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How Not to do Social Media Case Study – Southern Illinois University Carbondale Facebook Page
Right now, the Southern Illinois University Carbondale is in the middle of a contract negotiation dispute which has resulted in a strike by the tenured faculty. As one would expect in a situation such as this, the faculty has urged its supporters to be vocal on the union’s behalf and some students took to the SIU Carbondale Facebook Fan Page to urge a resolution to the contract dispute.
Unfortunately, the SIU Carbondale administrators of the page began deleting those messages. One report noted that they began by deleting only the messages of support for the faculty, but later began deleting all messages related to the dispute – and even went so far as to ban some users. Read more…
For Andrew – On Public Relations and Community Engagement
This evening I received a comment on a blog post I did about the “My GR Six” contest currently going on in Grand Rapids:
“At least they’re doing something besides taking pot shots from your lazyboy. What an asshole you are. No wonder you don’t have any friends. Lol.”
- Andrew | Submitted on 2011/09/08 at 5:02 pm
Though it perhaps didn’t come through in my blog post – I think the My GR Six crew are a great bunch of people. I like Beth Dornan and John Gonzales quite a bit and even attended a recent Grand Rapids Social Media meetup to hear about the inception of the project.
While I’d never deny I’m an asshole, I do take exception to some of what Andrew said – chiefly the idea that I’m not doing anything. For example – after the less flattering entries were frowned upon I thought it would be great if they could find a forum. Read more…
The Less Than Definitive Guide to Grading Student Blogs
At the behest of my fiancee (who happens to be a superb part-time professor at Grand Valley State University), I’m writing this post about using blogging as an important part of the educational process.
It should also be noted that this post is directly relevant to those outside education as well: every organization should be encouraging employees to blog about work-related content. Not personal gripes or gossip – but about their day-to-day struggles and triumphs, or about their trade/craft/field. Social media engagement is the modern equivalent to networking in trade groups or local business associations.
Why Would I Want to Engage in This Sisyphean Undertaking? Read more…
Five Tips for Faculty on Interacting With Students via Social Media
Several people have asked me questions (following the social media policy webinar I did with PaperClip Communications last week) about how faculty should interact with students using social media. It’s a pressing issue first, because there have been several high-profile cases of inappropriate conduct, and second, because social media provides an opportunity to share relevant information to an entire class (or multiple classes) if it’s handled well.
Here are a few tips:
- Stay “On Campus“: If they’re available on your campus, course management software like Blackboard, Banner or WebCT can do nearly everything Facebook can do and there’s a “check” in place in that the school is able to oversee the interaction. In addition, it allows other students to view, participate in and learn from the interaction. We at GRCC use Blackboard and we also use a set of tools from Wimba (like Wimba Pronto which is a client that builds in collaboration, video chat, instant messaging, chat, etc. into one tool). Most of these systems are also able to publish content to Facebook through an application like CourseFeed (so that students can still remain in Facebook – but participate in the class and get notifications and announcements).
- Don’t Friend – Be Friended: Faculty(and supervisors)should never initiate friend requests – they need to respect the fact that the power inherent in their position might make students fearful to refuse the request. If a professor wants to invite students to connect with them – it should be done in the form of a general invitation to the entire class(no different than providing their email in the syllabus).
- Stay Public: Conduct discussions in the open (ie through wall posts as opposed to personal messages) to help ensure that they stay focused on the course and don’t deviate into personal areas that might be inappropriate. It’s the same as the principle behind conducting an after-class meeting with a student in a hallway as opposed to a classroom so that event he appearance of impropriety is avoided.
- Use the Buddy System: It would be ideal if faculty would let their department head, dean or another colleague know that they’re using social media to interact with students AND to “friend” them to give themselves a system of checks and balances. If you’ve got another pair of eyes helping you keep tabs on what you’re doing, they may be able to help you watch out for interactions that may be problematic.
- Be Transparent: Behaving as though others can see your conduct is always a good policy. Anyone trying to maintain a public face that is markedly different from their private behavior is bound for epic failure in an age where online content is easily shared, and students (and consumers) have audio/video recording equipment with them at all times (on their mobile phones). An “abstinence-only” approach to social media is bound for failure just as much as the “abstinence-only” approach to reproductive health education. Content about you will go online whether or not you want it to – ultimately it’s best to have a say in the conversation.
