We are proud to announce a new way of sharing relevant conversations and interesting stuff with the USF community of faculty, staff, and students: #USFCA

The idea behind hashtag.usfca.edu is to create a place where the USF community can benefit from a few social media fundamentals:

• Hashtags categorize and sort content on Twitter, tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram (and probably soon on Facebook). Using #USFCA provides all students, faculty, and staff a simple way to contribute to the daily USF story. Tag – you’re it!

• Curators are important for any successful social media presence because they sort through the constant flow (and let’s face it, most of it is pretty boring) to select the most relevant bits. That work gets a lot easier when using nifty curating platforms like scoop.it (which is our platform of choice). #USFCA is curated by a team of staff and students. Who wouldn’t appreciate just taking a quick glance at #USFCA to get the gist of the USF conversation and happenings, instead of sifting through loads of content on all different kinds of platforms? Of course, content with the hashtag #USFCA is also searchable for anyone anytime on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. An additional goal of launching #USFCA is to increase the quantity and quality of that stream by creating an incentive for contributors to use the tag.

• The increasing use of photos to tell stories, and the inherent problem of crediting sources correctly that comes with social media sharing. We picked scoop.it as the platform for #USFCA because it provides a wonderful display of photos as well as video, full editing capabilities of the curated item (you can change headline, description, add notes, add tags), and each item gets its own unique URL so that it can be featured and linked to by others. But each item links back to and refers to the original source by default. We wanted to further increase the incentive to use the tag, so we have added a “Contributors” page that lists all the users who were published to #USFCA. This way, the site provides students, faculty, and staff with a way to directly connect with other people at USF who share  interesting content.

Our editorial guidelines are pretty simple:

• Keep it relevant. What are people talking about? What should they be talking about?
• Keep it non-commercial. Avoid commercial content, because we do.
• Keep it civilized. Constructive critique is fine, but don’t be mean.

We are always looking for ways to improve the site, so please do not hesitate to share your comments with us on this blog or via email at hashtag@usfca.edu