All I Ever Needed to Know About Social Media I Learned from the Muppets

It’s time to play the music. It’s time to light the lights. It’s time to meet the Muppets on the Muppet Show tonight. Whether or not you were a child of the 70s and 80s, you know the opening lyrics for the Muppet Show theme. You know Kermit the Frog and Fozzie the Bear, Waldorf and Statler, Miss Piggy and Gonzo. The Muppets were not human, but they were terribly human-like. The conflicts on the weekly variety show airing in the late 1970s were the stuff of legend for kids growing up at that time. What can we learn from these puppets who showed us how to be better and worse and everything in between?

In this presentation, Tonya Oaks Smith will argue that the Muppet Show is simply a display of what we see everyday when we manage our social media presence. Take a time machine back to childhood and see how various personalities interacted on the Muppet Show – and how those very characters appear day in and day out on the social web. We’ll talk about how the Muppets serve as a microcosm for the social web, and then we’ll talk about how to deal with things when they go awry.

Learning Objectives

• Learn the theory behind human behavior involved in social media
• Learn how to use human behavior to promote your institution
• Learn how to make use of team members throughout campus to gather content and support

Speakers