Great Social Media Idea: Tagboard!

Happy Monday, dear people! My crazy busy-ness (the word business just seems that much more depressing now, doesn't it?) has yet to subside - boo working weekends... BOO! - but I've still got you covered, because I know how much you all rely on me for social media ideas. And puns. And Technotronic jams. Sweet, sweet Technotronic jams. 

Orientation has now taken place at several schools (UP included!), and many of us out there are using special hashtags for move-in weekend to help capture some of the fun energy that always takes place during this time. (I went with the sort of boring #UP17, but it seemed to do the trick.) As Andrea Britton wrote on Social Media Today earlier this month, "Having a hashtag strategy will be the primary concern of event marketers in 2014." After my positive experiences during graduation and now orientation this year, I can't help but agree.

With that in mind, Tagboard is a tool I found extremely useful during this past week. In a nutshell, it allows you to create a place where all tweets, instagrams, facebook posts, vines, etc. tagged with a specific hashtag are collated and presented in a fun, aesthetically pleasing, very user-friendly way. I went for the free option - which is simply a firehouse of all the hashtag action (this has its risks, I learned the hard way) - while there are paid options that allow for more features and control.

Wake Forest's Tagboard mania!

I noticed several schools using it this past weekend, including Wake Forest, Louisiana-Lafayette, and Cornell. (Side note: How freaking AMAZING is Wake Forest's home page welcoming new students? So much great content, it almost make me sick how good it is Props to everyone at WFU, especially friend of the blog Gretchen Edwards!) 

Because there were so many tweets and instagrams coming it at rapid fire (even a small school like UP ended up with more than 1,000 tags across all platforms for #UP17), Tagboard proved both invaluable to the social media manager for keeping track of everything in one location and for everyone who wanted to follow along. It is especially good for people that don't use Instagram (like many of the parents), allowing them to take part in all the fun that goes on there in that big scary mobile platform. And, selfishly, I found it to be a very convenient and accessible way to share with the proverbial people that sign my paycheck the power and importance of social media during big events like this.

I'm really glad to have learned about Tagboard, and I'm excited by its potential for both events and year-long campaigns. I think it's especially well-suited to athletics, and I'm really interested in coming up with fun ways to leverage it to help run promotions and do some fun contests. 

OK, before I sign off today, I'm going to share a video that I worked on with you. In case you were wondering last week why I wasn't able to write as much, here is Exhibit A - my debut as a school mascot. And yes, running around in a giant padded costume on a 90 degree day in downtown Portland = lots and lots of sweat. Enjoy!