The dish is super simple to make, eggs, flour, salt, pepper, herbs all mixed together and poured into a cast iron skillet over a few tablespoons of freshly made brown butter and then topped with cheese.

Mine did not puff up as evenly as Ashleigh’s but it tasted great. The bottom almost had the consistency of a pie crust and the top was salty and cheesy and crispy while the middle was eggy and custardy, a perfect combination of different flavors and textures and a great way to start off a Sunday.

Tools for finding related hashtags

• Hashtags.org
• Keyhole.co
• RiteTag

Finding geotagged content

• Advanced Search on Twitter
• TrendsMap

Monitoring hashtags (and social media in general)

• Gramfeed (Instagram)
• Iconosquare (Instagram)
• Hootsuite (all channels)

Aggregators/Display

• Tagboard
• Hash At It
• Eventifier

Automated and Scheduled Posts

• Buffer
• If This Then That

Reposting to Instagram

• Repost (iOS)

Moderated Photo Slideshow

• Eventstag

Hashtag Analytics/Tracking

• Topsy
• Hashtracking
• EasyHashtag

In previous years our office had helped collect photos for the Commencement ceremony opening slideshow. With the doors opening at 9:30 am, this slideshow repeated for a couple of hours, followed by a video of the graduates making their traditional walk across campus as they prepared to enter the arena. This year we still wanted to do a photo slideshow, but with a twist; we wanted something that was different, something engaging and something fun, so we turned to social media.

Last year we used the #wmgrad hashtag to track Commencement-related activity (and archived it in our first Storify). This year, in the weeks leading up to graduation, we teamed with the folks in Student Affairs to get the word out. Realizing the wealth of potential photos available, we encouraged the soon-to-be-graduates (via email listservs, our student services portal, Twitter and Facebook) to post photos of their graduation experiences to the photo sharing site Instagram using the #wmgrad hashtag…and we were not disappointed!

@tobesurprised: Ringin that bell. #wmgrad #onetribe

@jocelynray: GRADUATING! #wmgrad

Within hours of the first email being sent out with the instructions, photos were retroactively tagged with #wmgrad and new photos came streaming in. We had dozens of photos from each graduation-related event, from ringing the Wren Bell on the last day of classes, to the Candlelight Ceremony the night before graduation, the Walk through the historic Wren Building and across campus to the Hall on Sunday morning, and finally coming out onto the arena floor and being greeted as the W&M Class of 2013.

We wanted to be able to monitor the photos coming in as well as present them in an appealing way, so we turned to a great little site called eventstagr.am. Evenstagr.am offers a service where they will pull photos from Instagram for any given hashtag(s) and create a web-based slideshow (with various customization options). All of our interactions with the eventstagr.am support folks were stellar; they answer questions with lightning speed and even offered to be available on the weekend for support during the event. On Sunday, as new photos came in to be moderated and were approved, they were instantly and seamlessly added to the live slideshow playing on the big screens in W&M Hall. Those seated in the audience were able to watch a near-real-time photo feed of their graduates’ experiences leading up to this momentous day.

@tlchamberlin: Alma mater, hail! #wmgrad

@samsh1ne: #wmgrad

It was exciting to see the photos coming in, with over 10 photos a minute coming in during the peak of the walk across campus. We ended up with 322 photos in the slideshow (tantalizingly and ironically close to W&M’s 320 years of existence). Nearly 200 graduates participated via the hashtag and we had over 1,100 photos tagged with #wmgrad by the end of the weekend. Afterwards, all of the photos used in the slideshow were put into a Storify and shared on Twitter and Facebook so students, their families and friends could find the photos later to look back, reflect and enjoy (so far the story has been viewed over 830 times!). We also created a Storify of the entire weekend’s events so that we could showcase some of the photos and well-wishes from, during and after the Commencement ceremony.

So by all accounts this social media experiment was a success, and we look forward to adding this as a “new tradition” on W&M’s historic and tradition-filled campus.

~Tiffany Broadbent Beker (@tb623)

@jbvandyke
#wmgrad Walking there!

@lolciraptor: Tryna walk across campus #wmgrad

This project started over two years ago, combining  a “Web Communities” page that was maintained in our content management system and a Twitter-only stream of updates from the (then) two dozen or so College-affiliated accounts. Realizing that updates for more than just Twitter could be shown using the various RSS feeds and web API’s available, the stream of updates was expanded to include Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. The list of Twitter accounts that had been used in the previous site, along with the Facebook pages, YouTube channels, blogs and Flickr accounts that we knew of from the Web Communities page were combined and divided into two lists so things would be a bit easier to find and particular audiences could have an easier time finding what they needed.

This directory worked well for a while, but as more and more organizations on campus joined in on social media and the variety of social media options continued to expand (Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn) the two column list began getting a bit unruly. So at the end of 2012 the social media team decided to revamp the directory portion of the site by moving the data into its own database (using Codeigniter to manage things). This allowed the lists to be more easily filterable, offering different viewing options as well as creating an administrative back-end so that anyone on the team could add or update an account (rather than hand-editing a PHP file).

Do you have a similar site for your institution? What challenges have you faced implementing and maintaining it?

Graduates - Photo by Stephen Salpukas

Our office has been playing around with a site called Storify over the past few weeks (http://storify.com/about) which helps you to tell a story by curating social media content. The idea behind Storify is that you search for a particular Twitter hashtag (like #wmgrad for this year’s commencement), or for comments on a given Facebook page, video from YouTube or photos from Flickr, Instagram, etc. and then hand-select the best bits of content to use to tell the “story” of an event. You can intersperse your own text in amongst the social media entries as well to provide more context or detail to a story. Using a simple and friendly interface, Storify lets you create a permanent record of (typically fleeting) tweets, posts and photos about a common topic that otherwise would be floating around on the internet seemingly unrelated to each other.

Frequently, Storify is used to recap current events or information from conferences or presentations, and it is also frequently used to “live blog” an event. There has been buzz about using Storify in higher education for quite a while, Jen Doak from CASE wrote about Storify back in June of last year. This year, many schools utilized the site to capture their commencement activities (it was even a topic on HigherEdLive’s roundtable on commencement coverage).

In addition to individuals and colleges, there are government agencies (like the White House and the U.S. Department of Education) and news organizations (USA Today College) also using the tool.

I first played with this personally using April’s spooning record breaking attempt as an example. Intrigued and impressed by how easy it was to create a fun story, I presented it to our social media team and it was decided to create an account for W&M to use to capture all of the great bits of social media content generated by our community.

Check out the #wmgrad 2012 story on Storify