Meet One of Higher Ed’s Social Media Mavens, Mark Greenfield
This year’s National Conference on Student Recruitment and Retention sponsored by Noel Levitz is gonna be a blast. Our team wanted to take some time out to highlight one of the 15 speakers focusing on social media topics (can you believe there’s 15 experts teaching about social media?! We’ve come a long way!)
Mark Greenfield is one of Higher Education’s most prolific students of social media. He can’t be described as a “bystander” or an “observer,” because he has had several hands in the pot since the inception of social media almost a decade ago.
Currently, Greenfield is the Director of Web Services at University at Buffalo, responsible for all of the websites directly related to recruitment and retention at UB. He is also a social media consultant at Noel Levitz, working with campus administrators on developing a strategic framework for using tools like Twitter and Facebook. Greenfield also runs a social network for higher education web professionals called UWEBD.
Mark was kind enough to hop on the phone with us to help us understand his role, his approach to social media, and the topics he’ll be sharing in Atlanta between July 20th and 23rd.
“Twitter, even moreso than Facebook, is about conversation,” says Greenfield “I’m interested in helping people explore what is possible when people start to use Twitter as a dialogue, as opposed to a broadcasting tool.”
He was also kind enough to recommend the following books for us to help build our social media acumen:
- Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
- Open Leadership by Charlene Li
- Twitterville by Shel Israel
- The Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, Doc Searls, et al
Amongst the four suggestions, “The Cluetrain Manifesto” has been Greenfield’s handguide to understanding the the web for over ten years now. We’ll get glimpses of each of it’s philosophy in each of his presentations. The main premise of the book is that markets (like the web) are conversations.
This gives us insight into Mark’s passion for Twitter – a tool that is misused by many departments in higher ed. Rather than a news broadcasting service, Greenfield opines that Twitter is made for colleges and universities to have dialogues with their audiences, managed by an army of students, faculty and staff that have all been groomed to become brand advocates for that institution.
He will be delving further into this and more in his presentation “Using Twitter for Recruitment and Retention,” which will be taking place on Friday, July 23rd at 1:45 PM.
As mentioned, Greenfield is one of many thought leaders in our industry that will be educating us on trends in the higher education social media space. We recommend attending at least one of his talks this year. Learn more about other social media presenters here.
