It’s that time of year kids. When we give back to others and help those in need join Facebook!

No, seriously.

Other Side Group announced a contest today to give away a free social media consulting session and personalized social media report to one lucky non-profit. The winner will be chosen on July 1, so get your name in now!

Interested? Get all the details and enter to win here!

Social media is not just for marketers. It is a change in mindset, a shift in collaboration and information sharing, a way to connect people who WANT to be connected, for the purposes of learning, supporting, sharing, helping and improving. And more. We’ve yet to even scratch the surface of the potential uses for social media.

Here’s an example: Monica Rankin uses Twitter to help her classroom of 90 undergrad history students get more out of what would normally be a static lecture class. Twitter allows Rankin to turn a 50 minute lecture class into a 50-minute interactive seminar, complete with live online interaction from students via computers and cell phones. She and her TA set up a Tweetdeck account, asked students to join the Twitter community, and projected the class discussion on a screen at the front of the classroom. Rankin allowed students to write comments on paper to be put on Twitter later if they are not able to be online during class. She was also able to review student comments after class and respond individually, expand the topic or provide guidance, and foster an environment of interaction in a classroom that would normally have limited discussion.

And what were the results of the UT Dallas Twitter experiment? Students who would not normally feel comfortable voicing an opinion or interacting in front of a large group were able to interact with classroom discussion. Students were required to narrow thoughts or arguments into the 140-character limit, necessitating a concise and precise thought be processed by the student and entered into twitter. Class discussions were open to the wider community, fostering interaction with members outside of classroom confines. In general, what we’re talking about is substantially increased engagement. Check out the video of Rankin’s class for an inside look at how the experiment played out:

As we begin to move beyond the basics of social networking, examples like this one will become more and more frequent. Social media fosters a creative approach to changing and improving the way we can communicate. What examples of creative uses have you seen?