Patrick Powers

If anything, Twitter will keep you on your toes. The microblogging giant earlier this month announced plans to rework its interface in an effort to make the service faster and simpler. According to Twitter: “We’ve simplified the design to make it easier than ever to follow what you care about, connect with others and discover [...]

It’s all about the A-B-C’s in education, why should resources for higher education professionals be any different?

I love it when a university doesn’t take it self so seriously that it forgets the most important aspect of social media — social media is fun. So kudos to you, Oregon State University. The video description puts it simply: “Meet new people, stay up to date on campus events and just generally have fun.” [...]

Social media sites went crazy with the death of Osama bin Laden. People shared the news as a status update, blogged about it ad nauseam and tweeted until it trended. Some celebrated, some worried for American soldiers’ safety and others condemned the need to kill a man as punishment for killing men. Regardless of personal [...]

If you’ve signed up for a social media account, you’ve seen it. It’s the box that no one seems to notice. Before any social media site creates a new user account, it’s going to ask for agreement to its terms of service. This innocuous little box may mean nothing to most users when it could [...]

One might argue that it doesn’t really matter what the other guy is doing, but that doesn’t stop the boss from asking. There are a million ways to measure the success of your own Twitter efforts, but how does one go about benchmarking your success against the competition? Sure, there are sites you can pay [...]

It took a tag-team of Green Bay Packers fans driving across the Southwest to remind me of social media’s greatest gift: Social media, at its best, is fun. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably seen enough. I spent three days bombarding followers with tweets that included @tsand and #MBteamS. I lost a handful [...]

Fellow bloggers Kanna Taylor and Erin Eschen already posted great recaps of the Social Media Club St. Louis’ panel on higher education last week — that’s not what this blog post is about. This post is about those questions asked but not answered. The panel discussion lasted more than an hour and a half and [...]

Colleges and universities struggling to find ways to pull together a comprehensive social media campaign should pay attention to Texas A&M University. TAMU last week announced a social media scavenger hunt that utilizes YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. It’s a creative way to increase student engagement and give away some sweet swag in the process. [...]

Ever wonder the top three things a small campus should be doing with social media, how to measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign or how to “move the needle” using Twitter? A handful of guests, including me, were invited on Thursday to answer these questions and more during a 1-hour online chat with [...]