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 [...]

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 [...]

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 the President of the United States can tweet for himself, why can’t the president of a university? The most effective Twitter streams in higher education are those that engage the audience, serve a purpose and provide a voice in the conversation. It’s an incredible bonus when that voice carries with it the weight on [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

I love the end-of-the year show Oprah puts together, the one when she starts screaming at the audience: “You get a car! You get a car! You get a car!” The idea is that the multimedia mogul spends the year collecting a list of her favorite things. She unveils the list at the end of [...]

Organizations launch advertising campaigns all the time, investing thousands, if not millions, of dollars to create the ideal marketing mix. A formal Twitter advertising campaign need not be part of the equation. Twitter earlier this month revamped its offerings for businesses and made it easier for anyone looking to promote specific tweets, trends, or accounts. [...]