First Social Media Breakfast

(And yes I do still take notes on this thing called "paper")

Yesterday morning I bused out to Concordia for my first ever Social Media Breakfast. The topic was Education & Social Media. Just wanted to share some takeaways I got from it!

• The first thing I noticed was the whole audience with their smartphones out, tweeting away. The twitter back story from the audience was entertaining. Everything from quoting speakers, adding comments, and even complaining-"get a move on" and "I'm tired of this topic!" were pretty popular at one point.

Glad I had my snazzy phone to keep up. Click here to find the dialogue on the twitter feed.

• One member of the panel was the MKTG guy for an online college. We discussed whether secondary education would move more online rather than traditional "brick and mortar" universities.

Personally, I see positives and negatives from both sides. As I said on twitter, online classes require participation-I've had JOUR classes where I was required to use chat rooms on Blackboard. On the other hand, another huge part about going to an actual university are some experiences that have to be done in person, such as networking, relationships, growing up, and independence.

• I loved what the panel said about connecting with their students on where they want to engage. The PR people from Augsburg and St. Catherine's really emphsized the importance of retweeting and showing the students work. The ROI from universities using social media is to measure students interactions and tone, help students enter the university, and eventually graduate.
• An audience member came up to the mike and said that when he taught he implemented required blogs. He said that the writing quality improved and students' personal lives were incorporated with their education-which I'm guessing, they actually took pride in their work and cared about it. I totally see this and why it works. I am writing this blog for my own use and I never will know who might see it so I want to represent myself well!
• Twitter in the classroom? My boyfriend took a new media class at the U where students tweeted with the class numbers hashtag and the professor and students were encouraged to discuss and post interesting news stories. I think this is a great idea. Especially as a journalism major graduating in a field that utilizes social media so much, I feel that if classes are not utilizing these tools, we will be unprepared. This article from NYTimes was mentioned. I don't know how I feel if students were to use twitter in class instead of actually discussing in class out loud...It was hard enough to pay attention to both the panel and the twitter feed at the same time, I don't know how I could do it in class. But I do think that discussions facilitated outside of class and incorporating blogs, twitter, or other social media into a journalism major is essential. I do wish a panelist from a social media communications post from the U or the School of Journalism and Mass Comm was there so I could pick their brains of how they create a media connection with over thousands of students!

Click here for my twitter and insights or just check out the screen shot below.

-Edwina