Patrick Powers

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 [...]

Foursquare on Monday made available to all colleges and university badges previously reserved only for those institutions that partnered with the location-based service. It’s a growth strategy long overdue and, perhaps, past its prime. Foursquare previously partnered with 100 universities across the country and made certain badges available to them. It’s a welcome sign to [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The hardest part of any cohesive social media campaign is pulling it all together. It’s why I’m so impressed when colleges or universities embrace the social stream and preset it on their own terms in a creative and meaningful way. I’m not talking about social media directories where a school lists all its accounts. I’m [...]

Faculty, students, and staff upload presentations to SlideShare all the time. Some are good, some are bad, and some are pretty incredible. But in the end, they all say something about the institution where they work and learn. The end result for a college or university, however, is often the same —a hodge-podge of content [...]

When I started researching university iPhone applications more than six months ago, the pickings were pretty slim and the level of quality varied greatly. Times have changed. There are a slew of new university-specific apps launched in time for the fall semester. Here’s a handful at the head of the class: The Ohio State University [...]

It doesn’t matter if you love him or hate him … or even know who he is. You have to respect Justin Bieber for the mere fact he knows how to draw a crowd. Teenage girls launch into deafening screams of delight at the mention of his name. When Bieber was scheduled to perform earlier [...]

Some of the greatest buzz I’ve generated on Twitter have been from live-tweeting events — from annual commencement ceremonies, to our president’s first day on the job, to an on-campus lecture from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. The response has been great. Live-tweeting allows communication to flow to and from the event, engages audiences wherever they may [...]