there to train and the training is very tough. Also, it’s hot and humid. There are lots of biting insect and poisonous snakes, and the concept for Fort Polk is that the training should be more painful than fighting for your life in an actual combat zone. So, soldiers like to complain about Fort Polk, and that is what first lead me to Reddit. Here’s one of the first posts by a Redditor that I found about Fort Polk. WARNING: don’t read the following post if you are easily offended by people who are rude, crude and obnoxious. (projected duty station: fort polk). I read posts like that to get a feel for what soldiers are talking about on social media, but I try to put it into perspective with the realization that the negative comments are mostly made by soldiers who take pride in how tough their life is and how well they are able to deal with everything that life throws at them.

So, for about a year, my browsing on Reddit was mostly unpleasant. Then, about a month ago, a blogger with about a million followers posted some poorly sourced and baseless accusations about Fort Polk. I was pleasantly surprised when the Redditors in r/army called out the blogger and insisted the blogger take responsibility for the unfounded accusations.

My Favorite Martian

As usual, I tracked down NASA just to see what was going on with my favorite space agency. The r/NASA subreddit has over 65,000 readers. The content Reddit felt more like gossip and conspiracy theory than the NASA content on Tumblr. Probably because the content is more blogger produced on Reddit than on Tumblr. There was still some great content such as this link to a photo of an Orion capsule in a swimming pool. There was also a very interesting post by MartianRedDragons with a link to a two-year old article on How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars. MartianRedDragons seemed very certain that SpaceX will beat NASA to Mars, but he received only 4 comment karma points on the comment. By the way, I am less happy today with my favorite space agency after receiving yet another rejection letter, this one rejecting my application to work on the James Webb Space Telescope. I am sure the sting will go away in a few days.

Who is Redditing?

Reddit has about 250 million monthly visitors according to DreamGrow putting it at number five on social networking sites and more than double the monthly visitors that Tumblr has. The Pew Research Center has some interesting demographic data on Reddit users. They are almost two-thirds men, much younger than the general population of the United States and 42 percent have a college degree. There are also twice as many liberals as conservatives on the site.

Ask Me Anything

Probably the most popular aspect of Reddit is the Ask Me Anything function. On June 29, 2017 r/AMA had 177,950 subscribers with 534 online at 6 p.m. The top AMAs were a request for Noam Chomsky to participate in an AMA, an offer to AMA with a fast food worker, a redditor with only one testicle, a professional clown/mixed martial arts fighter/suit salesman, an AMA request for bald men who shave their heads and an AMA request for someone who moved to Canada after Trump was elected. The only AMA I found interesting was about bald men who shave their head. Scroll up to the top of the blog to see why.

Photos and Videos

I noticed that Reddit is not big on photos and videos. Most of the posts I visited were text only. Most of the photos I found were linked from sites outside of Reddit. When I made my first post, I included the photo of Colonel Warren above and the post kept saying it would not go through. Eventually I cancelled the post and saw that it was posted but not with the photo. When I posted a link to a video, Reddit pulled the first frame of the video and used it as a thumbnail for the post. My overall rating for photos and videos is “very bad.”

Big Names on Reddit

Of course, I already mentioned NASA and the posts look like genuine posts from a NASA employee. Noam Chomsky hosted an AMA seven years ago. Does that count as being on Reddit? It is probably safe to say that Trader Joe’s and Apple are not on Reddit, but you can certainly find a lot of posts on those two organizations. The r/apple subreddit has 424,000 subscribers. Lululemon Athletica has no presence and less than a thousand subscribers to subreddits related to the company. Nike has a presence but has only garnered about 5,000 subscribers over the seven years of its presence in the community.  

Troy’s tantalizing tidbits

A Song of Ice and Fire, the book by George RR Martin, and the basis for the HBO series, A Game of thrones, has an official presence on Reddit. The subscribers on that subreddit are called Crows, and there are 354,110 of them with 1,338 Crows “currently on Watch Duty.”

Reddit has unusual values. At Reddit, we have a few simple values that help us stay true to our mission.

Remember the human Our actions affect real people and communities, so do the right thing—even when it’s difficult.

Evolve Move forward and grow together. Be optimistic about our future. Know that change is necessary for us to progress.

What would Snoo do? Snoo isn’t an asshole. Snoo likes to enjoy a good time. Snoo is humble. Snoo is kind. Snoo has high integrity. Snoo delivers.

