Patrick Powers

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, [...]

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

If I’ve learned anything from two weeks spent playing around in Google+, it’s that when it becomes available, this service can work for higher education.

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.” [...]

If higher education could learn anything from the companies in Silicon Valley, it’s the power of the user. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business last week opened its 59th Annual Management Conference with a keynote panel on “The Economics of Social Media.” And while panelists didn’t specifically address issues specific to higher education, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The buzz has been building for months now around Quora, the online question-and-answer site gaining traction as the latest social media darling. Is it really worth the hype? I think so. I’ve been using Quora for a week now and I’m sold. It’s the first social media site I’ve joined that provides a depth of [...]