Category: Friday Five

Friday Five: A half-decade on Twitter

Tomorrow marks my five-year anniversary as a tweeter. It is, as the Twitter-anniversary-tracking tool @TwBirthday reminded me this morning, the eve of my TwBirthday.

I suppose I should get all retrospective, talk about how few of us there were back then, how it was a nice, close-knit community, blah blah blah. But frankly, I wasn’t even thinking about the personal historic significance of this day from the perspective of my social media use. I rolled out of bed with thoughts of GSD on my mind this Friday. Hell, I didn’t even have a Friday Five in mind.

But then the twitterverse and Domagoj Pavlesic, who developed the TwBirthday tool, handed me this gift. So, on the eve of my five-year anniversary on Twitter, I offer you my five favorite posts on this blog about Twitter.

  1. Twitter: My go-to learning network. This post really captures why I enjoy Twitter so much, and why it’s my social network of choice, far and above all others. And this post isn’t even original. I borrow heavily from the ideas articulated in a post by Nigel Cameron, who puts it much better than I can.
  2. Best Twitter guide ever — another recycled (read: stolen) post, one that lent itself nicely to a Friday Five.
  3. TwitterVerse (for World Poetry Day) — in which I offer this bit of doggerel: Social media’d be less sweet/Were it not for @jack‘s first tweet
  4. Fun with Twitter StreamGraphs. Remember StreamGraphs? I haven’t played with StreamGraphs since, well, probably since soon after posting this entry.
  5. Your tweet was over 140 characters. You’ll have to be more clever. This is the blog post I wish I’d written, by the pretty damned clever Todd Sanders (@tsand).

Friday Five: The #highered Mind Set on the Beloit Mind Set List

There are five things you should know about this year’s class of higher ed social media commentators on this year’s Beloit Mind Set List.

The list, as we call it here at Higher Ed Marketing, is an annual compendium of zeitgeisty things we should all know about the incoming freshman class. An annual rite of fall for higher ed, much like the U.S. News & World Report rankings and The Princeton Review‘s “best party schools” list, the Mind Set List, according to Beloit’s press release, is intended to show us old-fogey higher ed types those secret “cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college.” This year’s list focuses on the Class of 2016 and puts their lives into context with one-liners like, “They have always lived in cyberspace, addicted to a new generation of “electronic narcotics” and “They have never seen an airplane ‘ticket.”

And the critics of this annual production? Ah, they are legion. Here are a few ways you can spot them as they infiltrate the Class of 2016’s addictive cyberworld:

1. They are clever, often acerbic spoofers of the actual list, as evidenced by the Twitter hashtag they created (#fakebeloitmindsetlist) to parody Beloit’s offering. Among the terse Twitter zingers since the list’s release:

2. They have always critiqued the list for its suspect research premise, and for its hyperbolic language (The Green Bay Packers have always celebrated with the Lambeau Leap and Martin Lawrence has always been banned from hosting Saturday Night Live). Well, at least since 2009.

3. They have never agreed completely about the merits of the list. Some view the Beloit list as a poor substitute for actually talking to students, while other laud Beloit’s approach from a branding and PR standpoint.

4. They sometimes forget that the Beloit Mind Set list is an unscientific compilation of pop culture factoids, and that it was created by a former PR guy at Beloit, in consultation with a humanities professor. So of course, it’s a PR ploy, designed to raise awareness of the institution.

5. They are probably all over 25, and therefore too old to be a social media manager.

Bonus attribute:

6. They carry on about the list for a week, sometimes longer, then promptly forget about for a year. Maybe this will be the last post of 2012 about the Beloit Mind Set List for the Class of 2016. We can only hope.