In the end, as more of our communication moves to social media – eventually this will become the dominant paradigm for faculty as well as professionals in the private sector. Better to get a head-start on familiarizing yourself with its nuances now than wait until it’s mandated as part of your contract. Not only that -but I think you’ll find (as I have) that your teaching experience is richer for the relationships you’re able to maintain with students after the class has ended. I’ve been amazed and humbled by the pursuit of scholarship that some of my students maintain outside the classroom – and I often learn just as much from them as they hopefully do from me.
Resources from Paperclip Communications “Social Media: Campus Policies and Protocol” Webinar
Social Media: Campus Policies and Protocol on Prezi
Links:
- Animoto (the tool for automatically creating slideshows set to music): Animoto.com
- List of Social Media Policies from other organizations: SocialMediaGovernance.org
- My Sample Social Media Policy
Social Media – Campus Policies & Protocol (Feb. 17, 2011 Webinar)
[File under "shameless self-promotion"] If you’re working on a social media policy for your organization, I’m hosting a webinar for Paperclip Communications: “Social Media – Campus Policies & Protocol.” The program is aimed specifically aimed at higher education institutions and will cover legal issues, employer/employee issues, student/faculty/staff “boundary” issues, online reputation management, campus PR issues, and generally provide advice and tips to help keep a school’s use of social media positive and lawsuit-free.
Social Media – Campus Policies & Protocol – February 17, 2011 Webinar
Date/Time: Thursday, February 17, 2011 from 2:00-3:30 PM ET
Length: Approx. 90 minutes
Price: $259
Register here: http://bit.ly/SMPolicyWebinarFeb17
It should be a lot of fun; there have been no shortage of fascinating case studies regarding employees and social media policy in the news and this is a topic that I love discussing. If you’re interested in reading some of my other posts on social media policy and online reputation management, here are a few:
- State Farm, Glenn Beck and Social Media
- Fear of Transparency Nixes Blog at University of Colorado
- 100 Percent of Companies/Organizations Have a Social Media Policy
- The Remote and the Real: Shopping for a BP Oil Spill Thong
- Sample College Social Media Policy Guidelines
- Your Visible Social Network: Radical Transparency as the Great Equalizer
PR Students: Your Fundamentals are a Strong Asset
I was talking to a couple of colleagues yesterday over coffee about teaching Public Relations and something occurred to me.
PR students are, in some cases, better experts on some areas of PR than their supervisors.
Public Relations is a relatively young discipline. Many people who practice PR have no formal education; they’ve acquired their expertise informally – usually through experience.
Mapping Public Relations Knowledge
As a result, the people who lead PR departments or agencies frequently don’t have a broad-based understanding of the profession. They may have come from hospitality with event-planning expertise, or from a news background (which gives them media relations expertise). While they have a very deep and nuanced understanding of those disciplines – they have relatively little or no awareness or education about some other areas of PR – which is a very broad field that encompasses many responsibilities, practices and tactics.
In my experience, this has proven to be true. I’ve worked in PR for over a decade and the majority of the leaders I’ve worked for fit this description. They have very strong skills in particular disciplines, but they invariably have blind spots as a result of how their knowledge was acquired. They may be experts on handling crises, but lack skills in measurement. Or they may excel at writing, but know very little about the legal concepts that apply to PR.
That broad base of knowledge is what the Public Relations Society of America’s “Accredited in Public Relations” (APR) designation works to remedy – the gaps in the whole profession that may have been missed through one’s career in the profession.
It can be intimidating to be an intern or an entry-level PR pro sitting at the table with leaders who have decades of experience on you. PR pros who are young to the practice should take confidence from the fact that in addition to the fresh perspective they can offer, they may also offer leaders knowledge they may not have.
Inspiring, no?
This window of opportunity likely won’t be open forever though.
