Breaking News: State Radio to Headline Fountain Fling

Late last night, Program Board announced via their Twitter account that Boston-based pop/rock band State Radio would headline thing year's Fountain Fling to be held on the Mount Vernon campus on April 24th.

State Radio opened for The Dave Matthews Band in 2008.

They recently sold out 3 shows at Washington's 9:30 club.

The First Online Social Media Snowball Fight?

Amid the Snowmageddon pandemonium of this weekend, and news of lost power, stalled public transportation, downed trees and Starbucks closings, something spectacular happened at the intersection of online social media and frozen precipitation. Upwards of 3,000 people organized and staged a massive snowball fight in Dupont Circle on Saturday using online social media as the sole organizing strategy. The brawl began as an event on Facebook, established the Thursday before the storm. Word of the event spread to Twitter, and for most of Friday night and Saturday, the website's new local trending topics feature showed that both "Dupont Circle Snowball Fight" and "#dupontcircle" were some of the most typed phrases by Twitter users for nearly 24 hours.

As far as I'm aware of, a flashmob snowball fight of this magnitude has never been organized using Facebook and Twitter before. The success of the event is a testament to the power of online social media to spread information, organize, and mobilize. Even if the event in discussion was not of a particularly noble cause, it's manifestation proved the power of Facebook, and especially Twitter, to motivate people at a grassroots level to act.

Here is a video of the snowball fight that shows the scope of the huge gathering (credit to YouTube user goodboydc).

Twitter as a Promotional Tool for Student Orgs

It was reported late last year by the Washington Post that The George Washington University was among the most active American universities on Twitter. According to the study, 17 GWU administration accounts tweet an average of 57 times per day to more than 7,000 followers. While the study focused on administrative accounts, this made me wonder how active GWU's student organizations were on Twitter, and how they were utilizing the new medium.

Luckily, The GW Hatchet has an extensive list of student organizations on Twitter. A quick scan of the list shows that the most active of GWU organizations on Twitter and those with the most followers seem to be The GW College Democrats, The GW College Republicans, and the Program Board. Each account has in the neighborhood of 500-600 followers, and gains about 5 followers per week, according to Twitter statistics analytics website, Twitter Counter.

As for how the organizations are using Twitter, they all seem to use the site primarily to get the word out about events to their memberships:

The more ideological and political organizations tweet news articles they think their memberships will find interesting:

The other most common use of Twitter is for PR and publicity reasons. The organizations will often re-tweet articles by campus media covering their events:

So far, student organizations aren't fully utilizing the social media tool. Even the three largest organizations only have about 600 followers each. That amounts to a very small fraction of the student body. For Twitter to be a legitimate and proven promotional tool, organizations have to get more followers, tweet more often, and continue to provide content and information their memberships find useful.

You're too old (to be on Twitter)

A while back Farhan wrote about Twitter, speculating that Twitter is being overrun by "middle aged people".

Reuters reporter Alexei Oreskovic has found that Twitter users are primarily over twenty-five, and not in the 18-24 demographic that typically dominates social media.



Furthermore, Seniors are keeping up with the 18-24 demographic. Oreskovic found that:
In the U.S, 10 percent of Twitter users were between 55 and 64, nearly the same amount of users as those between 18 and 24, which accounted for 10.6 percent of the total.

Are you on twitter or are you resisting the micro-blogging trend? Do you have a favorite twitter user? (My favorites include Senator Claire McCaskill and Love Line/Celebrity Rehab's Dr. Drew)

Update: Blogspot Plug- You can follow us on twitter

Twitter: Sign of a Mid-Life Crisis?

Is it just me, or is twitteronia being overrun by "middle aged" people?

Consider this an open-thread.