To Reddit or not to Reddit

I had a boss four years ago who wanted to use a news aggregator as a central location for news about the United States Army in Western Europe. We poked around the Internet a bit and never did find anything we felt would be effective in aggregating news and also would be a place that most of our customers would want to go regularly for news and information. I started today’s blog by asking the question to aggregate or not to aggregate. Perhaps the question should have been to Reddit or not to Reddit. I am still not sold on the concept of using an aggregator to pull news into one platform, but it makes sense to have either an official Fort Polk account or an individual social media manager account to use to occasionally engage customers on Reddit, especially when they ask a question that would be better answered by the public affairs staff than by a disgruntled former employee or soldier who is unhappy with his experiences at Fort Polk.

[troydarr]

Part 4: Television News

Internet, smart phones and “cutting the cord”

This week I am planning to look at television news. That includes television news you can get through your desktop computer and your smartphone, but what I am really interested in is cable television news. At Fort Polk we have cable television news running into about 150 buildings. The channel selection is very restricted, only eight channels. We have CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Headline News, the Weather Channel and the local feeds of ABC, CBS and NBC. Televisions are located in waiting rooms, recreation areas, other high-traffic areas, emergency operations areas and some of the offices. The cost is very reasonable, but the infrastructure that supports the cable network is aging. The decision the boss has to make: Is it time to cut the cord or should we devote some of our precious budget toward renovating the cable network infrastructure?

Television news is like a lightning flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone. Hodding Carter III Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs (1977-1980)

Full disclosure:

I grew up during the Vietnam War. At my house we did not watch the 6 o’clock news on television, and all the kids had to be in bed so dad could watch the news at 10. I never got into the habit of watching television news. What little news I picked up as a young adult came from newspapers and magazines. Then I joined the Army and spent the next 12 years living in Germany with no television news in English and very little interest in television news in German. In 2000, I moved to Belgium and had access to CNN International for three years followed by two years in Alabama where I had access to television news but only watched it during tornado warnings. In Alabama I ditched newspapers and magazines and switched to only online news sources. Of course, those online sources included television news. The bottom line is I am not a fan of news on the television, but I am happy to go to CNN.com to find out what is going on in the world.

Back to our problem

In my office, I can access the news on my computer, on my smart phone, on my tablet and on my cable television. I absolutely need my computer and my smart phone. The tablet is nice to have. I just do not need the cable television news. It takes me longer to acquire the information I need through television than through the other available media tools. Yes, it looks like I have already answered my question, but that is me. Let’s look at some information on other Americans.

When a soldier, civilian employee or other customer goes into one of our waiting rooms, patient areas or recreations areas, according to this Nielsen survey, there is an 88 percent chance that the person has a smartphone. Why watch the TV and hope they can find out who won a recent sporting event when they can get the information in a matter of seconds with their smartphone? Of course, most of our customers are young soldiers and their young spouses. Smartphone ownership goes up to 98 percent when we consider only those between the ages of 18 and 24 or 97 percent between ages 25 and 34. Most soldiers are eligible for retirement between the ages of 38 and 42 which still leaves us at 96 percent. That’s a lot of smartphones. Walk into any waiting room and the vast majority of people waiting are ignoring the television and completely focusing on their smartphones.

Who watches the news on TV?

Among U.S. adults, 57 percent often get news on television. That does not support where I am trying to go with this discussion. But wait, most of those television news viewers are older than my target demographic. Among 18 to 29 year old, only 27 percent often get news from television with 50 percent of those getting their news often online.

Those who like to watch their news prefer television, those who like to listen to their news prefer radio and those who like to read their news prefer online. Print newspapers are at the bottom of the bird cage. Only 20 percent of Americans often get their news from a printed newspaper and among the 18- to 29-year-old crowd only five percent often get their news from a print newspaper. You know what I’m thinking? Get your news on the smartphone when you’re at work, and then watch television in the comfort of your own home.

Troy’s tantalizing tidbits

I love the Gallup poll on confidence in institutions. Of course, the military is at the top of the list with 73 percent of Americans having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the military, while television news is way down there at 21 percent. The Pew Research Center adds to the data that people trust their local news organizations about 16 percent more than they trust national news organizations. I think that goes along well with the way most Americans feel about Congress. I trust my congressman; it’s your congressman who cannot be trusted.

Stick a fork in me, I am done

My colleagues in the newspaper journalism business have been predicting the demise of the newspaper since at least the 1980s, but they were certain then that radio and television were going to be the cause. Newspapers have a few good years left in them, but it appears the end is nigh. It looks to me like radio and television are not going to be the source of the death knell for newspapers, but rather the ubiquitous smartphone. The most interesting question for me is will the smartphone also take down the radio and television?