Public Relations is now a formal degree offered by an increasing number of colleges and universities, so eventually the majority of PR pros will have some formal education. I tried to track down the first college/university to offer a PR degree and found references to Boston University – but despite Google and leafing through a couple of PR textbooks I’ve not been able to locate a history of PR higher education (and if anyone knows the historical roots of formal education in PR – I’d love to hear about them).
The Case for Investing in the Mobile Web Continues to Build
Too many resources are sucked up by the process of designing and re-designing our websites. We’re wasting valuable time poring over navigation, color palettes and spiffy Flash animation.
None of those aesthetic flourishes matter for a great many of the people who actually visit the site, because they do it through aggregators or on mobile devices:
How grcc.edu Shows Up on a Blackberry Curve
PRSA Tactics had a brief (“Survey: Blacks, Hispanics are Most Active on Mobile web” by Kyra Auffermann) in the “Diversity Dimensions” section that cited Pew Research Center numbers that reinforce the case for everyone (but especially higher ed institutions given the dramatic increase in minority enrollment during this economic downturn) to do more to invest in making information and services available to the mobile web.
Among the findings (which continue to show that mobile phones are the primary connection of minorities to the web):
- Rate of Cell Phone Ownership:
- African Americans & English-Speaking Hispanics: 87%
- Whites: 80%
- Rate of Wireless Internet Use:
- African Americans & English-Speaking Hispanics: 46%/51%
- Whites: 33%
The days of establishing a hub and forcing people to make a pilgimage to it are in the past. The new dynamic is reaching people where they are, on their terms. Increasingly that is on social networking platforms, and increasingly that is mobile.
The Importance of Data Integrity: Community College Rankings Based on Flawed Data?
Apropos of my recent post about the error uncovered in how Michigan colleges report data to the Federal Government, a story just appeared in Inside Higher Ed about the Washington Monthly’s rankings of Community Colleges in the US.
“The Washington Monthly has yet again irked some educators, as it did three years ago, by ranking what it calls “America’s Best Community Colleges” using openly available student engagement survey data.
Using benchmarking data from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) and four-year federal graduation rates in an equation of its own making, the magazine attempts to rank the top 50 community colleges in the country in its latest issue. Though the periodical’s editors say they only hope to highlight “what works and what doesn’t” at these institutions by ranking them, CCSSE officials have denounced the use of their data in this way and argue it may do more harm than good.”
The data available about your organization can and will be used with or without your permission. With more information being published and the increasing ease with which that data can be used – it’s critical to be aware and vigilant. Even with the best of intentions on the part of a journalistic entity like the Washington Monthly, it can damage an organization’s reputation (and mislead stakeholders).
In the executive summary explaining their rankings, the Washington Monthly acknowledged the limitations of their methodology and wistfully remarked about the lack of data available:
“Of course, our rankings aren’t perfect. Like the president, we wish we knew how community college graduates fare in the job market and their future careers. We’d like to know if students who transfer to four-year schools get good grades, earn bachelor’s degrees, and go on to graduate and professional schools.”
The upside is that the data they seek may soon be available from other sources. For example; what if we were able to pull employment data from social networking platforms like Linkedin and Facebook (or even people-oriented search engines like Pipl.com that catch references to employment in press releases and newspapers) and mash it up with the data from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement?
We may soon be able to complete the loop and better track student success (which is a challenge all educational institutions face).
Not only that, but what if we could monitor tweets and Facebook content (there are already algorithms that can evaluate tweets to determine whether they’re positive or negative) to look for warning signs that might allow counseling or student support services to intervene with a student to get them resources before it’s too late and they fail out of classes?
There’s a lot of possibility out there, and it’s up to us to tap into it.
Why Higher Ed Websites Suck (Follow-up on XKCD-Inspired Discussion)
Mike Petroff at .eduGuru had a clever rebuttal (“Redesign Your University Website According to xkcd”) to the criticism posed by the recent XKCD cartoon chastising college/university websites.
Having been involved in higher education web design for the better part of my professional life, I thought it might be valuable to break down the “whys” behind the problematic aspects of so many sites. The common theme for most of them is trying to reach too many audiences with the front page of the website.
