Category Archives: Social Media

Activities and Events, Social Media

Guest Speaker: Using social media to share the search for true love

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This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for details.

Happy Monday!

Last week, my social media class had the wonderful opportunity of having Nate Bagley as our guest.

Who is Nate Bagley (@bigbags)? Nate currently runs the Loveumentary Podcast (and blog!), a podcast that believes “True Love exists… you just need to listen.” The Loveumentary, which seeks to understand true love through interviews with married couples who have found lasting love, has been featured on The Good Men Project, ABC News, Fast Company, and more. Prior to leaving the security of employment to pursue his passion and share it via social media, Nate worked in web, SEO / SEM, and related areas.

I want to share a few highlights that stick out in my mind from his Skype with our class.

  1. People and brands shouldn’t be afraid to take risk, be vulnerable, and to open up about who they are – Nate said that he learned through his experience building the Loveumentary, that his audience began to really grow when he opened up and was vulnerable and honest about his true feelings and concerns when it came to love. People can relate, they  have the same concerns or face the same problems. And that has helped him connect with his audience and build engagement in ways he wasn’t previously able to.
  2. Use Metrics to be Responsive to Your Audience – This ties in to #1: When I asked Nate about what metrics are most important to him, he reminded students it depends on your goals. One thing Nate tracks closely on his blog is “time on page.” He wants to make sure people are enjoying his content, and sticking around to read it. He knows that if people aren’t sticking around, his content isn’t appealing to them. If they are sticking around, it is. He can use this knowledge to find out what resonates with his audience, so he can produce more of what works.
  3. Find your passion and find a need that you have – chances are others have it too. And if you are passionate about that topic, your chances of success go way up!
  4. Students today should be blogging, getting their name out there, and interacting with their field WHILE IN SCHOOL – Nate reminded our class that networking and building connections can be invaluable for the soon-to-be graduate. Students should be blogging, and building themselves on social media he said. In fact, he said he wished his professors had made him blog.

We learned a lot from Nate, and greatly appreciated his insight and passion. The Loveumentary is a great project and a great example of using social media to reach people, share a passion, and build an audience by helping others and providing a valuable service.

If you’re interested in checking out the Loveumentary (@loveumentary), you can find it on iTunes, and all other major podcast streams, or listen at Loveumentary.com.

Best of Luck to Nate and the Loveumentary!

Classes, Social Media, Teaching Social Media, Writing Across Platforms

Books I am Using This Fall for Social Media and Writing Across Platforms

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This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for details.

Happy Friday! We are wrapping up our first week of classes here at Shepherd University!

This semester I am teaching 2 classes related to social media and strategic comm: Social Media (syllabus), and Writing Across Platforms (syllabus).

I find myself using textbooks less and less. Perhaps this is because i am not finding what I am looking for, or maybe I am just not looking in the right places. Here are the books I am using in each class.

Social Media Class

1) Born to Blog by Schaefer & Smith

(I wrote a review of this awesome book a few months ago).

2) Likeable Social Media by Dave Kerpen

Recommended: Toa of Twitter by Mark Schaefer

Writing Across Platforms Class

Required:

Content Rules: How to create killer blogs, podcasts, videos, ebooks, webinars and more that engage customers and ignite your business by Ann Handley & CC Chapman

Recommended: 1) AP Stylebook, and 2) Public Relations Writing: Form & Style (10th edition) by Newsom & Haynes

I have only used Likeable Social Media before so am excited to see how they others go!: What books are you using? What would you recommend?

(Note, I put the Amazon links in here but this is not an endorsement of Amazon nor are these affiliate links).

Cheers!

-Matt

Book Reviews, Social Media

Blog Better with Born to Blog by Schaefer and Smith (Book Review)

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This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for details.

I owe this blog to the book Born to Blog: Building Your Blog for Personal and Business Success One Post at a Time by Mark W. Schaefer and Stanford A. Smith.

For some time before starting Social Media Syllabus, I’d thought about blogging again the way I think about getting back in shape to play lacrosse again or making homemade bread like Kelin and I used to – as a distant and improbable ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ scenario. I had started a blog briefly in graduate school, but being too busy, I shut it down. And honestly, my first blog lacked focus and intent. I hadn’t really thought through who I was writing to and why they should read my blog. I just wanted to blog and so I began. Needless to say, it didn’t go anywhere. Isn’t that the case with so many blogs?

So when I got my hands on Born to Blog after first hearing about Schaefer’s Tao of Twitter, I was excited and anxious. Clearly I wasn’t “born to blog,” I thought, reflecting on my first blogging failure. So I wasn’t really planning on starting a blog again. But a few chapters later I found myself plotting out Social Media Syllabus and telling myself, ‘this time it will be different.’

The book Born to Blog offers readers 3 important things:

  1. The “how to” and motivation to become a successful blogger
  2. A clear understanding of the value of blogging
  3. A roadmap for planning, launching, and maintaining a successful blog.

The first part of the book focuses on motivating the reader and explaining what it takes to become a successful blogger, emphasizing the 5 common types of bloggers: dreaming, storytelling, persuading, teaching, and curating.

Readers are encouraged to determine what type of blogger they are and to harness their strengths to be themselves (not surprisingly, I found myself to fit the ‘teaching’ type). The writing style makes the book approachable and friendly. The reader can tell that the authors want to help, want you to be successful, and want you to not only have the knowledge to succeed but feel that you are capable of succeeding at blogging. The authors offer a number of great examples of brave bloggers sharing their story as well as their own personal anecdotes. This book is not filled with hype or promises that your blog will be successful. There are many out there selling snake oil in the social space.   There are no illusions or “get rich quick” schemes. The plan the authors put forward clearly requires a great deal of work and commitment on your behalf. Mark and Stanford are clear that blogging is a marathon, not a sprint, telling the reader they will need tenacity and encouraging them to “not give up.”

