Utah Search Engine Optimization | Utah SEO Consultant

by Utah SEO Pro

Social Media Taught at School

April 27th, 2008 | Category: Social Media Marketing

So my mom and sister are driving me to the airport because I was on my way to SMX Social Media in Long Beach, CA. On the way they were asking me what the conference was about that I was going to. I was explaining social media to them when my sister pulled out a piece of paper out of her backpack and handed it to me. It was a study guide for an exam in a communications class she was taking that was all about social networks.

I was dumbfounded they were teaching about social networking in college when most all schools aren’t even teaching search engine optimization and the ones that do teach it aren’t teaching the best practices. My undergraduate degree was in Digital Media where we learned a lot about web design, animation, and accessibility so SEO did come up during our discussions. One teacher took 45 minutes to go over search engine optimization on Websites. Some of his recommendations included hiding keywords with the same color text as background, stuffing meta tags, and the typical spam stuff you’ve heard before. According to him, meta tags were one of the biggest things search engines looked at. I kept my mouth shut with a big shit eating grin on my face the whole time.

Social Media on TV

It’s amazing to see social networking going so mainstream. The other night on The Office they were talking about how they were making their Website “2.0″ and having a community on there to interact with each other. Unfortunately they faced the conundrum of pedophiles on the site…haha.

Social Networking Exam

Back to the exam…I am very impressed in the content of the exam. In addition to the exam, the teacher had assigned them to join, explore, and recap on 3 social networks over the weekend. My sister let me have a copy of the study guide so here it is:

COMM 1500

  1. A ______ is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission, (epidemiology), or airline routes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network
  2. What is social networking trying to do? Most of the applications so far offer one or more of eight features or functionalities. http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2006/08/15/social_networking_a_status_report.html
  3. Lots of people have opinion about Twitter, ranging from a complete waste of time to the indispensable connector with your community. What is Twitter? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter or http://twitter.com/
  4. What is an RSS feed? http://www.fastcompany.com/about/rss.html and http://www.whatisrss.com/
  5. They use video and paper to make complex ideas easy to understand. They present subjects “in plain English” using short, unique and understandable videos in a format called Paperworks. http://www.commoncraft.com/
  6. Be familiar with the following Social Networks:

Final Thought:

As you can see the exam looks pretty rudimentary and brief but a great step in the right direction to open up the world to social networking and social media Websites.

6 comments

6 Comments so far

  1. Twitter University April 28th, 2008 8:42 am

    Jordan- I would be interested in knowing what Utah University seems to actually care about the web. At one time, I was interested in getting a graduate degree in ecommerce, ebusiness, or internet marketing. However, the only thing I could find were unaccredited online schools. It’s nice to know that the academic world is seeing the value of the web (even if they are about 15 years late to the game).

    Paul
    twitter.com/paulwilson

  2. Web Success Diva April 28th, 2008 10:29 am

    Great post and just goes to show, for those who are still waiting for it to fade away — social media and most derivatives are here to stay.

    Thanks for sharing, as always your blog is super, duper :-)

    Maria Reyes-McDavis

  3. Brian Carter April 28th, 2008 4:32 pm

    That’s cool Jordan. I wonder if you’ve just got a super sharp teacher on your hands there… good stuff.

  4. Igor The Troll April 28th, 2008 5:04 pm

    Jordon, do you need to be social to understand social media? Or can an “anti-social” Troll like me manipulate and social engineer the society via social media?

  5. admin April 28th, 2008 6:36 pm

    @Paul Wilson – I am currently doing a Masters in Communications at Westminster. They have quite a few great Web classes but pretty rudimentary if you’ve been designing and coding for awhile. I did my undergraduate at UVU and they were pretty damn good.

    @Igor The Troll – It’s funny how anti-social in public most social media people are :)

  6. John Faris July 5th, 2008 11:52 am

    Hey Jordan. Thought you might find this interesting – SEO being taught for University credit at UC San Diego – http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_pwwi/is_200806/ai_n25479200

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