Social Media Cases

I'm not an educator and my background as a webmaster wasn't exactly a content area that fit well in regards to social media projects. However, at the college where I work my role is in the Marketing Department and when I broadened my line of thinking to social media and marketing projects I found a lot of examples to curate.

I had never used ScoopIt before and since I used Delicious for the last curation assignment I thought it would be beneficial to mix up the technology use. Scoopit was easy to use and I liked the visual elements it pulled in from each post.

http://www.scoop.it/t/social-media-education-projects

I found a wide variety of assignments that analyzed and evaluated a company's social media usage. In almost all of the assignments, blogs were the technology medium used for students to share their work. However, I think a Facebook group like our class is using could be used instead. In a lot of the examples I found there seemed to struggle to get the students to interact with each other - there were a lot of blog posts but not a ton of comments on them. I think that's why Facebook might be a better tool - it's easier to comment and would provide a central location for all the interaction rather than skipping from blog to blog. I think that it's difficult to mimic the community aspect that more organically formed groups have and Facebook helps to foster that.

My favorite project that I found compared the Facebook pages and interactions for Wendy's Frosty vs. the corporate page. First of all the author of the post had a sense of humor that is always appreciated. I think this type of project is great because it uses a comparison of an actual project that the student is familiar with. Many of the projects I found showcased sites like Nike and H&M - companies that are connected with the students.

This assignment was more difficult than I thought it would be. After struggling a bit to choose a topic, I then found it challenging to find actual assignments...in the end I think I found a nice variety of assignments that had a mix of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and blogs.