In San Antonio, each of our staff members went to 10 different seminars on how to improve our show. One that I had the opportunity of learning about was “Creating your twitter community” by Matthew Schott and Rasgorsheck. One of the key things that we talked about was using hashtags for commonality. This way people can keep tabs on specific events or categories in a single page. Hashtags group all the information from multiple inputs into one place. This makes finding information or news convenient and accessible The hashtag that we used for the convention was #hsjTX and by searching that hashtag, we can see tweets from everyone attending the convention. The point was to encourage schools to create their own hashtag for events to get the opinions of their viewers and allow their viewers to see other opinions.

A good example of that would be soliciting a hashtag during the Young Republicans Club/Young Democrats Club debates and asking students to write their reactions or opinions on what each candidate was talking about, then hash tagging something like #miracostadebate.

Hashtags would also be helpful for getting feedback on our show as well as allowing students to submit story ideas. However, hashtags are commonly misused, an example would be:

Ex: #tryingtobefunnybyrunninganentiresentenceasahashtag

Hashtags are supposed to be a small phrase + something that relates to that phrase. Other examples of bad hashtags are:

-#7FactsAboutMyBestFriend

-#FootballPlayersILove

Other sources to expand social media are Hoot Suite, Tweet Chat, and Storify. Hoot Suite gives you three panels of (1) your home feed, (2) your mentions, and (3) your direct messages. This makes retrieving information easier and faster, while also letting you schedule your tweets in advance.

Tweet Chat is where you can see what someone -who is currently online- is doing. It’s more organized for real time communication; this means that you can talk to people who are currently on twitter.

Lastly, Storify can be used to organize the more popular posts to give you the most reliable sources of information. It’s basically like a twitter news website; you can even upload your own stories!

Some other information that we learned during this seminar is that if you are going to tease something about your television program, you need to have content and substance (promotion). Use a Hashtag to create buzz for an upcoming event to promote school spirit and broadcast publicity. To keep up with the advancements in social media, journalists need to emerge technology and promote downloading apps. However, we can’t do it too sparingly, to be successful we must find a balance. Remember that everything is subjective. The blessing and curse of social media is there’s not really rules.