I attended the 2016 Social Media Conference yet again this year. I think it was the best one I have attended, with each session giving me little tidbits of information about how to better manage and utilize my use of social media as a professional and in my classes. This is not to say that the conference can't be improved. I would like to see stronger session on leveraging some of the analytics available in some of the platforms as well as to see a track dedicated to academic research revolving around social media. But, from top to bottom, this year's conference was the best I have attended.
For my first session, I attended a session on "In Introduction to Social Network Analysis" bu Vivian Ta (@VivianTa22). A doctoral student from UTA, she presented last year and was back again. She described social network analysis as mapping and measuring the flow of information. It enables you to identify connectors, influencers, bridges, and isolates. The methodology allows you to track the spread of disease, sexual relationships, collaborators, business, law enforcement, etc. The value of social network analysis is that it allows you to identify data and patterns of information flow. There are two types of social network analyses: egocentric and socio-centric. Egocentric revolves around a single person to demonstrate economic success, depression, etc. Socio-centric social network analysis focuses on large groups to describe groups of people to give insight into concentration of power, spread of disease, group dynamics, etc. There are three types of measures used to analyze social network relationships (referred to as centrality measures): degrees, betweenness, and closeness. Degrees refers to the number of relationship connections each node has. Betweenness refers to nodes that link together multiple groups. They represent single points of failure and can be important linkages in terms of allowing information to travel between groups. Lastly, closeness refers to how quickly information can travel between nodes. As for actually gathering the data, you can utilize direct measures such as surveys but this can be time consuming and difficult. Indirect measures can come from organizations, citation analyses, co-authors, memberships in organizations etc. This is a cheaper approach but does not indicate how nodes are truly related to one another. Still another approach is to use data scraping, web harvesting, or data extraction techniques to pull data directly from user's social media accounts. For example, you can harvest likes, follows, friends, reply to's, retweets, comments, tags, etc. See OutWit Hub for an example of a data scraper. As for analyzing the data retrieved, there are several FREE platforms: NodeXL, Pajek, UCInet, NetDraw, Mag. e, Guess, R Packages for SNA, and Gephi. You can examine the frequency of interactions, types of interactions or flows, as well as the similarity of characteristics (status, location, educations, beliefs, etc.). This was a nice presentation that gave me a research idea so in my mind, it was excellent.
The second session I attended was titled "How to Use Social Media in Higher Education to Tell Your Program's Story" by Dr. Becker and Dr. Putman. The started off by citing Hoover, 2015 who found that interacting with current students and staff through social media is more effective that interacting with them face to face. They stressed the need to align social media efforts with strategic goals and that you need a dedicated social media person to handle efforts 10-15 hours per week. They used a work-study position for this which is funded mostly through the federal government, thus reducing the funding requirement on the part of the department. Start by developing strategies and goals and develop a consistent message across platforms. It would not be wise to have a very conservative message shared through one outlet and then a very wild approach on another. Develop a hashtag for your department. They noted that it is challenging to consistently post, create messages with audience appeal, and dedicate time of an employee. You should post photos with your messages as it leads to significantly more likes, comments, and click throughs. Short posts and pose a question also tend to be more effective. Finally, the best times of the day to post are around 9:00 AM and 4:45 PM so, 1-2 times per day. This was a good presentation, which gave me some good ideas for managing our own department's use of social media.
The third session was titled "Twitter for Educators - Network, Learn, Grow" by Yvonne Mulhern. She started off with an interesting quote from someone I did not catch: "Twitter makes me like people I've never met. Facebook makes me hate people I know." She talked about using Twitter for professional development, self-promotion, and the use of Twitter Lists. Follow people you admire, leaders in your field, etc for professional development. Tweet publications, research ideas, etc. Finally, follow other's Twitter Lists which enables you to more efficiently follow leaders in your field. Follow HigherEdJobs or Chronicles Jobs. The idea is to develop your own personal learning network (PLN). There are also several tools that enable you to streamline your use of Twitter: Twistori.com, TweetReports.com and do not forget to look at Twitter analytics.
The fourth session was presented by Dr. Goen and Dr. Stafford and was titled "Remaining Legal and Combating Trolls on Periscope, Facebook Live, and Meerkat". They limited the discussion of Meerkat given their recent demise. They first defined a troll as an individual that visits a page to post insulting, off-topic comments to provoke some sort of emotional response. In general, they identified two different types of trolls: spammer trolls and disruptive trolls. Spammer trolls are all about them, selling their stuff, etc. Disruptive trolls spew insults, often sexual, violent posts, etc. Regardless of the type of troll, there are ways to combat trolls. On Periscope, you can set a post to follow only which means only those who follow you may post a comment. All others can only watch. You can also block users on a live broadcast. This does not remove a negative comment but it does prevent them from making additional ones. Finally, you can set a broadcast to private which only enables those following you to make comments. There are similar tools on Facebook (FB). On FB, yo ucan report/block a person from your page. The report aspect provides FB with information about your objection and allows you to continue to view the other's account. If you simply block a user, you do not have to report anything but by doing so, you can no longer see the other's account. You can also adjust your general privacy settings to limit what others can see. Alternatively, you can customize each post to limit its exposure. Finally, you should only accept friend requests from people you know.
The final session was over YouTube by Dr. Mitzi Lewis. Titled "How to Make the Most of Your YouTube Channel", Dr. Lewis boiled it down to three essential areas: Brand Your Channel, Be Found, and Keep 'em Watching. For Branding Your Channel, know your mission and post videos that are directly relevant to it. If you need to deviate, consider adding another channel. Make sure your banner, name, and icon are consistent in terms of terms, colors, style, etc. You are trying to give off a consistent image. Have a good, relevant channel trailer that is, ideally, 30-60 seconds. Finally, include channel sections to groups similar/related videos. For Be Found, make sure your thumbnails are images that are relevant to the video content. She gave the example of Jimmy Kimmel videos in which then thumbnail is usually an image of the guest being interviewed. Make sure the titles use words that people will search for. Put the meat of your descriptions early in the narrative, so they can be seen without hitting "more." If you want to identify good key words to include, google.com/trends/explore can be helpful. Finally, keep tags short and meaningful. Finally, for the Keep 'em Watching group, Dr. Lewis suggested maximizing watching time by hooking them first and then let them watch. So, given them a tease, intro, and then discuss your topic. It is extremely important to hook them early. If you use playlists to organize related videos, limit the number of videos in the playlist to the teens or so. Use a watermark which will exist on all of your videos. Finally, regularly upload videos so subsribers have something to visit. For other helpful tips and tricks, she recommended creatoracademy.youtube.com.
This year's conference was better than years past. Again, I would like to see an academic research track included as well as some strong sessions on analytics. But, this is a nice little conference that is applicable to this in higher education, primary and secondary school, as well as businesses and other organizations. So, plan on attending next year!
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