Many debates have occurred online regarding Social Media within Education, since its presence has become strongly desired within our daily lives, focusing conversations on integrating Social Media within the classroom as a subject, but what about using Social Media for Education?

YouTube has taken the initiative to just that, creating the ability for the Education system to utilize its site to better educate globally by redefining the way we learn through visualization. YouTube has created YouTube for Schools, a controlled environment that enables teachers and students to capitalize on watching educational videos designed for the classroom.

This is an innovative opportunity, granting schools the prospect to revolutionize the way children learn, since people learn in different ways, some more so visually; this is an opportunity to expand the classroom and open doors for students to access a worldly library, literally.

How Can My School Participate in YouTube for Schools?

A school must sign-up to YouTube for Schools in order to have access to this exclusive community on YouTube that will not only enhance the education system but also keep it safe, secure and appropriate for the classroom.

4 Benefits of Signing-up with YouTube for Schools

Comprehensive Content – YouTube will provide educational videos of the highest standard, accessing from YouTube EDU, TED, Stanford, PBS as well as many others.

School Appropriate – School Admins and Teachers will be able to have a login to watch any video, students however will login and only have access to YouTube EDU and videos that their school has added. All comments and other types of videos are disabled, only granting access to YouTube EDU.

Customizable – School Admins and Teachers are able to customize the videos through the YouTube EDU library, even as much as creating customized playlists for their students to watch.

Teacher-friendly – Teachers will have access to playlists of videos that are in ordinance with common educational standards organized by subjects and grade levels. The playlists were created by teachers so more time is focused on teaching instead of searching.

The way we communicated has changed in the past decade; we are using technology as a platform to remain connected with people we know and to expand our relationships and connections with various like-minded people. YouTube for Schools further enhances the connection by offering an opportunity to better our education systems through videos and by unraveling an innovative form for students to better their education by learning more, by stepping outside the most likely dated textbook, unto a worldly stage of endless video opportunities.

Read More Social Media News and Information on the Hasai Blog

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Erin Ryan is a Social Media Specialist, Social Media Promotional Director and Writer. She has a keen understanding of Social Media and frequently stays up-to-date within the Industry. Erin Ryan has the know how for B2B, B2C and personal Social Media to assist in making it successful.

She can be found on a variety of social networks and enjoys sharing quality information and knowledge that will help aid you in finding your own genuine success. Connect with Erin on Twitter!

If you have not visited Stumbleupon in a while, you may be surprised at its newest redesign, making the site visually enhanced from changing category links to images, increasing image thumbnails on  profiles (not to mention completely redoing the profile layout) and adding channel pages for celebrities, publications and brands now have authorization to create accounts on the site.

Stumbleupon has even gone so far to change its logo, yes that is right, gone are the blue, white and green design and replacing the well-known circle is an orange circle with SU in white letters. Not exactly, what Stumblers are use to, but is a better representation of the brand as well as modernizing the site says CEO of Stumbleupon, Garrett Camp:

“We realized we weren’t conveying the experience well enough through our visual appearance. The power of our technology is remarkable, but now we’re finally doing justice to that with a modern, slick front-end. Finally, our front-end is as good as our back-end.” (via Gigaom)

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Profiles look completely different and now enable you to choose under the new “Your Likes” feature what you want to see when visiting your profile from “showing all”, “show photos only”, “show videos only”, “show additions” to “show by interests only”. The entire profile looks cleaner and fresher with a more humanized feel and look.

What are StumbleUpon Channels?

This is probably the most exciting change to StumbleUpon due to its previous lack of abilities for businesses, since users had to create accounts with names. As many Social Networking sites enable brands now to create a page on behalf of their business, it seems changing the look and adding features to StumbleUpon is the right move. Channel pages will also serve a purpose for publications and celebrities that use StumbleUpon, but arguably will be most beneficial for companies to have the ability to become a part of the Stumbling community, since it is the #1 traffic-driving website. This means a huge shift in opportunity to discover and share content that will aid in Brand Marketing and deliver phenomenal page view impressions.

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With that said, brands should be aware that StumbleUpon enjoys a variety of content from an array of domains. This means that creating a “channel” and subbing only your link repeatedly will not be much of a benefit to your business, instead discovering content that is relevant to your industry and mixing it up with your content is your best bet for success.

The unveiling of the new look is rolling out as we speak and is now beginning to show at the top of accounts to “check out the new Stumbleupon”.  Keep in mind that this latest redesign is web based only for now, so mobile goers will have to wait to view it from their hand-held devices. It will also be interesting to see how the new logo will catch on within its community and in amongst the cyberculture, since many have SU buttons to share, clearly they will need to be updated as well.

This is definitely a bold move on Stumbleupon’s behalf, and we are looking forward to what is in store for the future of this amazing site.

Do you like StumbleUpon’s New Features and logo?

Read more Social Media News on the Hasai Blog.

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Erin Ryan is a Social Media Specialist, Social Media Promotional Director and writer. She has a keen understanding of Social Media and frequently stays up-to-date within the Industry. Erin Ryan has the know how for B2B, B2C and personal Social Media to assist in making it successful.

