Great Social Media Idea: Faculty Selfies

My brother was my high school physics teacher. (He's the principal there now, which is simultaneously awesome and strange.) As such, I would be remiss if couldn't recite on command Newton's three laws of motion, the first of which is - of course - the law of inertia: An object in motion tends to stay in motion and an object at rest tends to stay at rest, unless acted on by an outside force. 

Why do I tell you this? Because after taking a week off from blogging due to work travel, birthday celebrations, and other sundry affairs, I found myself mired in some serious inertia. It's so much easier (and more fun!) to binge watch Veronica Mars with my girlfriend and go to bed early than write blog posts. I gave in to inertia last night, but not today. Why? Because I was acted on by an outside force: A wonderful suggestion in my inbox that was too good to pass up. (I have a lot more suggestions to go through, by the way... if you have submitted one, sit tight!)

The inertia breaker? A madcap, hilarious, and wonderful series of faculty selfies from Green Mountain College.

I absolutely loved clicking through these!

More and more, I find myself gravitating toward the unpolished. Polish definitely has its place (Especially when it comes to sausages... get it?!? Gosh I'm hilarious.), but there's something fabulously shaggy - to borrow a favorite word of my brilliant co-worker Brian Doyle - and joyful about this series of photos that shows professors with cats and professors with toothpaste in their beards and professors who cut their faces while fishing. 

It makes them seem so real and so personable, and as I've written about several times on this blog, humor is one of the key ways to have success on social media. (Shocker of the century - self-seriousness is not one of them.) You really can get a better feel for the true personality of a professor in a goofy selfie than a serious posed shot in a lab or whatever.

Again, there is a time and a place for more "elevated" imagery - admissions and fundraising print materials near the top of the list - but it's nice to see things like this to help remind us that there is also a time and a place for things that are a bit more rough around the edges.

Huge props to Green Mountain College for doing this series, and many thanks to the person who submitted this idea to the site and helped break my inertia!