Tips from the AEJMC Teaching Committee
Social Media Tips: Tweet up with your colleagues
By Amy Falkner
S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications
Twitter: amyfalkner
(Article courtesy of AEJMC News, November 2012 issue)
A recent article in Fortune lamented that universities are failing miserably at equipping students with the social media skills demanded by today’s jobs. Are we?
I don’t believe we are a total #fail. But there is definitely room for improvement. And if you don’t know what that symbol means before the word fail, you should keep reading. If you know it’s called a hashtag, then please help your colleagues understand why it’s important to be active on social media and use it in your classroom.
Here are some tidbits from that article, which trended No. 1 on CNN.com after its release in late September:
• Job postings requiring social media skills rose 87% from 2011 to 2012, topping 13,000 in one month alone earlier this year.
• Among Fortune 500 companies, 73% now have Twitter accounts and 66% have Facebook pages.
• Among 2,100 companies surveyed by the Harvard Business Review, only 12% of those using social media feel they use it effectively.
Hello students. Meet opportunity.
This means we have to prepare our students differently for a constantly changing media landscape. At the AEJMC conference the past two years, I taught sessions on using Twitter effectively in the classroom during the “Doctors Are In” sessions, sponsored by the Teaching Committee. I was overrun with interested faculty members. Some were just starting out; others came to offer their own helpful hints. It was very energizing.
I didn’t understand the attraction of Twitter myself a few years ago. When I was laid up from a surgery, I said ‘I am going to learn how to do this damn thing.’ And I did. It took a few days and that was it. If you are new to Twitter, this is a great place to start: www.mashable.com/guidebook/twitter. Today, I don’t spend ions of time to collect thousands of followers, but I do find it incredibly useful in getting news fast, staying on top of my industry, and seeing collectively what the nation is talking about.
I will focus on Twitter here because this is where I see the growth and it’s actually easy to incorporate into your class. Facebook is the behemoth of social media sites with 864 million users worldwide, but your students know it well and are actually moving onto other things. I teach advertising, so it is important that my students understand how brands use Facebook (universally, not well). But that’s an easy lesson. It’s actually the first assignment in my advertising media class.
Twitter is where there is a bigger knowledge gap — both for students and faculty. The older you are, the more likely you are to be on Facebook. The average age of a Facebook user is 40.5, according to June 2012 data from DoubleClick Ad Planner, now part of Google.
Twitter is a different story and there is a disconnect in our age group (“our” meaning typical faculty). According to the Pew Research Center, Twitter has 176 million users worldwide; 40 million in the U.S. That’s 15% of Internet users and its user base is getting younger. This is where your students are getting their news. The percent of users within each age group starts with a high of 26% for 18-29 and decreases as age increases, to 4% participation among those 65+.
I encourage you to buck the trend. I will tell you that as the associate dean of academic affairs, I regularly track what percentage of my faculty is on Twitter, and what percentage are active within the last 30 days. I check their Klout scores (Klout is a measure of social media influence). If I am trying to deliver a curriculum that infuses digital and social media skills usage across disciplines then I need faculty who walk the walk.
And, I am happy to report, I do. In fact, so much that I learn from them constantly. Your best resource to learn new things is your colleagues. Newhouse recently hired a professor specifically to teach courses on social media, Dr. William Ward. This isn’t really a shameless plug (well, sort of) but he has a great website that can help you get started and get lots of material for your class at www.dr4ward.com. Multiple faculty members have taken a workshop with him; we train ourselves all the time. Our students take a class called “Social Media U Need 2 Know” from him and it is always at its cap. And they are getting jobs based on what they are learning.
This is happening across our curriculum. Our goal, as it likely is for your school, is to insure our students are job ready. Some sample Twitter assignments across disciplines are part of the “Doctors Are In” pdf on the AEJMC web site under the Teaching Resources link, as well as award-winning examples in the “Best Practices in Teaching Writing Across Media” booklet from this year’s conference. (Shameless plug for the Teaching Committee). Seriously, there is great stuff there. Check it out.
I have found the easiest way to get students to see the ease, fun and potential benefits of Twitter is to require them to tweet during a live event that attracts millions of people, something that is bound to be a national water cooler conversation. We just did this for the Emmys. Fortunately for us, Audi was the promoted tweet for both #Emmy and #Emmys, which means it ran at the top of the search results for those two hashtags the entire show. And when the kid from Modern Family was driven to the Emmys with his mom in an Audi, my lesson on social TV was complete. And really, everyone can find something clever to say about Sophia Vergara in 140 characters or less. See…you just thought of it. It’s that easy.
Holmes, Ryan. (Sept. 26, 2012). Universities are failing at teaching social media. In Fortune Tech. Retrieved Sept. 30, 2012, from http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/09/26/universities-are-failing-at-teaching-social-media/?iid=SF_F_River.
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