Secondly, the authors concisely explain the value of blogging for a business in clear terms. The focus of the book is primarily on the use of blogging as a tool for business, a la content marketing. (There is a brief section in the back on personal blogging that I wish was placed earlier in the book).  In this section, the authors tackle many of the common questions or concerns that companies face from “How often should we blog?” to the possibility of negative comments, or maybe worse no comments at all!, to potential legal issues

While the book isn’t quite as in-depth in terms of offering advice on how to create a content plan and calendar as Content Rules, it offers a great overview and enough to get you started. The authors do a strong job in the middle section of the book tackling important issues surrounding finding and nurturing blog contributors, developing a content plan, uncovering valuable content within your own company your readers want, and more. Readers should keep in mind that this is a shorter book tackling blogging specifically. I would recommend Content Rules, a book we’ll be using in my Writing Across Platforms class, as a supplement to this book.

I appreciate the emphasis on the theme in this book that blogging is a journey of personal growth. As bloggers, the authors remind us that we cannot expect to be perfect. We are constantly growing, learning, and hopefully improving. I have used Born to Blog as a guide and have turned to the book on many occasions for help with questions I’ve had along the way.

if you’re looking to get into blogging or improving an existing blog, whether personally or for a business, I highly recommend this book. I plan on using it for my social media class this upcoming fall (see social media syllabus. You can also learn more about the class) as the text for our class semester-long blogging assignment. I hope the students will find it as approachable, motivating, and informative as I have!

Do you have any great books you recommend for bloggers? If you’ve read Born to Blog, what did you think?

If you enjoyed this post, please share. Cheers!

– Matt

Classes, Social Media

What’s Changing? Plans for My Social Media Fall 2013 Class

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This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for details.Neon_sign,_-CHANGE-

I often find myself at the end of the semester saying “I wish we’d had time to talk about X!” Or, “when I planned this class, Y wasn’t even on the map!”

The great thing is, the relative shortness of a semester enables constant innovation.

Having taught social media for a number of years as a standalone course, there are a few things I plan to change for this upcoming semester.

When I first taught a social media class, I taught it as a hybrid class, half in person and half online. Our major project that semester was the #UVUSOCIAL speaker event featuring Cory Edwards of Dell. Last fall I taught the class based on the team-based learning teaching model (Here’s the syllabus). Students completed in class modules and at the end of each modules completed in in class project designed to put to test the various things they learned during the module. The projects were applied scenarios and students were forced to analyze situations and solve problems over the course of two class periods. While this approach had many benefits, I felt somewhat limited by it.

So what am I planning on doing differently this fall? Here are the major changes that are in the works:

UPDATE: A copy of the syllabus for this social media class is now available as 1 of the resources on this blog!

  • Hootsuite University program & Certification – We’re participating in the Hootsuite University Higher Education program, and students will get “Hoostuite Certified” via their exam certification process. Last semester we used Hootsuite in the class, but weren’t part of the program. t love Hootsuite and am super excited to be a part of this awesome program! It will be a great resume builder for the students.
  • Semester-long blogging project – I’ve wanted students to get hands-on experience with social media. The trouble is, often organizations are a bit wary of turning over the keys to Twitter or Facebook to a professor and his college students. And I completely understand. Unfortunately, to know social media students need to use social media. So much of learning social media is through planning and audience analysis, trying out engagement strategies, building relationships, monitoring, metrics, and evaluation. One way I’ve gotten around this in the past is to host our own social media event. This year, I realized another way to get around this issue was to have students author a niche-based blog on a topic they’re passionate about related to their career interests. I consulted a number of people on who have done this project before, and heard many professors found it to be very successful (I got lots of great feedback from the Teaching Social Media Marketing Linkedin group – Thanks!)
  • Metrics – While we touched on metrics last semester, this semester students will get a chance to set real goals, monitor their very own traffic (as opposed to hypothetical scenarios), etc.
  • Optimization of Posts: Days and Times – Last semester I talked about this quite a bit. Students even read Zarella’s Hierarchy of Human Contagiousness. This semester, students we will discuss the topic and provide some examples. But instead of doing exercises, students will use a modified version of Professor Jeremy Floyd’s social media metrics spreadsheet to track their posting schedules and see what days and times are most effective. Thanks to Jeremy for sharing this awesome tool!
  • Social Media Audit – Last semester my Politics of Social Media class did an in-class social media audit activity of an organization we were working with. I was also planning on having them complete a full social media audit. However, due to how busy we were working on our #ACFF12 campaign, that never happened. So this semester in Comm 322 Social Media, students will complete a social media audit on a brand of their choosing.
  • Infographics – More and more it seems that visual storytelling is what’s winning on social media. I was considering integrating infographics into the Writing Across Platforms class I’ll be teaching next semester. Unfortunately, there is just too much to cover into writing class. I’m going to have to do the project in the social media class instead.
  • Lastly, A New Book – I’m dropping Zarella’s Hierarchy of Human Contagiousness, and adding Born to Blog by Mark W. Schaefer, a great companion for the blog project and 1 of the books from my social media book summer reading list.

What do you think? What recommendations do you have? I hope to finish up planning for the class this week and to get a copy of the syllabus up sometime soon. I also plan to offer some more in depth explanation of some of the projects and topics I’ve mentioned in this post.

If you are teaching a class on social media, what are you planning to cover this year? Are you making changes from previous semesters? If so, what? Drop a comment in the comments below or shoot me a Tweet (textbox on the right)!

I’d love to know!

photo CC By Felix Burton (Flickr), via Wikimedia Commons