Patrick Powers

Social media is great for building community and fostering conversations. Some of social media’s most untapped potential lies in its ability to influence search engine result pages, where two-thirds of all prospective students go to research colleges and universities. This webinar covers a little bit of everything: how search engines work, why higher education should [...]

In an effort to engage more fans on Facebook, reap more retweets and pin every pretty picture we see, are we in higher education ignoring the digital tactic with the greatest potential for all of us? Meta descriptions, keyword analysis, and inbound links are not sexy phrases often uttered in higher education circles, but perhaps [...]

How many Facebook pages exist with your college or university’s name attached? How many Twitter accounts? Ever see a YouTube video and think, “We didn’t do that, did we?” If any college or university is going to foster a truly integrated, student-centric digital experience across all channels, we have to get better at managing the [...]

If the choice falls between shoring up established social properties or jumping on board the fastest growing platform, the decision for higher education may be an easy one. Don’t waste time on Pinterest when Facebook fans are already at the party. Earlier last month Michael Stoner wrote a piece on why Pinterest is “the last [...]

How do you handle the tough ones — the comments made in anger, the posting that doesn’t quite violate terms of service or the diatribe littered with poor punctuation and no clear direction? As with anything else in social media, it helps to have a plan. Too often people get excited about the possibilities of [...]

It may go against social media convention, but I think Field of Dreams was right. I’ve listened to scores of seminars, sat through just as many webinars and enjoyed many conversations around social media that encourage one to disregard the most memorable line in the movie: “If you build it, he will come.” The line [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]