In the battle to get found online, organizations are using social media to wage information warfare to win the trust and confidence of their constituents.

Former DoD analyst Mark Drapeau, PhD., who is currently an online public diplomacy director at Microsoft, explains how to dominate your information spectrum with lethal generosity.

This is a recording of a presentation he delivered at my Social Media Master Class.

To attend an upcoming social media workshop, visit our calendar for dates and locations.

SHOW NOTES

01:24 - “ Mark talks about his experience prior to joining Microsoft at National Defense University, which is affiliated with the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the U.S. Department of Defense, where he studied emerging technologies and their impact on national security. His mandate at Microsoft is to create proactively social content that engages communities, including state, local and federal government offices.

03:31 - Nature abhors a vacuum. Empty spaces will be filled by something. And so, if you work in fashion, or you work in IT, whatever you do, if there's a niche, it will be filled by someone's content.

When you search for a topic, fashion, shoes, computers, is someone finding your stuff?

That's the premise I start with, says Mark.  There's an information war taking place by organizations who want to get found online.

But what's more important than analyzing your traffic, according to Mark, is understanding your audience, what they want and how to engage them.

In his case, if someone is searching Government 2.0 he wants to make sure people are finding his content.

05:01 - “ For organizations, Mark sees new media communications as a form of public diplomacy that can be used to educate the marketplace and increase the receptiveness of Microsoft's customers to their policies, products and services.

Public diplomacy is the act of influencing, engaging and activating the public softening the battlefield and it is used by government agencies and companies to help their organizations achieve certain goals.

07:23 - The convention protocol by which information moves from organization to individual is inefficient, based on the various layers of approval corporate information needs to clear before it winds up reaching the customer. The press release is an excellent example of this. But what's happening is by using social media to communicate with others, what's happening is that a lot of people are bypassing official company channels in the process.

They're not official spokespersons, but they're reaching people. So while organizations struggle to clear official information through the various layers of approval, unofficial voices in social media are filling the vacuum.

Because in most cases, big organizations are slow, and cycling information through their chain of command simply can't keep pace with open source information.

And whenever there is a significant gap between information that can be crowd sourced via open source, and the organization's own, online presence, that organization loses the trust of the community.

Slide Deck: Mark Drapeau Free The People Potomac Forum

People are sharing information and educating one another through Twitter and Facebook.  Sharing information with your online social network has becomes a social norm, and by contrast, organizations that fail to behave this way are seen as antisocial.

The important thing to understand about social media is that it's more about being social than it is about understanding media or technology.

It's not about the tools; it's about interacting with other people.

09:21 - What's amazing to me is that if you go into the marketing department,