Dayngrous Discourse

Social media can help you connect with people you might not have connected with otherwise. I'm in Florida so the odds that I would sit down to lunch with someone working in France or Texas are slim to none - unless of course I traveled to their cities or vice versa, but with social media I can make connections with people across the country and across the world from the comfort of my office. There's a great article on Every Dot Connects by Mike Chapman about our connection and how it worked to help support our troops.

Though social media connections, namely Twitter, Connie and I have been part of creating a new relationship with a client of ours, Qipit, and a great organization we’ve come to know even though we have yet to meet in person, eMail our Military. Qipit is based in Paris and San Francisco, and eMail our Military, also known as eMoM, is based in Miami Lakes, Florida.

Conrad Hametner of Qipit, @hametner on Twitter, and Trish Forant of eMoM, @mailourmilitary, are now friends and colleagues and thanks to social media tools, are now working together on a project that reaches our military personnel overseas and who are separated from their families.

I’m a military brat myself. My dad, a “lifer” in the Air Force, was twice stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam war. So I’m very familiar with the hardship military families go through when they are separated.

eMail our Military was created in response to restrictions placed on regular snail mail in the current age of chemical warfare and following 9/11. Emails have replaced regular mail making it impossible to send many of the things we used to send my dad. Artwork, photographs, and other keepsakes, can only be copied or scanned. That’s if the military family can afford to do so on often very tight budgets.

Qipit’s idea is to offer military families their free service as a part of the eMail our Military program. By using a digital camera, Qipit allows for a high quality pdf to be made of artwork, photographs, love letters, report cards, legal documents, newspaper articles, or whatever you want to photograph and attach. The really great thing about it is that they can be sent quickly. I remember waiting weeks to get a response from my Dad after we sent him a care package. This is so much better and it allows for that “almost being there” feeling that all military families crave so much when they’re apart.

You can help out even if you’re not a member of a military family. Some of our troops are single, may not have kids, and can all of them can use a friend or a kind word. I encourage you to contact Trish at eMoM and get involved. All the links are here in this post, but if you have a question about any of this, please feel free to email me at chapmanmd@gmail.com or DM me @mikechapman.

I can assure you that any little thing you do, whether it is getting an email to a member of the military, contributing money to eMail our Military (they are a non-profit), or just spreading the word about this new program on your own blog, would be very, very helpful.

Regardless of our own individual political views, we can all show our support for the troops.

I can confidently say that social media is helping me meet truly wonderful, caring people and spread our message of support.