Social Media Strategy

Scholars

Internationalism has been a hot-button term in Cold War historiography for the past fifteen year. I am optimistic that scholars will be curious to visit a site dedicated to visualizing the term as it evolved in practice, funneling all manner of dates and meeting sites and acronyms into a handful of well-labeled, dynamic maps. The question is how to get their attention.

Platform: Historians are not as prevalent on Twitter as they are on email forums (H-Net). But Twitter will allow me to tap into scholarly circles beyond H-Net’s ambit. My tweets will refer to the maps themselves at the outset, and will refer to my blog posts about the maps, and new additions to the maps, thereafter.

Message: The primary message to fellow academics is utilitarian: this is useful. Here is Soviet internationalism reified, or at least visualized, with a comprehensive database to back it. The objective is for scholars to cite the site, and in doing so draw attention to the Soviet-sponsored “world federations” that were and remain widely dismissed as hollow fronts. However much or little control Moscow exercised over the federations, my maps make plain that they traveled widely and were attended by too many non-Marxists to disregard as communist citadels.

Measure: The best metrics for the site’s success are (a) traffic, measured by hits; (b) references, as retweets and hyperlinks on other blogs; and (c) citations in published work. With reference to SMART, (c) is not achievable nor realistic in the near term. My goal for the first six months of the maps’ existence will therefore be to measure 100 hits (a), and 25 retweets and links (b).

Students

My target here is not graduate students, but undergraduates and high school students. The aim is to show students conducting last-minute research on Cold War internationalisms a map that defies expectations, and so prompts reflection.

Platform: I will draw on every social medium available to me to reach the younger cohort, putting shots of the maps on Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook to complement Twitter and the blog itself.

Message: My message to students is simple: Communists held endless conferences, partly to counter Western stereotypes of Iron Curtain isolationism, and partly because the communist faith in international confraternity was genuine.

Measure: I will monitor hits to the site and retweets, aiming for hits by 100 total users by the end of six months, with 25 retweets. Citations in high school essays, sadly, won’t be trackable.

Communists

The presence that communist ideology lost in the real world in the late 1990s it made up for online. Marxism.org is a jaw-dropping testament to the volume of text that communist volunteers have transcribed and uploaded over the past thirty years (in the 1990s especially). Lefty Reddit threads are just as lively. It stands to reason that my site will generate interest and traffic from these communities. It will help inform debates over what Marxist-Leninist internationalism means with what actually happened.

Platform: Reddit was not discussed in our readings on social media. However, while witter will tap some communist communities, and the blog will attract some traffic, Reddit could easily disseminate my URL faster and further through the Marxist net than the others.

Message: The appeal to communists is the same as to scholars. What was Marxist internationalism? My site shows that it was neither (a) just talk, nor (b) stifled by capitalist intrigue. Communists will no doubt welcome the site as a rebuttal to Cold War stereotype.

Measure: I repeat what I wrote above about about hits and retweets, this time adding the site’s mention (by me) on fifteen Marxist Reddit feeds over the first six months.