As an online PR professional, you work with a variety of web based tools, dashboards, platforms, destinations, networks…throw in a few more nouns and you get the point. Business and tech analysts dig into them upon release, a value is assigned to them and their creators, promotion hits hyperdrive and off it goes to the general public. We integrate these tools into our daily routine to get work done, and a few of the special ones get to be a part our lives.
If you think I’m going too far by saying that these tools are a part of my life, talk to any online pr pro you know about what happened the day Twitter really went down or the day gmail just wasnt there…but on to the point of this post.
Using these tools can become so normal that, in some ways, they get a little boring. Well, I got a little surprise last week when I looked over to the trending topics sidebar and saw that “#westindians” was one of the top trending topics.
Why was this so surprising?
We often get into categorizing by race but stop at the surface, without digging deeper to look at subgroups. So it was extremely exciting to see people from an essentially “hidden” subgroup (my subgroup!) identifying and discussing the culture from their perspective.
Now, I can’t guarantee that everything people shared is true…but I can say that people were very open and honest with their thoughts.
I’ve spoken about hashtag use before, specifically about how we need to do some hashtag research to see if there are communities that we can tap into and increase the power of our message. Well just like blogging and anything else in the social media space, our efforts tend to work better if we listen first.
Like I said, not everything tweeted here is truly representative of West Indian culture, but I couldn’t let this evening go by without sharing this user-created window into #WestIndian culture.
Very interesting. I’ve been exploring the same with other demographic groups on twitter, especially #africanamerican. Twitter is a good way to look into specific conversations/concerns within communities, from their own vantage point.
Great! Have you written about it before. I just checked out your blog and there are some really interesting posts, like the one on Jamaicans and dancehall. It would be great to talk further about what you’ve done. If you’re interested, email me at james.walker@prprescriptions.com.
Yeah,I agree. It also helps to listen some to some of the “dribble” trending topics( I.e.-#famoushoodquotes or #rhiannasforehead) and see what they lead to. I tend to stay away from those because I like to tweet more professionally, but from a listening post standpoint, they have a lot of merit
@Kristenej Exactly. A perfect example, probably one I should have included the post, is the exchange I saw between two people talking about West Indians and race.
One felt that West Indians were a separate race and the other disagreed.
This is exactly why we need to stop marketing and communicating just at the surface to “African-Americans” and “Hispanic Americans.” This type of perspective cannot be overlooked.