I know not what course other may take

But as for me, I will recommend we cut the cable and let people enjoy their smartphones while they wait to see the dentist.

[troydarr]

Part 3: LinkedIn to the world of medicine

Switching it up again

I probably should not have made an initial blog post listing the media platforms I plan to analyze and an order. As you may recall from last week, I planned to consider Instagram but switched up the order because I was reading about Snapchat. Well, this morning, a lady I work with was talking about her volunteer advocacy work with a nonprofit. She did not go into details about the work, but she said she struggles with trying to decide the best medium to reach her key public, medical doctors. After discussing the problem for a bit and considering different digital media platforms, we latched on to LinkedIn. The doctors we know personally do not spend a lot of time tweeting, posting on Facebook or sending selfies to their besties. They do, however, take advantage of the opportunities offered by LinkedIn to maintain professional contacts and to stay in touch with former colleagues and classmates.So I decided to delve a bit deeper into LinkedIn this week.

Who is LinkedIn?

Dreamgrow puts LinkedIn at number 12 on top social networking sites with 106 million monthly active users. We saw that graphic in Part 1, and I don’t want to repeat myself too often. Below is a great graphic form Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider that lays out some information for LinkedIn users in the United States. The largest demographic by age is 35 to 54 year olds at almost 40 percent. The industries with the most representation in LinkedIn are higher education at 18.7 percent, information technology and services at 13.9 percent, financial services at 11.8 percent and continuing down to the demographic we are looking for hospital and health care at 8.2 percent.

That still does not tell us exactly what I am looking for. The information from AMN Healthcare is not quite up to date, but the 2013 Survey of Social Media and Mobile Usage by Healthcare Professionals tells us that LinkedIn is the preferred social networking site for medical personnel at 58 percent with Facebook at 24 percent and Google plus at a paltry 10 percent.

Why you should be LinkedIn

I, of course, failed to mention it before in my introductory blog, but I have been on LinkedIn for a few years now. You can find my profile here. For me, LinkedIn is only a place to leave my résumé in case someone is trying to find out who I am professionally. I do not use LinkedIn for socializing, and I have never used LinkedIn professionally to communicate about my organization. According to the MindTools editorial team’s Using LinkedIn™ Effectively, three organizational uses of LinkedIn are increasing visibility of your organization, conducting research on other organizations, and telling your organization’s story.  Back in 2015, I was brand new in my organization and a strategic planning/brainstorming session was ongoing. The chief of staff asked how we could entice more talent volunteer to come to the Joint Readiness Training Center. I suggested LinkedIn as a medium to tell the success story of some of our great soldiers who help prepare brigade combat teams to fight and win our nation’s wars. And also show how those trainers continued on to successful careers in the Army. Although the chief of staff eventually decided not to follow up on that particular objective, a quick scan of LinkedIn shows that some of the top Army public affairs officers currently serving have also served as mid-level public affairs officer mentoring younger public affairs officers at the Joint Readiness Training Center.

Troy’s tantalizing tidbits

The most overused profile word on LinkedIn in 2014 to 2016 was "Motivated." According to The world’s most popular social networks, mapped on the World Economic Forum by Rosamund Hutt, LinkedIn is the top social network in several African nations.

Why hang out at LinkedIn

In addition to the professional networking opportunities and organizational uses, LinkedIn has a lot of interesting content shared by regular users. In LinkedIn Publishing Trends Every Marketer Must Know, Susan Moeller recommends LinkedIn over Facebook if you want your high quality content to be noticed. As of 2016 LinkedIn had over 3 million long form posts written on LinkedIn, with over 1 million professional-quality posts published. 

And quite a bit of the content is just interesting to browse. I stumbled across this post by Lauren Vargas, who spoke at the Harvard Extension School degree awarding ceremony speaker for Information Technology and Museum Studies graduates. The quality of the post surpasses most anything I find on my Facebook feed.

Who else is using LinkedIn

I am reading What Great Brands Do by Denise Lee Yohn. The first four great brands Yohn mentions in her book are Coca-Cola, IBM, Method Products, and Ikea. All have LinkedIn presences.

We are in it to win it

I will advise my colleague looking for a medium to communicate with medical professionals to consider using LinkedIn. As to my purposes, LinkedIn is a prime candidate for Fort Polk to use to entice top-quality soldiers to come and train the next generation of soldier. I am sure you are wondering why we don’t just order the best soldiers to Fort Polk to be mentors to the soldiers coming through the Joint Readiness Training Center. Like everywhere in the free world, people have choices. And highly skilled people have even more choices. Fort Polk needs to sell its brand just as Coca-Cola does. And I will conclude this week with an article about Jean Case posted on Coca-Cola’s LinkedIn page, 5 Keys to Being Fearless.

