What President Zelensky is teaching us about the art of war in a social media age.

Sam. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed show, coming to you from sunny Somerset here in the southwest of England. My name is Jim James and each show I try and pick up tools and tips for entrepreneurs to get noticed. But I think probably like most people, I'm finding it very hard to focus right now. The situation in Ukraine is beyond belief. And so I wanted to look at aspects of the Ukraine, Russia conflict that might still be relevant for the show. But to really move away from a, a PR talk today. So I am going to look at some of the ways that Zelensky has been using social media and how this war is the first war to be held on social media. So welcome to the show. This time, I think for all of us is a time of reflection and if not stunned, questioning. And it must also be a time when we look at the kind of Orwellian use of information and misinformation. First of all though, what I'm going to look at is the use of Twitter by Zelensky and the use of infographics. And then we're going to look at really how public relations is where the true battlefield lies. Of all the marketing disciplines, advertising, events, direct mail, websites, what we're seeing is during wartime, public relations is the number one weapon that both sides are using. In fact, not just both sides, all sides, everybody, governments, NGOs, refugees, everybody is in information sharing overload. Let's just start first of all at looking at the Twitter wars. Now, as we learned from Donald Trump, Twitter can be a direct to end reader viewer tool that bypasses traditional media. Now Zelensky Zoledor, the president Zelensky has his own Twitter account. And I was checking that actually from the very beginning of. Now. First of all, let's look at the Twitter wars. Now, Zelensky President Zelensky has his own Twitter, which is Zelensky Y capital U lowercase a. And what I did was I started to look at his account on the 26th of February and he had 2.3 million followers. And that was at 4:42 in the afternoon. Now by 11:22 in the evening, he had 2.8 million followers. And by 10:00 clock the next morning, he had 3.2 million people. So over a period of not even 24 hours, he picked up 900,000 followers. Later that day, by the 27th of February at 22:16, he was at 3.6 million. And on the 1st of March in the morning at 6:53, he was at 4.1 million. On the 1st of March, by 8:00 clock, he was at 4.3 million. And the 2nd of March, when I'm reading this out to you now, 4.4 million. So within a matter of days, Zelensky has picked up 2 million followers around the world. If we want to just compare that to the President of Russia who had 1.3 million at the same date, the 26th when I started track it, and today, which is now the fourth, he has. Sorry, and today, which is the second, he now has 1.5 million followers. He just gained 2 million in the same period of time, 200,000. And the president of Russia Today at 8 o' clock in the evening on the 2nd of March has 1.5 million followers. And he had 1.3 million when I started this on the 26th of February. Zelensky has been the right man for the job when it comes to social media warfare. As we know, he was possibly ridiculed for his background as an actor. But what we're learning, of course, in this war is that the theater of war is the mobile phone. Zelensky has been posting eight to nine posts a day from his account in one language, or about 16 posts in a bilingual. So he is posting about one an hour during daylight hours, and he's posting that in both English and in Ukrainian. Now, what's interesting is as well is that if we take for example, his post just yesterday about talking with Boris Johnson, he had 2,640 comments, 10,000 reposts and 79,000 likes. In fact, when you watch Zelenskyy's Twitter, it's like nothing else. It actually is like a ticker tape feed. That is how quickly the likes and the retweets and the comments are going up. Now for President of Russia Putin, who by the way, does have his own English language Twitter, but it has a negligible number of followers. So I've taken the President of Russia official, which is only written in English, by the way, and when he posted today about his talks with Kazakhstan, the president there, he had 14, 14 comments, 233 shares and 1600 likes. He's posting four posts today and two yesterday. So the amount of content the Zelensky and his Ministry for Foreign affairs, which also has a bilingual account, and almost every member of parliament in English and in Ukrainian. And of course, some are posting in Russian as well. They are using Twitter in a phenomenal way, as we know they're also using Facebook. But I'm focused on Twitter because this is with hashtags, how the news is being tracked but also it then sits alongside and could be shared very easily next to the official news channels of cnn, the BBC, CGTN and all the major international players. So Twitter is proving to be, for Zelensky, a vital part of his arsenal when it comes to communication. I posted also this week some infographics that they have created. They've created infographics to show their successes on the battlefield. And I thought this is also very interesting to create in a bright orange in an Instagram size, which is then seen on Twitter, but can be used on all manner of places. Losses of the Russian occupying forces. In English, this is, for example, preliminary numbers as of the Russian invasion continues, it says, and little icons to show 4300 personnel killed, over 200 person as prisoners of war, 46 aircraft with a nice picture of an aircraft, 26 helicopters, 146 tanks, 60 cisterns. Those are mobile tanks, by the way, not for the bathroom. And two drones. And it carries on. And then hashtag, Russian invaded Ukraine and Ukraine under attack and stop Russian aggression. They then did the same infographic on the same day, but in Russia. So they are using social media really cleverly. And then they've had, for example, and what looks to be done on Canva, a Dmitry Kuleba, the Ministry for Foreign affairs, in a very delicately done infographic, saying, we also demand to impose full oil and gas embargo on Russia. These oil and gas now also contain Ukrainian blood and uses the same hashtags. And it's a picture of him in black and white laid out to the right and the orange background for the text with a white background for the whole picture. Interestingly, they haven't used the Ukrainian colors of blue and yellow. But what we're seeing is really a concerted effort by the Ukrainians to use social media. And there was one young woman interviewed