Joining the Social Media Dance Moms

As I am sure you can tell from my post last week I watch dance shows. I can barely make it through a Dance Mom show with the Abby Lee Dance Company crew simply because I can't imagine other parents being that horrible to one another. I grew up in this environment and never once did I see any mom take out another. I am sure there were stage moms of course but they only skimmed my world.

At my son's studio there are over involved moms who complain a lot but I see those same moms at work so nothing new. Why am I talking about this? Well let me tell you I stumbled upon a dance show last night called Dance Kids ATL. I started watching and the fact this studio did hip hop and breakdance primarily really caught my attention. On top of that I loved the moms. They were supportive, not divaish and understood when the choreographer spoke to their kids. I even took to my twitter (@CourtinCanada)to mention this.

I woke up this morning to tweets back from some of the Dance Kids ATL moms! How encouraging is that!

This demonstrated to me exactly what I read in The Cluetrain Manifesto Chapter 3 - Talk Is Cheap chapter which I have to say I throughly enjoyed reading. This would be like a wired conversation. By responding to my tweet not only will I continue to watch this show, I will tell people about it and if I lived in the Atlanta area I would likely check out the studio. They brought a human voice to the show and helped to create a community around it. Twitter is allowing these conversations that would never have been possible before social media.

Of the 95 Theses the one that I identify with the most is #3 Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice. In January I took a new position at Western where I not only supervise the front line staff but I also manage the social media for The Registrar's Office. When I took it over they had another area of Student Services running the day to day messaging. They were just using prescheduled messages pulled from an important dates section in the schools Academic Calendar. This meant there was no human voice to their tweets. The same information was being posted to Twitter & Facebook. I really enjoy talking to applicants, students and alumni on social media. When they have questions they can just ask and receive answers. I also enjoy finding out things that students are finding hard to navigate or confusing. It helps me to create new YouTube videos and update step by step instructions. Right now I manage @westernuReg , https://www.facebook.com/UWOSCentral , Western University Student Central YouTube and we will be contributing to the Reddit account that Western currently has. We haven't decided if we will host our own for the Registrar or just answer Western's.

I think the more ways a student can get answers to their questions the more enjoyable their university experience will be.