When we first discussed the guidelines for our final group presentations in our “Social Media U Need To Know” class, the idea of a group project conducted almost exclusively through different social media platforms seemed very daunting. We were instructed to use several tools that I had little to no experience with, and I initially felt that they would just slow down the process. But as we began our research on the advantages that social media tools present for political candidates in their campaigns, it was soon evident how helpful these tools really were.

My first reality check what realizing how great Google Docs is. I’m embarrassed that I hadn’t used such a great tool until my senior year of college. The ability to share and edit documents with my teammates was an awesome way to collaborate and made it easy to update our own sections of the presentation as we completed them. In the past, I’ve done group projects where one person is selected to put all the pieces together to make it a cohesive presentation, but that need no longer exists because of tools like Google Docs.

Other Google tools that I really enjoyed using were Google Alerts, Google+, and Google Hangouts. After setting my alerts, I received daily e-mails with relevant articles and posts about politics in social media, which gave us great information and sources to use in our research. If I came across a good article that I thought we could use, I would post it on Google+ to our group’s circle. Not only was it a great way to share the info, but it kept all the articles in one place that was accessible to all of our group members. And Google Hangouts has to be one my all-time favorite tools, make the whole idea of a “group meeting” ten times simpler, since you don’t have to find a convenient place for everyone to get together and you can chat in the comfort of your own home. Not to mention the new mustache feature that applies a mustache to your face while you chat…

Of all of the tools I felt that we used the LinkedIn group the least. I felt that everything we could do on LinkedIn, we could do just as well through Google+ or Twitter.

Twitter was a major resource throughout the entire project. We communicated as a group through tweets, which helped us to get in touch as quickly as possible, since our tweets were sent to our smart phones. We also connected with our interview sources through Twitter. I was surprised at how quickly I received a response from Archie Smart at Targeted Victory after tweeting him to ask about an interview. Until this project, I thought that using Twitter to contact professional sources was a bit unprofessional, but I’ve realized that if the people you want to get in touch with are engaged in social media, and if you go about it the right way, they’re usually very receptive to your questions.

We chose the hashtag #votesocialmedia because we felt it was playful and applied to our topic of political campaigns. Our group members used the hashtag as we put together the project just to make it easy to keep track of our conversation. During the actual presentation our hashtag actually trended worldwide for about 8 minutes according to TweetStats! (thanks to our TA, Heather Cosson, for looking this up).

And according to Hashtracking we made 89,863 impressions as well! Overall I really enjoyed the project, and our conclusions about social media as it pertains to politics proved to be very interesting. Please take a look at our Slideshare presentation (embedded in the post below) and let us know what you think!

Welcome to my blog! Originally I created this blog to update my family and friends on my adventures when I lived in NYC for an internship last summer, and then when I studied abroad in Strasbourg, France last fall. Please excuse the abrupt transition to the topic of social media. I’m currently taking a class called “Social Media U Need To Know” and I’ve tested out several tools for viewing updates from several social media sources. I hope you enjoy!

Hootsuite:I enjoyed using Hootsuite, and it reminded me quite a bit of TweetDeck. On the other hand, there’s something about the layout or colors that makes this interface overwhelming for me. I don’t like that each column pops up with an alert when there are any new tweets, which I have to refresh in order to see them. I do however think that this is a very useful tool. I like that there are different tabs for each social media tool. Go to hootsuite.com to try it out for yourself.

TweetDeck: This tool was probably my favorite of them all. I think it’s by far the most visually appealing and easy-to-read interface. I really like that I have the ability to create columns for separate lists, making it easy to stay updated with certain groups of people that I’m following. I downloaded the desktop version, and I also have the iPhone app which is still very easy to read, even in a smaller format. Give it a try at tweetdeck.com.

Seesmic: I like the layout and the quick, automatic updates. I also think it’s a great idea to put the “marketplace” right in the interface. This makes for easy-connecting to other forms of social media (i.e. Flickr, Tumblr, etc.). I also like the available channels that streamline your content to certain sources, like the Huffington Post. seesmic.com

TweetGrid: I’m not at all a fan of the layout of tweetgrid. A grid seemed like it could be very cool aesthetically, but I was very disappointed. It’s not visually appealing and it’s too busy. I prefer the column setup, which makes everything easier to read.

Monitter: I think that Monitter is a useful tool for competitive purposes, since you can track what’s trending and can search keywords to find related tweets. This would be great for a business to use, but I don’t think that I’d be interested in using it myself.

Socialoomph: I didn’t understand how to use this tool at all. The layout is very wordy and list-oriented which is not visually-appealing and it difficult to decipher. This is probably my least favorite of all of the tools, mostly because I couldn’t even figure out how to access my Twitter updates.

Fall break has sadly come to an end, which marks the halfway point of the semester. So hard to believe that I’ll be leaving Strasbourg in less than two months!!

Had an amazing time over break…left a rather frosty Strasbourg on the 22nd and hopped a plane from Karlsruhe, Germany to Spain! First stop? Barcelona!

(from left: Mike, Rita, Jacquie, Lauren, Matt, me, Chris)

Traveled with “the six” and got off the plane to discover much warmer, sunny weather! We met up with Rita’s boyfriend Mike at the airport and caught a bus to Barcelona and did the tourists-with-huge-suitcases walk of shame to our hostel. The hostel was super nice, and the room was very cool…complete with bunks that were like our own private rooms. There were seven of us in a room made for ten…I think we may have annoyed the other people staying in the room with our constant giggling.