1. Make big bets and make history. 2. Experiment early and often. Be bold and take risks. 3. Make failure matter. 4. Reach beyond your bubble. 5. Let urgency conquer fear.

[troydarr]

Part 2: Oh, Snap!

This week’s selection

I was planning to look at Instagram this week because some of my bosses have suggested an Instagram account might be the next logical step for my organization’s social media program. However, I was reading and listening to Get off my Lawn, a series of articles and a podcast that goes into a lot of detail on Snapchat, so I decided to look at Snapchat this week. Also, one of my colleagues mentioned that snapchat is an up and coming player for organizations looking to expand their social media programs.

And I took the road less traveled by…

The biggest difference in using this app versus other messaging apps I have used in the past is that in those other apps I already had a group of people I intended to chat with when I created the account. In the past, I have used Kik, Touch – Stay Closer and Discord to message people I am playing online games with. The communities already existed when I joined in. And, of course, Facebook Messenger was added to my already existent Facebook account. Since I do not personally know anyone’s Snapchat account, it was difficult for me to test the app. On the add friends page, the app informed me that it could not find any contacts.

Troy’s tantalizing tidbits

When I went to the app store and typed Snapchat in the search window, I came up with hundreds of different add-on apps and filters for Snapchat, but not the actual app. I had to go to the Snapchat home page and click on a link to get the app. Since I did not have any friends to show me how this cool new app works, I found How to Use Snapchat in Wired. The article helped me feel a bit better about myself. Apparently non-millennials are supposed to have problems grasping the purpose and uses of Snapchat. Only about 200 million people are using Snapchat, so I feel a bit better about my messaging app usage.

Yes, that big orange bar representing 1.2 billion people is where I normally message family, friends and former colleagues.

It seems that the users of Snapchat are getting older. The number of users 25 or older is growing twice as fast as users under 25. I will probably die of old age before that demographic catches up with me.

Who is using Snapchat and for what

We already established in last week’s blog that Tumblr has a lot of sex. Snapchat must then be a virtual den of iniquity with the anonymity and auto-delete function.  Not so, according to the Huffington Post’s Biance Bosker in Study Shows How People Use Snapchat — And It’s Not Sexting. Bosker reports on a University of Washington study that showed 60 percent use the app to send funny content while only 14 percent said they had previously sent sexts over Snapchat. And only 1.6 percent said they do so regularly.

What is up with the animal noses?

So, snapchat has a lot of filters that allow you to do crazy stuff with your selfies. Vomiting rainbows and water gushing out of your eye sockets seem to be popular. Animal faces and giant tongues can be found all over the Internet. Apparently other social networking sites have been jumping on the selfie modification bandwagon.

Big time users

Some of the major players on board with Snapchat are McDonalds, Gatorade, Cisco, General Electric, Domino’s Pizza, New York Times, Washington Post and my favorite, NASA. I could not figure out how to post this cool NASA story from Snapchat to Tumblr, but this is the same story on YouTube. Ironic?

What’s in it for me

Snapchat feels like it might be a better fit for Fort Polk than Tumblr. If we can get past the sexting reputation, Snapchat offers access to our most important demographic, the elusive millennial. At Fort Polk, we love our post newspaper. Surveys tell us that about 50 percent of our customers use the newspaper as a source of information. Putting our “stories” on snapchat in addition to the old fashioned tree-based newspaper might help us reach some of the younger soldiers who haven’t come around to opening up that newspaper stand and grabbing a complimentary copy of the Fort Polk Guardian.

[troydarr]

Part 1: Tumbling headfirst into Tumblr

Analyzing how people get news and information

This week I chose to analyze Tumblr for two reasons. The first reason is because I just created a Tumblr account for this blog, and the second reason is because DreamGrow listed Tumblr as number nine in the top social networking sites with the most monthly visitors at 115 million.

The Thing 

Tumblr is a brand new experience for me. I was aware of the existence of the social networking site, but had never considered using it. Immediately after creating an account, the top blog on my dashboard was some artistic photography of a young woman that was not quite safe for work. On my second foray into Tumblr, I did not look at any of the content, but only familiarized myself with the tools and created my Why am I here? blog post. As I logged on to Tumblr for the third time it offered up NASA as a blog to follow. Since one of my dream jobs is to work at the PAO desk of mission control when the first man sets foot on Mars, I followed. I quickly scrolled down my dashboard past some interesting content from NASA that did not address a future Mars expedition and my interest stopped at an excerpt and link to Social Media Creation Myths from the New Yorker.

