Social Media Bootcamp! Tools to Build an Engaged Online Community

This online slide show from a presentation at San Francisco State University, August 2009, presents possibilities in the use of social media including:

• delicious.com's shared bookmarking
• Twittter
• blog posting
• further social media tools from delicious.com
• Geotagging
• Flickr
• Facebook
• short message service (SMS)
• blogging through mobile devices including onsite blogging
• media alerts
• a glossary of social media from socialbrite.com

It presents: a distribution graph representing use of social media by type and function; strategies and tactics to build an online community; planning tips to get started; metrics as indicators, such as page view data and comments; links to licensing and free material; and examples of journalistic uses of social media. It extends its discussion of Twitter (and its message posting, called “tweets”) to the use of hashtags - a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to tweets by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag, and widgets – such as website embedded on-screen tools (clocks, event countdowns, auction-tickers, stock market tickers, flight arrival information, daily weather etc).

Among its examples are the following:

• real time conversations online
• video + chat
• livestreaming
• petition signing
• community service promotion
• combining geotagging with citizen photography uploads or with mapping locations for an itinerary of a neighbourhood walk
• community photo album development
• Google maps for visualising news
• maps in "mashups" - a web application that combines data and/or functionality from more than one source
• Facebook community tools

Additional resource links are included.