Got a great lesson about twitter today from a Marine sergeant who does social media here at the Defense Information School (DINFOS).
He told us to use facebook to interact and use twitter to follow breaking news. He gave us sites to follow and told us not to worry about hashtags, they are not necessary for searches. We can just search twitter for subjects we care about.
He also showed us good things we can learn from Yelp and other social media sites.
The class was two afternoons and covered all of social media. There were no tests, no lesson plan and no homework. The oddly informal character of the course shows just how new the whole subject of social media is to the military.
The contrast was especially strong today because our morning class was about rewriting national news into local news stories. This was the staple of weekly newspapers, but has all but vanished now that most everyone gets their news from electronic media.
We had a very formal lesson in how to do something that is very rare, and an ungraded lesson in how to do something that will be the center of all communication with young people--90% of the military.