After settling in we ventured into town to find some dinner and sangria. Walked to the beach to find some overcrowded clubs, decided they were lame, and then hung out on the beach for a while (a few decided to take a quick dip).

Saturday we visited the Picasso museum which was right near our hostel, visited an amazing market,

and went to the beach while the sun set. That night we went to a bar called Chupitos (which means shots in Spanish) where the wall was covered in hundreds of names of different shots. We had no idea what they were so just chose a few with interesting names such as the Boy Scout which involved the bartender handing me a skewer with a marshmallow on it which you then proceeded to roast over the liquor that she set on fire on top of the bar. Others included the Bob Marley, the Harry Potter (sparks were involved), the Willy Wonka (whipped cream and mini Hersheys on top…yum) and more…

Slept late on Sunday and had a giant paella for lunch before visiting the Sagrada Familia and Parc Guell, both works of Gaudi.

Hung out at the hostel and played drinking games with a bunch of Europeans that night and spent the next day lounging at the beach before we headed to the airport to fly to Madrid!

After the worst flight of my life (thank you Ryanair), we finally arrived in Madrid around 11 pm, had a late dinner, and went to bed. The next morning we met up with Tara at the SU Madrid Center and she showed us around the city, including Retiro, a beautiful park. Stopped for lunch at a tapas bar and did some shopping before going out to meet up with some more Syracuse friends who were studying in Madrid!

Went on a tapas tour with a cute Australian guide on Wednesday and got to try some tapas such as chorizo with tomato sauce (so good), octopus (not so good) and drinks like sangria and tinto

Then did one of the strangest things I may have ever done…ventured to a nunnery where a group of nuns live and have no connection with people in the outside world except by selling macaroons which they give to you through a window with a rotating table. They give you the cookies and then put the money on the wheel and spin it to them…all you hear is the nun on the other side saying Gracias! So weird…but the cookies were good! Ended the day with a tour of the Royal Palace which was beautiful, but we were all exhausted from walking around. After a siesta we went to dinner and to a popular club for our last night in Madrid.

After a miserable delayed flight we arrived in Paris in the afternoon and I met up with my parents! They had rented an adorable little apartment in a very lively part of town, complete with a view of the top of the Eiffel Tower. We had a wonderful few days in Paris walking around and exploring the city and of course some major sites such an l’arc de triomphe. On Saturday we did a bike tour through Giverny to see Monet’s garden and house. We woke up to pouring rain which killed our excitement, but by the time we got to the town where we would begin to ride the weather had taken a turn and it was beautiful! We shopped for lunch at the farmers market in town (wine, roasted chicken and potatoes, olives, baguette, cheese, etc) and had a picnic by the Seine before being out bike ride to the gardens.

It was great to see and spend some time with them, but I was happy to finally return to Strasbourg after a long and busy week and a half traveling! Strasbourg does kind of seem like home now…of course everything was closed when we got back, and another strike is scheduled for this weekend. Home sweet home!

Third week of classes already? Time is flying by so fast, its unbelievable. So I’m becoming more and more acclimated to life in France and am having some wonderful adventures along the way, but living in a foreign culture really keeps you on your toes at all times. I don’t think a day has passed where I haven’t encountered something completely new (and most likely confusing).

The one that was really stumping us for a while was the fact that virtually all businesses close by 10 pm in Strasbourg. I’m not talking just restaurants and stores either…EVERYTHING is closed. I’m sure you can imagine the horror that a group of young Americans experiences after leaving a club on a Saturday night, and discovering that even McDonalds is closed. We finally realized that this is undoubtedly one of the many reasons that Americans are fat and the French are string beans, but regardless, our longing for a late-night double cheeseburger is worsening daily.

I made pancakes for dinner last Thursday to accompany the Michigan maple syrup that I brought as a gift for my host mother. I didn’t realize until a week after I gave it to her that she had no idea what it was for or what it tasted like. Her son, who lives in Paris and speaks some English, explained to her that you have to make pancakes to go with them, and hence I was summoned to do so. Converting an American recipe for pancakes into European measurements was interesting, but actually worked out wonderfully. I learned how to measure dry ingredients in grams using a mini scale and melted butter on the stove for the first time in probably 10 years (madame doesn’t have a microwave, and thinks thinks that they are awful things). Now my dinner table communication skills are not the best, but I’m gonna go ahead and guess that when Madame jokingly motioned as if she were pouring the maple syrup into her glass, she was telling me that she liked it. She even asked for a double batch next time! Cooking something that is considered “American” and seems so normal to me was a fun experience…I’m going to have to brainstorm some more typical American dishes to cook for Madame this semester.

I’ve spent what seems like endless amounts of time looking up flight schedules and prices for weekend trips during the semester. Finally it looks like our Fall break trips are handled…first to Barcelona, then Madrid, and then to Paris to meet up with my parents before returning to Strasbourg. Also…Oktoberfest is quickly approaching and I can’t believe that we’re actually leaving this Friday!! Our train leaves from the station in Kehl, Germany around 7 a.m., so hopefully everything will work out and we will get there on time! I have no idea what to expect out of this weekend aside from quite a bit of beer and plenty of people donning lederhosen, and I couldn’t be more excited!

This week will be spent researching for some class papers, doing lots of reading, and hopefully getting all my ducks in a row before this weekend…god knows once we board that train, all thoughts of school will be left in Strasbourg.