Here’s the story of how our Social Media Curation presentation came together. 

Lu and I, in talking about our interests, quickly realized that we wanted to focus on Social Media Curation start-ups. That was a good combination of our interests - Lu in start-ups, me in curation.  We did a lot of the work in Google Docs - we had a master file where we kept our notes, outlines, next steps, etc. That helped us out, because everything was in one place. There wasn’t a question of “What’s where?” or “Where are those notes on X.” I’m not a huge fan on Google Docs - I prefer working on my Mac platform - but in this regard, it was helpful. We also used Google+ in our planning, holding a hangout with Dr. Ward to discuss how the presentation was coming together. 

Then the question of how to contact the CEOs/professionals for our interviews came up. Social media made this entirely possible. After following the three sites/apps I was doing as case studies (Storify, Paper.li and Flipboard), I reached out to Paper.Li and Flipboard through Twitter. Through a search, I saw that Storify founder Burt Herman was on LinkedIn and that several of my friends were connected with him. So I asked to connect with him, and he accepted within a half-hour. Then, I e-mailed him, explained the project and requested an interview. We talked the next day on the phone. He spoke for 15 minutes, and we easily could have talked for three times that length. He was a wonderfully friendly, gracious guy. I hope I get the chance to work with him again, since we share many common interests. 

I also created a Storify on Sean Brannagan’s talk in our class. I did this show that I could have something to show our class during our presentation, and to see how easy it was.

For Paper.li, I got a quick response saying to contact them through their information e-mail address. After a message and a follow-up, I was connected with Kelly Hungerford in their office. The founders of Paper.Li were both traveling, but Kelly did forward my questions to them, and Iskander Pols responded to the questions. I also created my own paper (The Daily Miss a Day, Miss a Lot, named for the lame slogan of my old newspaper).

For Flipboard, founder Mike McCue quickly responded to me on Twitter and directed me to Christina van der Boom in their office. Again, Mike was traveling and we were unable to connect. But Christina did direct me to a three-part interview Mike did with TechCruch, including a segment where he talked about creating Flipboard.

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Social Media made this presentation possible. Without Google Docs, Lu and I would not have been able keep up with each others’ work. Without Twitter, I wouldn’t have connected with the companies. Without LinkedIn, I wouldn’t have been able to easily set up an interview with Burt Herman. 

The speed at which we were able to do this impressed me, too. In less than a month, Lu and I went from a rough idea to a finished project, because of the tools we’ve learned this semester.