Patrick Powers

I’m a sucker for a good college video parody, especially one about social media. Kudos for the timely work, Stetson University.

When asked why he no longer dined at Ruggeri’s restaurant, St. Louis-native Yogi Berra uttered these now famous words: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” Can the same be said about the social media behemoth Facebook? It would appear College Only thinks so and last month launched a new social media network limited to those [...]

I was pretty excited when Facebook announced “Universities on Facebook,” a page dedicated to helping university students establish an interactive presence and build community. But am I the only one underwhelmed by its content? Universities on Facebook feels more like a quiet nod to the demographic who helped launch the social media behemoth than a [...]

“Someone wrote something on my Facebook page and I don’t know if I should delete it or not. Could you take a look?” This is not the type of phone call you want to receive as you’re trying to shut it down at the end of the day. I’ve always been — and will continue to [...]

The question for college admissions counselors isn’t should they be on Facebook, it’s how they should be on Facebook. U.S. News and World Report first asked the question nearly a year ago: “To friend or not to friend?” Admissions counselors want to keep the personal lives they stored on Facebook separate from their professional ones. [...]

The following post was originally written for the St. Louis Social Media & Tech Report. The small St. Louis County municipality where I live spent more than $30,000 in August 2008 to purchase and install an electronic sign outside the police station. The purpose was to provide a place for news and events pertinent to [...]

While most people care about the information they choose to share online, they don’t care too much about Facebook’s move to make more of that information public — at least not enough to ditch the social media network altogether. This care-but-don’t-care attitude was the general sentiment at a great Social Media Club of St. Louis [...]

If there’s one thing brothers are good for, it’s for putting you in your place. Minutes after coding a Facebook “like” button into this blog, I received the following message regarding my apparent narcissism: The way Facebook built it, liking someone (or something) is as easy as clicking a button. The benefits are greater exposure [...]

TIME recently released its annual “TIME 100,” a list of 100 names of those who most influence the world around us. The magazine lumps the list into some obvious categories such as leaders, heroes, artists and thinkers. It also added a new one this year — social networking. It’s this last category that piqued my [...]

Every fan page created in Facebook starts out the same. There’s a wall, info, discussion, events and maybe some photos. But who wants more of the same? It only takes a few tweaks to transform a standard-issue Facebook page into something better. The opportunities are there, yet many (me included) regularly fail to tap those [...]