That’s why I loved have a chance to talk about how to take your mid-career life into a more multimedia experience. I talked about how you have to change your mindset, play and connect to promote your work. I realize that sounds easier than you think… but guess what? It really is that easy. If you play, you learn. That’s exactly how I got to where I am in my career.

Beyond what I had to say, I want to share a list of links of tools that I think are really helpful:
delicious.com – save all of those links you don’t want to lose and tag them with searchable terms
bit.ly – make a shorter link for something you want to share and get instant analytics that show who clicked on it
Mobile Reporting Tools: RJI 2010-11 fellow Will Sullivan and a team of students analyzed all kinds of mobile tools and listed them based on the type of phone. I HIGHLY recommend you play with all of the available tools you can with the phone you own.
Also, check out A New Guide: A team of my students recently interviewed journalists across the country to come up with some best practices for journalists using social media.

Some journalists in New Orleans asked me to share some tutorials about Twitter. I really like the guide Twitter put together for journalists. I also like Mashable’s Twitter guide and its Facebook guide to help you think about the potential of those tools. I’m also writing a series of tips on Google+ for the MediaShift blog. You can see my first post here.

Here’s a look at my presentation… I hope our conversation from the presentation can continue here and on Twitter (using the #jentalk, #eij11career and #sndstlcareer hashtag).

A couple of months ago, I had a chance to present to my fellow faculty and staff at the Missouri School of Journalism to talk about how I use social media inside and outside the classroom. Here’s a look at my slides:

I’ve found great success in using my classroom as a social experimental space. I also use it as a way to stay in contact with my current and former students. In the classroom, I encourage tweeting with the #jenclass hashtag. It gives my students a chance to share live notes with each other. Yes, there are times where the note taking turns into a completely off topic side conversation, but I follow the hashtag and can call the students out if they lose focus. I also use CoverItLive sometimes to let students practice the skill of live blogging. It’s a skill that is only done well if you practice. It’s tough to practice if you don’t have reasons to live blog!

I also make it clear to my students that it’s easier to reach me via social networks than leaving a voicemail. My class hashtag extends beyond class discussion. Current and former students share links and ideas throughout each week. (Right now the stream is quiet since I’m not teaching a class, just managing the newsroom at KOMU.)

I recommended experimenting with your comfort zone to the faculty and staff who attended my session. One person commented how I’m much braver than he is as a teacher. I said I’m lucky to have flexible students who are hungry to learn in this space. Each semester is different for me. I never teach my class the same way, so every semester I learn something that worked and something that didn’t work. Luckily, I ask for input throughout the semester and most of the time my students feel comfortable telling me when they feel they understand what’s going on and when they feel lost!

I loved having a chance to share some of my higher ed ideas to my peers. It’s something I don’t get to do often enough. It’s funny how so many of us are doing really great things, but we’re so busy working hard we don’t take enough time to share.

Five minutes.

I wish I could really summarize this experience in five minutes. But since I have five minutes, I’m going to focus on how I grew and changed my goals. I first focused on how newsrooms can collaborate. It’s still important… But I learned during this time that even if I find the most amazing way to bring multiple newsrooms together with the help of technology, it isn’t worth the effort if people don’t use the information. That’s why I moved to the most important word for my life as a journalist and as a journalism professor:

Community.

We need to find ways to teach our journalism students and our industry how to respect the process and work it takes to build community. This is crucial as more people turn to journalists for their personal skills and abilities – it’s very possible they aren’t going to them because of their newsroom. We need to be open, honest and connected. Hopefully I can search for ways to share this knowledge so we can all use the great skills of the journalism profession in this new socially connected world.

I loaded up the first half of the presentation… The second half included questions and answers and a little bit of show and tell. If you have questions or need some show and tell, leave a comment here and I’ll see if I can help get you started.

Here are the slides I used during the presentation just in case you’re curious. I ran through a few pretty quickly to get to the second half of the presentation.

All of my follow up notes to this presentation are a permanent link to the right of the blog called “Twitter Tips.” Please feel free to leave comments here if there are additional details that were missed.

UPDATE: You can go here to watch part 2 of the webcast.

I promise to post the video here as soon as I can get my hands on it. Have fun!

UPDATE – if you go to the RJI website, just click on the “RJI Live” link to the left. And if you want to join in on the Twitter conversation before, during and after the event, please use #tweettalk as the hashtag!

Okay. I have a lot of energy.

So when I present the faculty with a new idea or a great concept… Some of them tune me out because they assume they won’t understand what the heck I’m talking about. I get excited about new ways journalists can share information. I get really excited when journalists are only a piece of the news gathering process. I get super excited when life is simplified with the help of technology.

So after enough professors and students asked… I’m putting together a presentation on how journalists can use Twitter next Monday. I’d love to hear the ways you use Twitter so my presentation isn’t JUST my ideas. There are so many different ways, it would be wonderful to get input from places beyond my world so I can prove that I’m not the only person who thinks Twitter is a helpful tool. So please leave comments here or on Twitter or even on my Facebook page if we’re friends. I would love links and stories about successes and failures when it came down to journalists using Twitter. Thanks!!