The Syracuse Post-Standard featured a several page spread on Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool) Professor-of-Practice Anthony Rotolo and his efforts in making SU a leader in social media entitled “Anthony Rotolo: Companies, and schools, need a strategy for social media.”
“What it means to have a leadership in social media as an organization, whether you’re Syracuse University or a multi-national conglomerate or even a small startup, is that you are speaking to an audience that is passionate about you and inviting them to particiapte in your brand and what you offer to that community,” Rotolo said to the newspaper. “For so long, we have shared informatoin in a one-way channel, throwing as much as we can up against the wall and hoping that it sticks.”
Rotolo, who teaches IST 486/686: Social Media in the Enterprise and IST 400/600: Star Trek in the Information Age, oversees the University’s efforts to engage alumni, staff and current and prospective students using social media, including Twitter, Facebook and the location-based game FourSquare, developed by SU alum Dennis Crowley. Rotolo believes that every organization should have a strategy for dealing with social media, even if the organization doesn’t have one person labelled the “social media strategist.”
“I would say, by and large, the majority of companies do not have a social media strategy, just this sort of awareness that things are going this way now and we have to figure out where we stand on it,” Rotolo said. “We’re getting to the point where people are asking that question: Does everyone need to be doing this?”
Rotolo not only advocates for social media in businesses and says small businesses can benefit most from social media, but also uses social media in the classroom, believing that it adds a real-world component to learning. He allows students to use laptops and phones, trusting his students to figure out their own priorities when it comes to learning. This does not mean, however, that he doesn’t see the value in face-to-face lecture.
“We all prefer to be, when we can, in-person with each other. You can see that in user communities as well as social media,” Rotolo said. “There’s this trend toward planning tweetups–a meetup, but on Twitter people call them tweetups–moving the relationships you’re building at somepoint to a face-to-face.”
Rotolo was appointed the first-ever social media strategist for the iSchool and Syracuse University in 2009. In this position, Rotolo is working to expand the iSchool’s leadership in social media as an area of study and as a way to enhance traditional instruction. Rotolo holds a B.S. in Information Management and Technology and a M.S. in Information Management, both from the Syracuse University iSchool. In May 2009, he received the iSchool Outstanding Faculty of the Year Award, and in December, he received the Web-based Information Science Education Consortium’s 2009 Excellence in Online Education Award.
Rotolo writes for the iSchool’s official blog, “Information Space” at https://ischool.syr.edu/blog, and his own blog at http://rotolo.syr.edu. Contact him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/ajrotolo or on Twitter at twitter.com/rotolo.