Digital and Social Media Marketing |

Has the #pizzagate incident given us a terrifying glimpse of the future?

21 December 2016

Aleksej Heinze providing his view on how to get a work placement

Dr Aleksej Heinze

This year has offered some dramatic lessons in the power of social media. Twice, people have confounded predictions to vote for ideas which have targeted emotional responses.

Now we have President Donald Trump, and the UK Government scrambling to navigate a path out of the European Union.

As 2016 draws to a close, a shooting in Washington at a pizza restaurant – the so-called pizzagate incident – exposed just how dangerous and how effective those emotional appeals on social media can be.

The impact of social media in higher education

23 September 2015

Wendy Sinclair

You may well be wondering why a nurse has been invited to blog for Salford Business School, I asked the same question until I recognised that using social media in nurse education is part of our business. As a lecturer in children’s nursing, I am also part of the fitness for professional practice team and a few years ago I noticed an increase in referrals of student misconduct using social media platforms.

At the same time I was seeing a decrease in student communication via more traditional channels of email, telephone and the virtual learning environment and instead I was being asked by some students to use social media.

In an attempt to try something different, I began in 2012 with a personal twitter account (@wlasinclair) wondering if anyone was even interested in my posts. I had incorrectly presumed that all of our students would use twitter and even more inaccurately believed that they would communicate with me via twitter.