social networking – Page 14

I’m off to Minneapolis to join several of my higher ed colleagues for The Art and Science of Social Media Marketing for Higher Education, a one-day workshop to be held on Wednesday, June 8. The workshop is the precursor to this year’s Summer Seminar, a portion of which I also plan to attend.

For the pre-conference workshop, I’ll take part on a panel discussion about using social media tools in higher ed. I’ll be joined on the panel by Lougan Bishop of Belmont University and HubSpot’s social media scientist, Dan Zarrella. We’ll be discussing blogging, Twitter and Facebook but probably will also talk about YouTube, LinkedIn, FourSquare and many of the other social media tools out there.

Dan will kick off the day’s events with a session on “The Science of Social Media Marketing.” Then Kary Delaria of Kane Consulting will talk about “How to Listen in Social Media.” She’s already started talking about it on the KaneCo Conversations blog.

I’m looking forward to learning a lot from both Dan and Kary in their sessions. I’m looking forward to learning a lot from fellow attendees, as well.

Follow along on Twitter

If you can’t join us physically, follow along via Twitter using the hashtag #tlgsm. (That stands for “The Lawlor Group Social Media,” as John T. Lawlor’s company is a co-presenter of the event with Hardwick-Day.)

Following the one-day workshop will be the annual Summer Seminar. You can follow it on Twitter, too, using the hashtag #sumsem11.

Social media strategist Jay Baer has come up with an interesting label for social media power users that I hope will stick. He calls them “super socials,” and as far as labels go, I think it’s a pretty good one.

Baer uses the term in his post 9 Surprising New Facts About Social Media in America, in which he shares a quick review of a new report about social media use. Baer reviewed Social Habit II, a new report from Edison Research and Arbitron that should be available soon.

Some of Baer’s conclusions weren’t all that shocking. The fact that the majority of Americans now use one or more social networks is no surprise. Nor was the news that Twitter, my social network of choice, is a thin sliver of the social media pie.

But the interesting thing to me was Baer’s fourth point, “The Emergence of the Super Socials.”

One-third of Americans with a profile on a social network, use those sites several times per day or more. This group of “super socials” (my label, not Edison’s) numbers 46 million, and increase of almost 20% in one year.

At least one table from the Social Habit II report calls super socials “Habitual Social Networkers,” so you can see why I prefer Baer’s term. It makes my use of social media sound less pathological.

Baer further defines super socials as:

In love with Twitter. They’re three times more active on Twitter than the total population.
In love with their smart phones. Fifty-six percent of super socials use smart phones, as opposed to 31 percent of the total population surveyed in this study.
More connected to brands via social media than the general population.

I think I fit the definition pretty well, although I’m not as connected to brands via social media than other super socials I know.

Based on this data, are you a super social?