“Tumblr is a bottomless pit, neither good nor evil. In one version of the myth, Tumblr is a reservoir of original unfinished creation. The rest of the Internet is irrigated by rivers and streams of human attention that flow from Tumblr.”

Then came more NASA content and some content that made me wonder what I chose as my subjects of interest when I created my Tumblr account. I chose books and libraries, college, news, politics, and studyblr. And finally, on my dashboard, Mars. Not the manned expedition but the Mars 2020 rover.

The feel of Tumblr is very different from one of my normal Facebook experiences. First, there was definitely more adult content on my Tumblr dashboard than what I see on my Facebook news feed. Second, my Tumblr dashboard experience so far has less politics than my Facebook news feed. Of course, my Facebook feed for the last year or so has been all Trump, all the time. After searching around some more on Tumblr, I realized most of the adult content was coming from my choice of “college” as one of the subjects I am interested in.

NASA 1, Army 0

I found it interesting that NASA makes heavy use of Tumblr whereas the U.S. Army does not use it at all. One Tumblr blog that was updated for less than a year appears to have the type of content an Army public affairs office would post. However, it seems unlikely an Army employee would name a Tumblr blog fuckyeaharmy-blog.tumblr.com.

This number is a bit dated but according to DMR, formerly known as Digital Marketing Ramblings, 69 percent of Tumblr users are millennials. And, according to The Statistics Portal, 25.7 percent of Tumblr users are between the ages of 18-24. Millennials and specifically the 18-24 year old demographic is the key audience for Army public affairs internal communication programs.

A quick search for Fort Polk indicates at least some Fort Polk soldiers and their families use Tumblr.

All aboard!

Tumblr seems to be the social media of choice for writers, artists and some photographers and scientists. It also seems to have partially replaced Myspace as a site for fans of various music groups. Advocacy groups representing animals, gay rights, libraries and planned parenthood seem to be well represented on Tumblr. People who are interested in posting photos of themselves with less clothing than is acceptable on social media sites such as Facebook also seem to be well represented. And just from a quick scan of Tumblr, it would appear that lesbian soldiers are over-represented in Tumblr. Cody Bott offers an interesting read on the subject of 8 Types Of Tumblr Users. Don’t skip the comments below the article.

And it has music, too!

Tumblr has a strong focus on images and videos and seems to be more functional for displaying photos and videos than Facebook. I have not yet tested how well Tumblr works for loading photos and videos. This question lead me to click on the audio tab under explore. I searched for Simon and Garfunkle and quickly found an audio recording of the song, America. And then I listened to A Horse with No Name by the band, America. I am not sure if Tumblr rivals YouTube for music, but with the amount of songs from the 60s and 70s available, it is apparent that Tumblr is not just for millennials.

Marketing galore

I have already mentioned NASA. I was surprised to find every company I looked up was represented on Tumblr. They are:

http://coca-cola.tumblr.com/

http://wendys.tumblr.com/

http://mercedesbenz.tumblr.com/

http://itunes.tumblr.com/

http://applemusic.tumblr.com/

And then I discovered that Apple had made its social media debut on Tumblr back in 2014. Apple’s Twitter account still has no tweets.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish?

Tumblr is probably not a good fit for Fort Polk. The NSFW photos are the first obstacle. And it is a big obstacle. The Army has put considerable effort into developing a corporate culture that promotes inclusiveness and treating everyone with dignity and respect.

The second obstacle is that the Fort Polk public affairs staff is already trying to cover too much territory with limited resources or butter too much bread as Seth Godin would put it. As number nine on the list of most used social networking sites, Tumblr will probably have to remain in the unused social networking sites.

[troydarr]

About: Why am I here?

The purpose of this blog is to analyze digital media platforms to see how people consume news and information . I plan to use the information to help me integrate digital media platforms into my organization’s communication plans. My initial plan, which may change, is to consider 11 different news and information platforms. My organization already uses social media platforms Facebook, YouTube, flickr and Twitter and also produces a traditional/digital weekly newspaper and public service announcements that are aired weekly on local radio stations. Over the next three months I plan to analyze Tumblr, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Periscope, Vine, Snapchat, Television News, Radio News and Traditional Newspapers. I used information from Social Media Today and Dreamgrow to help me select the platforms I plan to analyze.