She can be found on a variety of social networks and enjoys sharing quality information and knowledge that will help aid you in finding your own genuine success. Connect with Erin on Twitter!

But as time grew closer, I felt a bit nervous. Healthcare, with all its privacy issues and the malpractice minefield, is a totally different animal in a lot of ways, not least of all in social media.

The conference was the Annual Meeting of ASTRO – American Society for Radiation Oncology – and held in my old stomping grounds of South Florida. On my panel would be Matt, to discuss how he has been using social media and what he’s learned; Amy Grantham, a cancer survivor who found a wonderful, supportive community on Tumblr; and Ted Lawrence, who’s not only an MD, but also a lawyer and would discuss the very real legal minefield that is social media when you’re a healthcare professional.

I thought I’d share my talk with you (I went first, so you don’t have to wait long to hear what I have to say) in this mp3:

Social Media and Medicine

And here’s my PowerPoint presentation, which you can use to follow along:

What makes up a good one? What makes them atrocious?

These questions are tackled by our friends at BuySellAds as they look at what works and what doesn’t work. Click to enlarge.

Whether it was intended as such or simply a bi-product that the company had over its association with the Jersey Shore star, Abercrombie & Fitch scored major marketing points with consumers and the media when it declared it was attempting to pay Michael “The Situation” Sorrentino to NOT wear their clothes on air.

It’s made national news on the internet and television. Even if the offer is 7-digits, it’s been better publicity than any marketing campaign could ever get. Twitter and Facebook have been blowing up about it for 2 days and it has become both a rallying call for the many haters of the MTV show as well as a beacon for conversation about the clothing line itself.

What can businesses learn from this? Exposure is no longer about endorsements alone. Getting a celebrity to say something good about your brand is fine, but in this ever-connected society, endorsements aren’t what they used to be. Buzz is everything. Attaching to celebrities and current events often ends poorly. In this case, it has been an absolute win.

Trying to take advantage of trends or memes on the internet is often the biggest mistake that brands can make when they dive into social media as a marketing or engagement platform. They see a funny lolcat or attack to the wrong Twitter hashtag, mess around with the content a little, and think they’ve created viral gold.

In most cases, they end up embarrassing their company or making people mad for the attempt.

There are ways to do it. “Going viral” isn’t as hard as most believe. The first and easiest step is to appeal to the empathic nature of people and social media in general. Below, Chris Menning at Buzzfeed gives us a very straight-forward overview of how and why empathizing is the key to going viral, whether for marketing or simply to gain exposure.

Today’s variation truly struck me. It’s not that the cause was necessarily great, and that’s the point. Instead of helping someone find their stolen computer or sending 90th birthday wishes by the bushels, Reddit user throwawayinging sent tens of thousands of views (maybe more) to a random kid teaching others how to play D on the clarinet. The kid had never had more than a few views on his videos. When he wakes up in the morning, he’s in for a big surprise.

Currently, the standard 300 views are being displayed. YouTube holds views beyond 300 until they are verified, but with nearly 2500 thumbs up on the video, it’s clear that there are tons of views on the 1:17-long video. Here it is:

While it may be obvious to many how Facebook is making its money through advertising and social gaming, we still sometimes don’t realize it’s our data that they truly covet. Advertisers are wanting to hyper-target on the internet now and Facebook has the data to make it happen.

If an advertiser wants to advertise to 25-35 year old males near Minneapolis who enjoy playing frisbee, Facebook knows better than any other company how to target them. Google is getting there. They have more data on everything other than personal preferences and that will change once Google+ picks up enough steam, but for now Facebook is the best gig in town for true hyper-targeting. Here’s a comic that puts it all into perspective.

Via: Soshable

It’s a little ironic that a movie about a man who is able to use 100% of his brain is being marketed by people who are apparently using 0%. Such is the case for the movie “Limitless” which decided it was a good idea to use a popular yet racist Twitter hashtag in an attempt to be clever in their marketing.

The results were not clever.

Simply put, when using social media as a marketing tool, remember the Hipocratic Oath. The most oft-quoted portion of the oath is “primum non nocere”: First, do no harm.

Whoever is handling the Tweets for the verified account for Limitless – guess what? You did harm. You followed a crude and obviously racist hashtag and attached your movie’s name to it. Then, you didn’t even make it funny.

Twitter can be an excellent tool for spreading buzz about a movie. Not only is this an example of one Tweet being used improperly (which has since been deleted) a quick view of their entire strategy seems amateur at best, damaging at worst. It seems that all they’re doing is tweeting at people and thanking them for saying good things about the movie. It’s idiotic and certainly doing very little to help promote DVD sales and downloads.

As a social media marketing firm, it is standard operating procedure to never insult other agencies, but this nameless group (whether internal or hired) should be reprimanded severely for this faux pas.

There are certainly things about Facebook that are not appealing to businesses. It can be time-consuming, may require money to make it work better, and doing it wrong can yield disastrous results. Those are the bad things.

Some of the other things that businesses consider bad aren’t really that bad at all. In fact, there are clear examples where some of the Facebook marketing myths that pervade society are exactly opposite of the truth.

This graphic by SmileSpread takes some of these assertions by the horns and proceeds to show examples of how they are simply not true. Enjoy.