Popular website finds cardinal and gold following


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Tweet, tweet! Do you hear that? No, it’s not birds — it’s the world around you using Twitter.

Follow on Twitter

While Facebook is great for friendships and student organizations, Twitter is a growing medium that everyone from musicians to journalists seems to be utilizing. You might not like the idea that a website basically consisting of mere “status updates” is sweeping the nation, but Twitter is a fantastic way to stay in touch with all of your news.

Not so surprisingly, Twitter can be great for staying up to date with campus information. With a simple click of a button, you can receive instant updates on programming around campus, opportunities to get involved, Pete Carroll’s music taste and more. Following USC Annenberg (@USCAnnenberg) can keep you in the know about the various guest speakers the school brings to campus, as well as the school’s coverage in the media. Likewise, following USC Vitirbi (@USCVitirbi) gets you knowledge about the engineering school’s new programs, scholarships and events.

“It’s networking,” said Jamie Hoffman who works at USC’s Fisher Museum of Art (@FisherMuseum). “Especially with a museum, where we constantly have new programs going on, we try to advertise them and Twitter is just another way to publicize our events.”

Hoffman also points out that USC Twitter users can work together — though the Fisher Museum is not directly related with on-campus organizations such as Ground Zero, the two are following each other and would more than likely give a shout out or re-tweet the other if something caught their eye.

Twitter also helps the university itself just as well as it helps its organizations. USC has used Twitter to foster partnerships with other companies, such as the popular academic organization TED. Famous for broadcasting its conferences online, TED partnered with USC in 2009 to create TEDxUSC, an independently organized academic conference broadcasted globally. Attendees were encouraged to tweet their thoughts and ultimately, TEDxUSC racked up 2500 tweets, creating publicity for both the school and the program.