Class Cloud Experience

There are so many things to discuss and talk about when it comes to Social Media.  Social media platforms are constantly changing and evidently becoming more and more popular.  Currently I am studying at Utah State University and working to complete a Communications major.  As I was looking through the options of courses I could take, the course "Social Media and Communications" seemed very interesting to me.  In today's society, we are using social media to communicate with others who are miles away from us or even across the world.  It is a huge part of communications and definitely something I wanted to learn about.  So I got into the class!

I have learned so much through this course and cannot wait to find out what else my professor has in store.  The last activity we did was called the "Class Cloud Assignment".  It was rather interesting and definitely worth mentioning.  During the last hour of the class, all of us students got onto Twitter at the same time.  We were asked to all use the hashtag #socmeddiscuss when we posted anything.  By all using the same hashtag we were able to watch all comments coming through because Twitter categorizes those tweets.  If you click on this link where I have searched "#socmeddiscuss" in Twitter, you can see all the tweets from the students in my class and people who were invited to participate. 

The week before we participated in this activity in class, my professor asked us to invited someone to discuss with us.  I decided to invite my very best friend, Savannah Hakes.  You can find my tweet to her at this link.  We texted a bit after this tweet to discuss the time and date that we would be on Twitter but she was unable to participate due to previous engagements.  I saw that a few people that were invited by my classmates and professor were able to participate in our discussion though.  It seems that my professor invited a past student of his, Andrew Yerka, to discuss with us and you can find one of his tweets at this link.  It was fun to have other people using the class hashtag and commenting on our posts.  As a class we tried to get a few celebrities to participate in this discussion but we were unsuccessful.  

The first tweet I made for this class cloud assignment while using the class hashtag was, "how can we best separate our professional and social lives on social media? #socmeddiscuss".   The direct link to this tweet can be found here.  No-one responded or answered my tweet.  This tweet got one favorite from a friend who is not even in the class.  My second tweet was a little sarcastic but 5 people from my class favorited it.  The tweet said, "I am going to be sick of social media after this class. #socmeddiscuss" and this can be found in a link here.  One of the last things I posted for the benefit of the class discussion was an article about FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).  The link to this article and the tweet can be found here.  

Overall this class cloud assignment was a fun assignment.  I learned more about how hashtags work with Twitter.  I also learned about commenting on posts, posting articles, and tagging people.  It was a very beneficial experience and I am glad our class was able to participate in something like that.