on the BBC who was interviewed about why she hadn't left. And she said, actually, well, we. We could have done. But then when we looked at the Internet and we looked at what the government needed, they needed people to manage the information wars. And so she and her friends decided to stay back and to communicate with the outside world by creating infographics, tweets, blog posts, videos, infographics. And of course, as we've seen from Zelenskyy, the famous walking down the street and filming himself in front of the parliament house there. So they are as a generation, in their 40s, as leaders and younger, and they're using social media in a phenomenally powerful way. All of this, of course, isn't necessarily winning the war for them, but it is winning the conscience war. And one of the things I saw that they had done, which is very clever, was that they have launched a website. And on that website they have a phone number for Ukrainian captured Russian soldiers to be contacted from families in Russia. So they put phone numbers for the Russians to call in order to find out if the Russian soldiers have been captured or killed in the Ukraine. So they are using all the different devices very, very cleverly indeed. Now, obviously, this is helping them in some respects, but then when we look at what's happening in Russia, there was an interesting post today on the BBC talking about monitoring the Russian television. So the war on Russian tv, it says in an article by Simona Krylova and Sandro Vetsko on today 2nd March, is that the people in Russia are getting a different kind of a news. And of course, this is the heart of George Orwell's 1984 double speak, where we have the juxtaposition of one noun next to another to make it sound sensible. So there couldn't be many better illustrations of this than the idea, for example, espoused on here, where they are saying that, for example, footage continues to be circulated on the Internet, which cannot be described as anything but fake. And they described it as unsophisticated virtual manipulations. And they're showing a tank, for example, which appears on social media to be a Russian tank that is in the Ukrainian conflict. And they are saying it's being doctored. And actually it's from the Donbass 2014. We also have here the idea, which is, again, scarily fanciful, but for many people, this is their truth. They are saying that the Ukrainian nationalists are using civilians as a human shield, deliberately positioning strike systems in residential areas and stepping up the shelling of cities in Donbas. So they're accusing the Ukrainians of bombing civilians in the Donbas region in the east. And they are also saying that the tactics of the nationalists who use children to shield themselves have not changed since the Second World War. Says the presenter on Rossia 24. It continues. It says they behave like fascists, in the very sense of this word. Neo Nazis put their hardware not just next to residential houses, but where children take shelter in basements. So it carries on like this across all of these mediums across the day. And my perhaps favorite, most worrying is on Rossiya 1, and it says to strike Kharkiv. In fact, what they're saying is that the Ukrainians are striking Kharkiv. Themselves, it says to strike Kharkiv and say that it was Russia. Ukraine is hitting its own and lying to the West. But is it possible to deceive the people? It asks. So it says here that the main objective in Ukraine, as far as Russia is concerned, is the defense of Russia against the threat from the west, which is using the Ukrainian people in its standoff with Moscow to counter what it describes as fake news and rumors which are circulating. She announces the Russian government is launching a new website where only true information will be published. I'll put a link to this in the show. Public relations. We're getting fed the news that we want to be fed and is more of the news that we've already seen. And Twitter is the same. All these social media channels send us something comparable to what we're already watching when we're doing our public relations in wartime. We can see the polarization and of course, the disinformation that's taking place. And I'm looking forward to the factmarter report which is coming out, which has got some analysis on the Ukraine Russia coverage from social media. And we're all familiar now with the bots as well. But what we're seeing, of course, is disinformation is driving people apart. What role can we all play? Plainly, we have to fact check what we are sending. Another thing that we can do, for example, if we're interested, is to show solidarity with the people of Ukraine. I personally have put a Ukraine flag for my LinkedIn account and I have that now also standby Ukraine as my banner for my Twitter. So we can do that in small ways. And we can also help to amplify those posts that we know to be true and to share those with our own networks to get more people on board with what is actually happening. There can't be many people now who don't know what's happening. Part of what I'm trying to do is then also to share what the Russians are also seeing, because it's only by understanding what they're seeing that we'll understand their motivation and their potential behavior in and around the actions of the Western forces and the Western media. As we plan our own pr, as you plan your own PR for your businesses. If we can even introduce that one of the lessons of this Ukraine, Russia crisis is obviously the use of social media taking the war to the home and into your hand. Everybody is an actor. No one now can be left out. But also that what we see as the truth isn't what other people see as the truth. Our own team may 100% believe in what we're doing, but our customers and our partners may not. Let's pray that the understanding and misunderstanding that you have with your audiences doesn't lead to this kind of carnage that we're experiencing here. I'm personally finding staying motivated through this war to be a challenge in terms of talking about day to day. I'm asking myself how can I help and perhaps with this podcast just highlighting maybe a few places where you can find out more about the war but also to fact check and to hear what other people are thinking about the war so that we don't fall into the same myopia as the Russians and we keep an open mind and an open heart and open arms for all those people that are fleeing the conflict. With that, I thank you for listening to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur. My name is Jim James. Good night, stay safe and God bless. Sam. Ra. Sam.