Patrick Powers

There is no shortage of available tools aimed at making the life of a social media manager a little bit easier, but are they hurting more than they’re helping? Building a social community takes resources — namely, people and time — and any effort to minimize the role of these resources seems to cause nothing but [...]

Mention Google+ in a room filled with people managing and monitoring social media in higher education and wait for the snickers to start. They laugh because, while they all have accounts and occasionally login to update them, they are keenly aware of the perception that no one actually uses it. Their target audiences — namely [...]

So what does the roll out of Facebook Timeline mean for higher education beyond bigger pictures and a new way of doing things? Plenty. Colleges and universities around the country are always searching for better ways to tell their story. They struggle with the simple ways to talk about all they have going on. Timeline [...]

The social media landscape is littered with casualties, deserted Facebook pages and abandoned Twitter accounts set up to be the savior of a brand. Walls without posts. Albums without photos. Brands without a fan. Most often these accounts fail for one reason: They failed to set a goal in the first place. Goals focus attention, [...]

It’s incredibly easy to set up a Facebook page and perhaps that’s part of the problem. Credit Facebook with a high level of usability. Any wanna-be marketer with a profile can create a Facebook page is a matter of minutes. The problem, however, comes when expectations for that page fail to deliver the intended results. [...]

All business collateral — letterhead, envelopes, business cards, etc. — uphold an identity standard that promotes brand consistency. Why should email be any different? If email is sent from a corporate email address, it represents the corporation that created it. Uniform email signatures present a professional image while still providing brand consistency across departments, divisions, [...]

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 [...]

Writing this post may endanger my ability to score free Axe hair gel in the future, but it needs to be said: Klout scores mean little when it comes to real social media success. The online measurement tool does a great job of entertaining those who care about the difference between a retweet and a [...]

Photos draw greater rates of engagement than any other type content posted in Facebook, according to a recent study conducted by Web Liquid. The statistics are interesting in that they confirm what most marketers have known for a while — more dynamic content leads to greater levels of engagement. However, it’s not safe to assume [...]

It took a while but it appears Google+ is open for business. Google on Monday unveiled its pages feature that allows organizations — including institutions of higher learning — to create brand personas and engage with the more than 40 million people already using Google+. It’s about time. The Google+ platform is a slick one, [...]