This is a guest post from H2 Communications, one of the few African American social media management companies in the United States. Make sure you show the brothas over there some love at www.h2comms.com!
How Social Media and the Internet can promote buying Black and essentially bring African American economic, political, and educational sovereignty.
According to an article in the Huffington Post, African Americans use social networking sites like Twitter 50% more than White Americans. The article attributed those statistics to the use of these sites by entertainers, but recently I’ve been handling the social media monitoring for United Black America Online. What I have seen that not only surprised me, but made me ecstatic and optimistic for the potential use of sites like this one, is that this is a place where young Black and African Americans, (professionals or otherwise) can openly engage each other about things that are happening in their world and the world abroad.
Of course this is my field so I know the business potential in social media marketing and the social networking arena. But as an African American man, I am also staked highly in what goes on in the Black community. So this was very compelling to me to see that young Black people weren’t just using these sites to meet for dates and keep up on the goings on in Black entertainers’ lives. But also as a tool to further consciousness, grow business ventures, and bounce ideas.
The implications of this, if used correctly, are that positive conscious Black conversations that we need to have can be started here. Problems that plague our community; from how the the Black neighborhood is being destroyed, and how nearly 50 year old government tactics and laws perpetuate a state of stagnate poverty, to how African Amerincans who leave Black communities abandon and leave stranded other potentially successful Black men and women, and even how businesses from other racial backgrounds are sucking almost a trillion dollars out of our community a year. These are things that must be discussed, and this is a perfect catalyst for these discussions.
One of the greatest and most major pieces of the puzzle is remote capabilities, because at this point African Americans and across the world are far from monolithic. As a matter of fact we are so separate that we miss most of our great accomplishments because of how far removed we are. From Atlanta to Chicago, from New york to Los Angeles. The ability to take the best and brightest from these major metropolitan areas and have them interact with cities like Cincinnati Ohio with a 48% African American population or Louisville Kentucky with an African American population of almost 40% is major, because where LA or NY will interact with politics, education and business globally, Blacks in these periphery metropolitan areas are years behind. Not only that, but behind of whats happening right here in the States, causing a major disconnect and essentially a lack of education.
So where we find ourselves in 2012 is looking into a portal of global communication literally at our finger tips. Its up to us to jump in head first or continue to let ourselves fall behind as a people. We are travelling down a long road with plenty of bumps, self-imposed and otherwise. But we must make it to the end, and one thing that holds true is that the only way to get there is together, as a United Black America!
William Huston
H2 Communications
www.h2comms.net
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