In case you don't keep up with the ecommunications blog, they've just posted the next meeting for the group with the strange acronym: MEUG. The Mass Email User Group meeting is Wednesday, October 27 from 3-4 p.m. in Morrill 238A.
The main topic will be internal audience segmentation, and Forum member Matt Sumera, associate director for Internal Communications, will present on Internal Communications' work in selecting and refining audiences on the Twin Cities campus and systemwide. They'll also look at the data available to see how your college or unit can leverage these ideas to select from your own students, staff, or faculty.
Some remote attendance options are available with an RSVP, and you can find out more on that at the ecomm blog.
I've had the pleasure of co-hosting two social media brown baggers for Forum members, and the events have been just like I thought they'd be. We have some stellar early adopters here at the U, and they are enormously generous in sharing what they know and how they did it. And we have a lot of people who are wondering where in the world to start. When I look at The Conversation Prism, I can understand why.
The Conversation Prism was designed by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas in 2008 to "provide a visual representation of the true expansiveness of the Social Web and the conversations that define it." They've since updated their graphic, and one look at their beautiful, rainbow flower of possibilities can strike fear into the heart of the part-time communicator who has, like, five minutes a week to focus on social media for her program.
A repeating question at the brown bags has been, if you think you need social media, "what do you want to get out of it?" And the Conversation Prism does a nice job of ordering our communications methods and priorities, placing Brand at the center.
Social media can be intimidating, and as the Prism so clearly shows us, the possibilities are endless and astounding--blog? Facebook? Flickr? Why? And as long as new sites and services are created and old ones fall out of favor (Friendster, anyone?) this will continue to be a fluid subject. Luckily, with a little guidance from the Conversation Prism and a lot of advice from your fellow communicators, we have the means to wrestle social media to the ground and make it do our bidding.
The next social media brown bag will be on Friday, May 21 in 202 Johnston Hall.
