Great Social Media Idea: #HESM Slack Group!

Happy 5th of July, friends! I hope you had a wonderful time eating grilled things and watching things explode. And celebrating the 240th anniversary of us telling King George III to stick it.

I've been thinking a bit about the blog lately, and I am considering making some changes to what I post about. Stick around at the end for more details on that.

But first, here's the single-best thing you can do today to make your job better if you work in social media at a college or university: join the awesomely awesome Team HESM Slack group, created by the great Jonathan Gabriel.

To get signed up, just tweet Jonathan and he'll get you all squared away.

There are already 146 members, all of them #hesm peers comprising an incredibly rich community to share ideas, ask questions, get tips, and commiserate.

And even if you're not a regular Slack user (me being guilty as charged on that), I know it will be a great resource for you because every day there are conversations happening about managing social media in higher ed.

It's pretty darn rad, and I highly recommend it to anyone working in #hesm.

Now for some inside baseball about the blog.

I will definitely continue featuring ideas that I like, but probably a bit more infrequently. I think I am gong to start mixing in more links/news (with a bit of commentary, natch) and not just banish that stuff to a Friday links round up. I might also start sharing some ideas I like from outside higher ed, though I'm not 100% sure on that yet.

Fact of the matter is that changes to Facebook and Instagram feeds have made it a lot harder to see posts from all the colleges and universities I follow, making it that much more difficult to source good ideas. And the stuff that does break through to my feeds tends to be celebrating a big athletic win, a big news announcement, and pretty photos of campus - highly engaging, to be sure, but not really the type of stuff I can feature on the blog.

And there's the fact that I'm not longer personally working at a college (though #hesm is still near and dear to my heart), and it makes more sense for me to professionally branch out a little bit.

No matter what, I promise I'll keep it relevant for all you #hesm folks! Really and truly. I am just going to try out some different things for a bit and see how it goes.

OK... enough of that. This is the only appropriate thing to leave you with after all that "content" talk.  ;)