Things on the Front Page of a University Website (and why they’re there):
- Campus Photo Slideshow
Limited technical resources, a lengthy approval process, and an inability to shrug off the old constraints of print media are to blame for the ubiquity of campus photo slideshows. The prevailing belief is that people like to see people who look like them (and apparently also pictures of the buildings they’ll be studying in) so that’s what makes the montages the dominant content. Problem is though, colleges have such a diverse constituency that in an attempt to depict it all an incomprehensible mashup results. - Alumni in the News
Most schools see alumni as an important constituent group; they contribute money, they give their time, and they serve as good evidence to the community that the school is successful in its mission. Administrators also figure that students are compelled to attend by seeing examples of the outcomes of education. - Promotions for Campus Events
Current students and community members one of the many audiences served by college websites, and as a nod to the outdated principles of traditional advertising, most schools think that advertising events on a high-traffic page will result in higher attendance. - Press Releases
Yet another of the many disparate audiences that colleges/universities cater to is the media, and the public relations side of the college try to make information as accessible as possible. Most schools also use press releases as their method of disseminating news to students and the community. - Statement of the School’s Philosophy
This is one of those mandatory “the president/chancellor/board of trustees says” items that no one really reads, but which is given disproportionate attention. - Letter From the President
Again – another “president says” item that everyone feels is mandatory. These letters are also included in printed materials like the catalog where they’re also summarily ignored (and often the letter on the website is exactly the same as the letter in print). - Virtual Tour
For whatever reason, college administrators are enamored with the spaces in which they work and figure this will be a selling point to prospective students. To be fair, this may be the case for large universities that have impressive, sprawling, ivy-covered campuses – but it’s not the case for the majority of schools.
Things People go to the Site Looking For (and why they can’t find them):
- List of Faculty Numbers and Emails
Actually many school sites do have faculty numbers/emails, and of those – many have them accessible from the front page of the site in a “people finder”/”phone directory.” Trouble is, the lists are often incomplete or hard to find. This is attributable to a couple of factors: 1) many sites are organized by department, so one needs to find the department of the faculty member to find their contact info, and 2) many adjunct faculty are not listed because they change regularly from semester-to-semester and most schools don’t have a publicly-available database of this info. That’s not to say that there isn’t a database – there is in the form of the human resources department. Understaffed IT departments usually don’t have the time/resources to write the scripts necessary to query these secure databases. - Campus Address
This is actually an unfair criticism; most college/university sites have the campus address in either the header or the footer of every page on the site. - Application Forms
This is also a curious inclusion as most schools prominently display an “apply now” button on the front page of the site (and nowadays the link usually goes to an online application form – as opposed to a printed copy that one would need to mail/fax in). - Academic Calendar
Ideally the academic calendar should be merged with all of the other campus activities calendars into one super-calendar tool that is easily searchable. Unfortunately as is the case with many other enterprise databases, the tools are either powerful OR user-friendly; never both. Most schools have complex space reservation management systems (because in addition to scheduling thousands of sections of classes, they have myriad events happening on campus and often maintain catering/room rental operations) – but it’s difficult to crowbar these into being user-friendly calendars. Conversely, static web pages or simple databases can’t handle the load that event schedulers require, so a lot of schools have both. - Campus Police Phone Number
Good point. I have no excuse for this not being on the front page of the website; though I would say that it’s unlikely in an emergency that anyone would take the time to fire up their laptop/mobile browser and go surfing for the campus police number – they’d likely just dial 911. - Department/Course Lists
This is another unfortunate case of enterprise databases clinging stingily to the data they hold. While departments are usually a common part of any college website navigation scheme, the course lists are not. They’re either hidden behind the wall of a database (with an insufferably complex search tool) or they’re locked inside of a static PDF. - Parking Information
- Usable Campus Map
The campus map is an unfortunate case of trying to appropriate static content designed for the world of print materials for the web, so JPGs and PDFs are turned into web content. Fortunately the tide is turning, given how open Google and Bing are with their interactive maps – so now many schools are able to embed helpful, dynamic maps into their sites (without having to have a Flash designer on staff).
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