The new networking

Alone in her kitchen, Sister Vicki Ix set her tiny video camera on a small tripod above the sink, and commenced to speak to the great big world.

"I'm Sister Vicki and welcome to Episode 3 of 'Nun Better,'" she says, smiling into the camera and, in effect, right at you from your computer screen. "Today, jumbo lump crab cakes. Not your typical convent fare, but . . . my aunt in Massachusetts suggested it's time to move away from pasta."

Of all the places you might expect to find Sister Vicki, a member of the Benedictine Sisters of Virginia, one of the last might be here on YouTube, the often-irreverent, post-your-own-video free-for-all that's representative of today's social media landscape.

What's a nice nun doing in a place like this?

"The biggest part of my job . . . is visibility," said Sister Vicki, whose job is to work with women who believe they are called to religious life. "My job is to make sure the ones who should find us do."

She blogs, she opened a Facebook account, and she might even learn to tweet on Twitter if she can figure out exactly how that could help. Her one-woman, no-budget cooking show on YouTube was inspired by her background as a graduate of culinary school and her affection for the celebrity chefs on The Food Network.

It also helped that a former classmate sent her a gift: a Flip video-camera that enables her to record and easily upload her cooking show.

"It's the coolest thing," said Sister Vicki, who splits her time between a monastery in Northern Virginia and a home she shares with two other nuns in Richmond's West End. She also teaches at St. Gertrude High School.

She fervently believes God opens doors of opportunity, but it wasn't easy for her to step past the door marked "YouTube." Posting videos of herself on the Internet? "A frightening thought," she said.

She was calmed to learn she could control what goes on the page, and the cost of posting -- nothing -- fit right into her budget. Part of one episode was accidentally recorded upside-down, but it simply added to the down-to-earth nature of the videos. The awe kicked in when she received an e-mail from a viewer in Australia complimenting her spaghetti Bolognese.

"My goodness," she said. "It's amazing how far you can go."

What we've come to think of as social media -- or emerging media, as some call it -- are Internet-based tools used for sharing information, images and just about anything you can imagine. They are based on mutual interests, and they revolve around conversations -- one-to-one, or one-to-many -- in real time. Because of technological limitations, old media -- stone tablets and bulletin boards, radio, television and newspapers -- were by nature largely one-way forms of communication. Those technological limitations no longer exist.

In recent months, social media have mushroomed, and not just because Oprah Winfrey talked about Twitter or actor Ashton Kutcher attracted more than a million followers on it. But those things helped.

Twitter and Facebook are the current darlings in the fast-evolving field that has individuals and companies scrambling to keep up. The number of visitors to Twitter, the 140-character-or-less microblogging tool, jumped to 17 million in April, an 83 percent leap in only a month and a 3,000 percent increase from last year. Facebook has more than 200 million active users worldwide.

Scores of services fall into the social media category, as illustrated by "The Conversation Prism" (http://www.theconversationprism.com), a colorful graphic devised by social media gurus Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas that shows the scope, reach and sheer, tangled pervasiveness of social media.

"Each medium has a different application," said Jonah Holland, who uses social media personally and professionally as a public relations and marketing coordinator at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. "I think the common denominator is I use them to build relationships."

On a recent weekday evening, a side room at Morton's the Steakhouse in Shockoe Slip was loud, crowded and convivially unruly -- a lot like the phenomenon of social media that everyone was talking about. Unlike that virtual world, this was all face-to-face. The occasion was the first meeting of the local chapter of the Social Media Club, an event that drew more than 100 from a wide swath of Richmond's communications community. Others had to be turned away.

Handshakes and business cards flew among the deafening chatter, as did fingers across cell-phone keypads. "So, how exactly are you using Twitter?" was a typical conversation-starter, evidence of a genuine curiosity and enthusiasm stoked by an open bar. It was old-school networking with new-world twists: The name tags included Twitter handles, and real-time "tweets" from those inside the room -- and some from outside -- were projected on a screen.

"Think about Wikipedia: a collective knowledge," said John R. Hopkins, promotions director for the club and senior new media designer at CRT/Tanaka, a marketing and public relations agency. "That's what I'm hoping we'll get out of it."

The next club meeting is scheduled for June 9. Find out more at http://socialmediaclub.pbworks.com/Richmond,%20VA%20(USA)

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John Sarvay started his blog, Buttermilk & Molasses "on a whim" in 2001.

"I had a lot of free brain time on my hands," said Sarvay, a Richmond writer and strategic planner, among other things, who was among the early bloggers around town.

For a long time, his musings attracted about 10 hits a week from friends. Then after the Harvey family was murdered on New Year's Day 2006, Sarvay, who knew the Harveys, began posting links to information about the case and the family, though he was careful not to traffic in the rumors and gruesomeness of the crime. In the two weeks after their deaths, almost 10,000 readers visited Sarvay's blog.

"That was kind of a wakeup call to me about how I could use this blog for good," said Sarvay, who later turned his attention to Richmond's downtown development on his blog, "and how it could become a place to build community."

