Professors Meet Students on Twitter
Department of Teaching and Learning’s Clinical Assistant Professor Dr. Josh Diem using Twitter in his lecture on advertising’s influence on children.
Stand in the back of any university lecture hall and look at what the students are browsing over. Most professors would be astonished that it isn’t the pythagorean theorem. More often than not, students are on Facebook, Twitter or chatting with their friends. As social media marketers, and strong advocates for leveraging new tools, we saw an opportunity and challenge for professors to meet students in Twitter, the medium in which students had once used to better ignore their professors.
We took our social media communication skills to the classrooms of the University of Miami to help professors correspond with a large group of students without disrupting the lecture.
By using Twitter’s hashtags, professors set up a real-time message board for students to propose questions, talking points and arguments. Professors or Teaching Assistants (TAs) monitored responses and addressed those they felt appropriate.
“Twitter is meant to enhance communication, so we’re enhancing communication,” said Nick Santillo, 24, University of Miami alumnus and owner here at Voltier. “Even in staff meetings, training sessions, and the boardroom – Twitter is constructive when used this way.”
The study was inspired by this video created at the University of Texas, Dallas:
University of Miami Assistant Clinical Professor Dr. Josh Diem, Department of Teaching and Learning, uses mid-semester evaluations to see what his students think of his class. Using Twitter, he can get those updates daily.
“If people aren’t resistant to change,” said Dr. Diem. “[Twitter] offers a good tool to find out what needs to be changed.“
Tweets to the Staff
Just like the classroom, the likelihood of your employees absorbing everything in your staff meeting, training sessions, or even boardroom is pretty small. Not only will this enhance participation, employees will walk away with a makeshift outline of your meeting.
We wrote a how-to guide that’s going out to business owners and universities all over. “People always talk about all the useful benefits of Twitter,” said Santillo, who manages several client’s Twitter accounts, “but you never really see a practical use. This is just one we’ve found.”
Keep in mind: your Tweets are public. We don’t recommend trying to cram your competitive strategy into that 140 character box. You cannot interact in a hashtag conversation without having public Tweets, so be sure to uncheck Protect my Tweets in on the settings page.
Sometimes I like to think about the Internet as one big high school. A high school that has every imaginable clique or type of group, from the nerds, to jocks, to stoners, to cheer leaders, to political enthusiasts, to goths… Each of these groups comes with a certain amount of social pull, a level of ability to sway general perceptions and spread ideas. In a real high school, the group of students with the most influence are usually known as “the cool kids.”
Reddit is a social news site where users submit content (articles, images, videos, comments, etc.) and the submissions are ranked by popularity based on the total number of votes given to the content. The largest demographic on reddit are males between the ages of 18-35. Topics redditors care about include: atheism, marijuana legalization, science/technology, programming, net neutrality, Jon Stewart, gay rights, and hating Glenn Beck.
Digg is similar to reddit but somewhat more popular. It’s demographics are similar to reddit but tend to be more moderate and more focused on gaming/news/and pop culture. There are what are called “power users” on digg who have high success rates with promoting content to the front page of the site where it is seen by millions.
Something awful is a very large paid forum. Members have developed a unique community with its own specific subculture. In many ways it is similar to 4chan in that it’s main visitors are young males with raunchy/gross out type senses of humor. Many memes have originated there including “all your base are belong to us” and goatse.ce.
IGN forum is the companion forum to IGN.com, one of the largest gaming sites on the Internet with over 6 million unique visitors per month. The demographics of the forum are similar to the site itself, mostly young males. Content on the forums is similar to what you will find at 4chan or Something Awful consisting of picture posts, offbeat news, contests, pop culture, geek culture, gaming talk, hot chicks talk, and obscure Internet references/memes.
4chan.com is the web’s most popular image board. It was created in 2003 by a 15 year old from NYC who called himself “moot”. Before starting 4chan, moot was an avid somethingawful forum member. The boards started as primarily a place to discuss anime and manga, but has since become a hub of Internet culture that has been responsible for starting and spreading TONS of viral content and spawning dozens of memes.
