Elon’s iMedia Twitter scholarship

Elon University is taking social media in education to a new place: the application process. The iMedia program at Elon is holding a Twitter contest from December 1 to March 15, in which two winners will receive $3,000 scholarships. The scholarship will be for applicants of the M.A. in Interactive Media program.

The contest asks prospective students to tweet about how the iMedia program will shift their career in new directions. Prospective students have to compose a single tweet answering that question and include mention of the program’s Twitter handle (@elonimedia) and the hashtag #shiftimedia.

The director of Elon’s M.A. in Interactive Media program, David Copeland, told E-Net! News, “This year, through one of the most interactive social media tools, we wanted to offer prospective iMedia students a creative and fun way to realize the value of a master’s degree in Interactive Media.”

Twitter rolling out self-serve advertising platform

Twitter has begun rolling out a self-serve advertising platform that will allow advertisers to buy advertisements directly through Twitter instead of going through a sales rep. The platform is currently being tested with a handful of existing advertisers and is slowly rolling out to everyone else. The rumor mill has been talking about this self-serve ad platform for a while, and the platform finally arrived in November.

The platform allows advertisers to easily buy promoted tweets, trends, or accounts. With the platform, advertisers can choose a product, set a price and duration and pay with a credit card through their web browser. Since it is still in test mode, only tweets and accounts can be purchased right now.

Xeni Jardin live tweets mammogram

It may no longer be Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but Xeni Jardin, technology writer and co-editor of Boing Boing, raised awareness last Thursday by live tweeting a mammogram appointment. Since two of her friends were diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this year, she went to get a mammogram as a precaution, but has since found out that she has breast cancer.

Jardin’s experience was full of social media influences. She tweeted pictures (or as she called it, “Instagrammed her mammogram”) from the clinic of the equipment and of herself in the robe the center provides that she said “make you feel like its gonna be ok.” She also created the hashtag #myfirstmammo. Finally, she even found the Pink Lotus Breast Center via Yelp and mentioned their Twitter account in her tweets.

Since getting the results of the mammogram and confirming the results that she has breast cancer, the support from the Twitter community has been huge. She continues to tweet about what is to come and is encouraging her followers to go get mammograms.

#Cainwreck

You’ve probably heard that Herman Cain has suspended his bid for presidential nomination. However, you may not know that in his announcement, he quoted lyrics from a song from the Pokemon movie and ironically referred to his new website as “Plan B.” In the Twitterverse, fodder like that doesn’t go unnoticed.

The Twitterverse started talking about the announcement before it even happened, with the hashtag #possibleHermanCainAnnouncements trending. Once Cain’s announcement started, the tweets didn’t slow down. His quoting Pokemon got so many people talking about it that several topics about and characters from Pokemon began trending. The Twitterverse also came up with #Cainwreck to refer to the announcement and the hashtag trended.

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