The blogosphere is littered with blogs started with the best of intentions, but which ran out of inspiration and time after, oh, say, a week, and haven't been updated in months. That's the trick: Anybody can start a blog, but not everybody can keep it fresh and interesting and worth reading. Or as it was put by Mark Avnet, professor and head of the creative technology track at VCU's Brandcenter, "Giving millions of people essentially a printing press doesn't mean millions of people become great writers."

Then there are stories like Richmonders John and Sherry Petersik's. When they started renovating their kitchen, they launched a blog as a creative outlet, John said, and as a way to keep family and friends updated on their adventure. Smartly written, freshened daily and welcoming to exchange with readers, their "This Young House" blog (http://www.thisyounghouse.com) has become something much more.

"It's the snowball effect of Twitter," said John, senior account executive at Siddall Inc. "People saw it and thought it was interesting and sent it to someone else. Eventually it trickled up . . . and we got mentioned on realsimple.com."

Better Homes and Gardens called them for advice, and they were featured on the cover of The Nest magazine. Last month, they had 750,000 page views on their site. The blog has turned into a full-time job for Sherry.

"I don't know what's happened," John said with a laugh. "I'm just hanging on."

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Talk to anyone who knows social media, and they use words like "genuine" and "transparent," "personalization" and "immediacy," "relevance" and "value." Whether you're an individual or an organization, forgetting any of those is the fastest way to have people tune you out. The same goes if you don't produce anything worth reading, or, even worse, if you're perceived to be a guy ringing a doorbell selling magazine subscriptions. People don't want to be spammed. Or to hear what you ate for breakfast.

"It comes back to being truthful and honest," said Adam Cunningham, corporate marketing officer for Siddall Inc., an advertising and public relations agency that has clients using social media. "The more you can engage and be useful . . . you become a resource."

The various social media tools are generally not difficult to use. What can be challenging is figuring out how to best adapt them for your needs.

Individuals share family snapshots with friends and relatives through Flickr or similar sites, or keep up with far-away family, long-ago classmates or seldom-seen business associates on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, among other services. Twitter also is proving to be a research tool for finding real-time conversations about topics of interest. Hunting for jobs or creating them -- popular pastimes in the current economy -- are also common exercises.

When Joe Sokohl, a "user experience" consultant, writer, designer and information architect, put the word out among his followers on Twitter that he was looking for something new, "Within minutes friends were sending messages out and within a few days I had several solid contacts."

Kate Hall lost her job at LandAmerica Financial Group in November. Since then, she has used Twitter and Facebook to build a following to what appears to be her new career: http://www.Richmondmom.com, a Web site for parents she started as a hobby. At first she was attracting about a dozen regular readers "including my family," she said. In April, the Web site had 10,000 visitors.

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How are organizations using social media?

• Special Olympics of Virginia has created buzz for an upcoming fundraiser, "Over the Edge," among a new, younger demographic by using social media outlets such as Twitter, said Carrie Dyer, director of development.

• Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden has used social media to generate interest. Visitors are invited to post photos of their garden visits through Flickr or Facebook. With the use of an application like TweetDeck, the garden can monitor chatter about the garden on Twitter and follow up for direct feedback, said spokeswoman Jonah Holland.

• Companies do the same sort of thing as a way to research what's being said about them and, for example, to head off complaints before they swell into a wave of discontent.

"People are on the Internet sharing opinions and thoughts through social media like Twitter and Facebook; it's an open forum" said Todd Feldman, a strategic marketing consultant with his own firm, TF Digital, who worked at AOL when it was getting started and most recently headed up new media for Circuit City. "Whether you're an individual or a company . . . word-of-mouth marketing has been going on forever. The difference now is we have technology on our side where we can monitor and measure conversation."

• Government agencies such as Virginia State Parks and the Virginia Department of Transportation try to reach customers through multiple social media sites.

Before it put together a video montage of bridge demolitions set to opera music, VDOT was drawing "dozens of people a week" to its YouTube site to view safety and educational videos. When the so-called opera video hit (http://www.youtube.com and search for "VDOT"), the site experienced almost 200,000 visits within a few weeks, said Jeff Caldwell, VDOT's chief of communications. A few legislators questioned why VDOT was spending time, if not much money, posting such videos.

"Our response was, this is how people are communicating, and we got 200,000 people to come look at government videos that they never would have looked at without entree from the opera video," Caldwell said.

• The Virginia Community College System has set up the "Virginia Education Wizard" -- http://www.vawizard.org -- an interactive site that, among other things, can help visitors choose a career path through an online assessment. A blogger in California complimented the assessment, which got the attention of a Virginian on Twitter who then forwarded it to hundreds of influential education contacts around the state, said Jeff Kraus, VCCS assistant vice chancellor of public relations.

"When you can have outsiders endorsing something important like that, that's really the whole social media game in my view," said Kraus.

Contact Bill Lohmann at (804) 649-6639 or .