Monday, June 2, 2008

Serving Our Country through Social Media

We are at war. Yet, today, through the advances in technology we can do instantly what in previous wars took weeks, even months to achieve – with the click of a mouse, we have the ability to send immediate support to a military service member.

We can send morale boosting emails, filled with news from home and feel good stories of Americans united. We can form online support groups collecting much needed items for care packages. We can share photos of the newest Marine in need, stories of the soldier who just became a dad, and patterns for cooling neckties we can create and ship to our guys and gals in the sandbox. We can do all this and so much more. We can rally our citizens to support our troops from the comfort of their computer chairs. This is the new world. This is social media at its finest.

Through social media we’ve created a community of kind and caring individuals across the globe willing to take a little time out of their busy day to send and show support to our military service members. These people realize that regardless of our political views, our troops deserve our respect, support & encouragement.

They come together for the sole purpose of supporting our troops on sites like MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo Groups and Twitter to name a few. They blog across all platforms and they use the power of their podcasts to send inspirational messages of support to our US Armed Forces.

I’ve seen it firsthand because I use all these services to promote and encourage troop support through eMailOurMilitary.com. eMail Our Military is a charitable organization that supports U.S. military service members through morale boosting email correspondence, letters and care packages. eMail Our Military was created in 2001 as a response to the DoD's cancellation of the "Any Service Member" and "Operation Dear Abby" mail programs. As a safe alternative, eMOM picked up where these programs left off

Using social media we’ve teamed up with companies like Utterz to send multimedia messages of goodwill to our troops over the holiday season, Seesmic to support service members in Iraq, Qipit to provide fast, free alternatives to copy shops and Babble Soft to keep military families with newborns separated by deployments on the same parenting page.

Now more than ever before we have the ability to support our heroes in the easiest of ways using our computer, the internet and various forms of social media. Reaching out to our troops is simple and only limited by how much or how little you wish to be involved. We’ve got something for everyone and we encourage everybody to get started today. Just visit eMailOurMilitary.com, decide if you want to support a service member one on one or participate in a general support project and get started. You make the commitment and we’ll help you connect with a military service member. It’s that easy.

Trish Forant is the daughter of a veteran, a military wife and a staff writer at Veteran’s Today. She now serves as President of eMail Our Military, the charitable organization she founded to support U.S. military service members. She blogs regularly at Honor, Duty, eMail.

eMail Our Military (eMOM) post signature

This post was a featured guest post on Chaos Scenario a media, advertising and marketing blog.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You honored us with your contribution, Trish. It was a wonderful way to bring the entire series to a conclusion: with a reminder that our responsibilities are never done.