Patrick Powers

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, [...]

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 [...]