Last night I sat on a panel at Towson University with five other Baltimore-area Internet entrepreneurs, all of us highly engaged in social media, speaking to a college audience of about 100+ attendees about using social media for business. Between what my fellow panelists shared and what we gleaned, I thought it would be worth noting my observations:
- Most of us panelists rely daily on Twitter, Facebook and RSS readers with LinkedIn and del.icio.us bringing up the rear. Most college students in the room hadn’t even heard of Twitter, and by far, they were primarily engaged with Facebook.
- Panelists were asked to differentiate between social media and social networking, the latter of which college students seem to treat as a given and mostly as a form of social entertainment. Even though most attendees were engaged in social networking of some kind, most didn’t seem to be actively engaged in social media, particularly from the point of intentionally contributing to it, i.e. blogging, commenting on blogs, contributing meaningful content or building relationships.
- Speaking of building relationships, we panelists highly encouraged the audience to build relationships via social networking/social media, particularly the closer the students moved to graduation and a professional career. We emphasized that these relationships cannot be one-sided with the student expecting everything to flow his/her way if they don’t contribute back. Contributions can take the form of a thoughtful response to a blog entry, sharing a useful link, making an introduction or suggestion, etc. I was reminded of the closing point made in the fascinating July 2008 Vanity Fair article, “How the Web Was Won: An Oral History of the Internet,” in which one of the Internet’s earliest engineers, Paul Baran, said:
At the beginning there was a different attitude than today. Now everyone is concerned about making money, or reputation. It was different then. We all wanted to help one another. There was no competition, really, on most things. It was a total open flow of information.
- Students received a few strong pieces of advice:
- Sign up for Google Alerts and regularly monitor their name as well as any matters of great interest
- Remember that everything they post online then becomes part of the public record (e.g. Facebook photos, MySpace entries, status updates, etc.) so don’t post anything you wouldn’t want a future employer, spouse, friend to see.
- Sign up for Twitter asap
- Work on those digital relationships!
Towson University Social Media Panel Event
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Great article and the event sounds like it was very successful. I totally agree that most students are facebook focused. I recently graduated and that’s all I used. I now work in social media and wonder how I ever lived without twitter, google reader and blogging.
Comment by T — October 29, 2008 @ 5:33 pm
Rather shocking really… though actually this is the second time in the past week that I’ve heard of college kids having no clue what Twitter is.
Very interesting, although surprising that most of the students had not heard of twitter. I thought that was a big things amongst college students. I agree social networking is a two sided street although I have not seen much come of it (at least professionally). Most of my success has been through off line networking.
Blogging, at least for me, has been a better attractor of consulting opportunities and professional inquiries.
I go to the University of South Carolina (2nd semester sophomore) and this is completely true. The only reasons my friends have even heard of twitter is because I’m always on it although I don’t think they really understand what it is and all the ways it can be used still. In my Media Arts class last semester I was one of two students out of a class of 95 who had a twitter account and again, most had never heard of it.
Comment by Reid — January 9, 2009 @ 10:46 am
I work at Tarleton State University and last week we had a bad ice storm. While spying on Twitter for *tarleton* I found a student has twittered that he couldn’t believe that we did not cancel classes. An hour later that same student tweeted that he slipped on the ice and dropped his ipod in a puddle. For the most part though, the students I have spoken with had either not heard of it or heard of but didn’t know what it really was.
Comment by Nancy Pricer — January 31, 2009 @ 12:48 pm
Hollis, have you seen this change much in the 6+ months its been since you were on this panel? I know Twitter has grown quite a bit since that time… perhaps college students just weren’t early adopters here?
Jon, I think the media hype alone is driving more people of all ages to Twitter (especially the influx of celebrity tweeters), though I think how frequently and for what means folks *use* Twitter is another whole story.
A 4/19/09 research study, “College Students are Twitter-less,” conducted by the PRSSA chapter of the University of South Florida, came to the conclusion that although 99% of those surveyed use social networking sites, only 15% have an account with Twitter and 34% have never even heard of the site. And, some 58% of the students who do have Twitter accounts never use the service or rarely log-on.
The recent comments to this post seem to support its findings, and based on what I’m seeing in the Twitterverse, I do feel that college kids are still either shying away from Twitter or are using it more like SMS or IM than anything else. In my opinion, the rare few seem to know how to “work it” to help position them for internships or future careers.
Good thoughts here Hollis. As with many things I think the number that are signed up versus the number that actively participate are probably drastically different.
Membership or numbers of accounts is probably not a great measure of participation and value/health of a social media site, as that number can be easily skewed by spammers and by businesses who sign up on every social media site they find as a matter of brand protection (with no plans to ever use the account or participate).