I’m currently working on plans for a new service within Learning Services which will offer Advice on Social Media use in Learning and Teaching. Because of this I jumped at the chance to attend an event hosted by the Edinburgh Entrepreneurship Club which offered a whole afternoon of presentations about Social Media in a broad business context.

Image used with thanks to jairoagua under a creative commons licence

The first presenter Louise Connelly (Social Media Officer at the Institute for Academic Development ) shared insights into how she manages her own ‘Social Media Brand’ or digital presence across various platforms (including Twitter, WordPress, LinkedIn, Academia.edu) and in different roles: personal; research; professional; collaborative projects.

In response to a question about how to target particular demographic groups, she recommended the Pew Research Center as a source of up to date information about who is using which Social Media Service and I’m grateful  to her for recommending this fascinating resource.

Dug Campbell (Digital Director at MBM Commercial) explored the legal side of Social Media, and emphasised the importance of every company having a social media policy. His talk contained the following food for thought ‘Every tweet is an act of publication – including a retweet’.

I was introduced to the concept of ‘Niche Networks’ which are focused around specific interests in the presentation about  KILTR a social media platform designed to connect Scottish interests globally

Alex Robertson & Jennie Stamp from YardDigital and Joe Halliwell from Sodash opened my eyes to the possibilities offered by Social Media Analytics for companies.  These presenters showed tools (ranging from inbuilt options, to specialist options) that could make sense of this data from social media sites and also help manage multiple presences across social media sites.  Joe Halliwell also explained how some analytic data is missing (e.g. location data), or needs to be paid for (e.g. historical data), but personally was happy with a payment model, he closed with this thought ‘Everyone needs a business model, if you aren’t paying, the service is you’.

This was an excellent event and I’ll be keeping a close eye in the EClub for future inspiring events.

Further Links:

Storify has been used to bring together tweets about this event

Presentations from the event are online

The University of Edinburgh Social Media Guidelines

An afternoon of Social Media: Tweets Posts and Analytics – 15 May 2013 / Educational Design and Engagement by is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0

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