Welcome to MCOM 333! To start off our class discussion, here’s a (parody) social media strategy to consider:
In class today, we’ll be discussing this video, the course syllabus, the course schedule, the movie Press Play Pause, and your homework. Here’s an example of the homework for you.
My current social media profile
Here’s a snapshot of my current social media profile, along with an explanation of what I’m doing in each venue:
- This blog and website. This website is exclusively for professional use. I use it in my capacity as a Towson professor to post class syllabi, course discussions and assignments, and other pertinent journalism and new media related information. I pay for the domain out of my personal funds and use WordPress as my content management system. A secondary function of this blog is to claim the domain stacyspaulding.com for my professional use.
- Facebook. As they say, Facebook is for people you know, Twitter is for people you’d like to know. I use this to keep up with personal friends, family, others interested in my hobbies (such as lindyhop) and professional and community contacts. I used to post quite frequently here until the new timeline came out and I purged.
- Twitter. This is where I follow professional contacts I don’t (yet) know. As the semesters wear on, I do quite a bit of communicating with students here.
- Tumblr: I have two. First is my personal Tumblr, where I post pictures of “East Baltimore’s painted screens and parlor windows.” The second is a Tumblr for MCOM 407, where I post news stories I find regarding community subjects that students are covering.
- Other places I occasionally post: Flickr and YouTube. Mostly I post things here that I think I might use in class. I use the “Class List” YouTube channel as a bookmark.
- What’s not on this list and why? I used to share news items I’d read via Google Reader, which were posted automatically to Google+. Changes made by Google, however, basically broke the RSS feed to this blog, and I never really got so much out of Google+. I have Pinterest and Instagram accounts, but haven’t really started to use them yet.
Thought leaders and others in the field we should be following
As a journalism and new media professor, I’m interested in a few different fields here: social media, journalism/new media, and education in these areas. Here’s a list of important people in those fields to tune into.
People with local ties, including our three class guest speakers:
- Pete Sweigard is The Sun’s director of audience engagement
- Steve Earley (website) is a community coordinator for The Sun.
- Ryan Goff is one of the social media gurus at MGH.
- Mary Hartney (website) used to work for The Sun but now is the social media editor at USAToday.
- Brian Stelter (Tumblr) is a New York Times reporter who graduated from Towson in ’07. You may have seen him in the documentary Page One. He’s an advocate for journalists’ use of social media.
- Amy Webb (and company, and team part 1 and part 2) heads Webb Media Group, an agency that specializes in emerging technology strategy and training.
Other news & social media types:
- Steve Buttry (blog) is director of community engagement for the Journal Register
- Katie Rogers is a journalist at the Washington Post
- Vadim Lavrusik (website) is Facebook’s journalist program manager
- Erica Anderson is manager of news and journalism at Twitter
- David Carr writes the Media Equation column at the New York Times
- Jim Romenesko maintains one of the most popular journalism news sites on the web.
Educators with national reputations:
- Mindy McAdams (blog and syllabi) teaches online journalism at the University of Florida
- Jeff Jarvis (blog) teaches entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY’s graduate school or journalism.
- Clay Shirky (blog) teaches at NYU and studies the Internet and society.
Twitter, Facebook and blogs to add to your feeds:
And…??
(This is where you jump in and post your social media profile and thought leader list to our Facebook group. See you over there!)