Category: higher education

Social media planning and policies: the view from the ground

corporate social media policy-resized-600Sometimes when creating policies, it’s easy to forget about the real needs of people who are supposed to follow those policies. I’m sure I’m not the only higher ed administrator who has gotten tangled up in a rule created by HR, legal or some other department that sounds good on paper, but doesn’t quite fit the situation I’m dealing with. As you probably do, I scratch my head and wonder what the geniuses who created this policy were thinking.

I don’t want to be one of those geniuses. Do you?

Creators of policies sometimes get so hung up on viewing everything from 30,000 feet that they forget about the people on the ground. For those of us charged with creating social media policies or guidelines for our institutions, it’s important to remember the practical needs of people who are supposed to abide by or carry out our rules.

This point was brought home to me recently when I co-delivered a talk about social media policies and planning to a group of intramural and recreation staff last week at the NIRSA National Marketing Institute. My co-presenter, Teresa Parrot, and I interacted with staff who work with hundreds of students — intramural participants as well as student-employees — and face a variety of social media challenges.

What do you do about students who take photos and videos of intramural games and post the content on YouTube or Flickr?

What happens when a student gets hurt in a game, and before the campus administration even knows about the incident, other students are tweeting about it or posting it on their Facebook pages?

Chances are great that the communications and marketing staffers who are creating a campus social media policy, with counsel from HR and legal, haven’t given much thought to those types of circumstances, or many others.

It’s important to keep in mind the needs of those staff members, students and administrators who are supposed to benefit from our social media policies or guidelines. Let’s make sure we’re creating documents that are a benefit, rather than a restriction. Let’s make sure our guidelines are practical.

[shameless plug]If you’d like to learn more about developing a social media policy, join Teresa and me as we co-deliver an Academic Impressions webinar on that topic on Dec. 7. Registration for Crafting an Effective Institutional Social Media Policy is now open.[/shameless plug]

In the meantime, here are a few other resources to help you along in developing or tweaking a social media policy:

  • .eduGuru’s Social Media Policy Resource Guide for Higher Ed offers links to several college an university policies. A hat tip to .eduGuru contributor Mike Petroff, who pulled together the examples.
  • Social media policies was the topic of discussion for much of Episode 7 of Higher Ed Live, a weekly webcast hosted by Seth Odell. Seth interviews Mike Petroff about the importance of developing practical social media guidelines. Although there were some technical issues with this webcast, it’s worth tuning in to. The social media policies discussion starts at around the 12:30 mark.
  • Last June’s Academic Impressions interview with Teresa and me about social media policies might be worth another look. The money quote comes from Teresa: “We need to focus not on how we can control the message, but on how we can provide resources and guidance for those who are communicating.”
  • So you need a social media policy… by Jennifer Doak, CASE’s online communications specialist, on the CASE Social Media blog. (Hat tip to Michael Stoner for pointing out this post.)

Photo via Red Shoes PR (www.redshoespr.com/blog/bid/9640/Creating-a-Social-Media-Corporate-Policy).

Friday Five: Community values edition

There’s a strong contingent of Glee fans among the higher ed marketing community. Just scan the #glee hashtag on Twitter any given Tuesday night, and you’re likely to see many familiar names commenting about the show and its characters.

Modern Family also has a strong following among higher ed marketers. On Twitter, the most visible and adamant of those fans has to be Todd Sanders, who once credited the show and its Twitter-savvy cast for making the Internet cool again.

Me? I’m a fan of both shows, even though I think the canceled Better Off Ted was smarter and funnier than both Glee and Modern Family combined. (Check the promo video from last year to see what you missed.) But that show is toast, and life, and television, goes on.

Community-castThere is one other sitcom, which also survived its first season — along with Glee and Modern Family — to re-emerge for season two. And it’s a show anyone in higher ed should watch, at least occasionally.

That show is Community. It’s pretty funny but also insightful in the way satires should be.

Community made its season debut last night with Betty White as the guest star. (I’ll never listen to Toto’s “Africa” the same way again.) The show is centered on the antics of an ensemble cast of archetypal Breakfast Club-style losers who attend Greendale Community College (yes, the school has its own faux website). In many episodes, the college is more of a backdrop for the characters than an integral part of the overall story lines. But as far as I know, it’s the only prime-time show right now that includes higher education as a major element.

It isn’t the most flattering portrayal of our business. The dean is a wimpy bureaucrat afraid to make a decision. The main professor — Senor Chang, the Spanish instructor — is the nastiest stereotype since Professor Kingsfield of The Paper Chase, only funnier. One of the minor characters has sideburns shaped like stars. Still, Community should matter to higher ed marketers. Here are five reasons why:

1. They’re talking about us. Community is perhaps the most accessible portrayal of higher education the average American gets during the week. Prime-time television may not be the 800-pound gorilla it once was, but it is still influential, even among the most tech-savvy. We ought to pay attention to what might be influencing the views of the viewing public. (But we shouldn’t take it too seriously. It’s a comedy, after all.)

2. Community colleges matter. For many Americans, community college is the access point to higher education and the portal to a degree. For those without the finances, test scores or other means to enter a four-year college or university, community college is the ticket to a better life. Moreover, President Obama’s plan to dramatically increase the number of Americans with a college degree by 2020 will rely heavily on the involvement of community colleges as a pipeline to those degrees. This, according to news reports about an upcoming community college summit to be hosted by Jill Biden, the vice president’s wife who also has taught in community colleges. (See also this July 2009 Slate article about how Obama wants to leverage community colleges to achieve his goal.)

True, Community serves up a distorted view of higher education. But…

3. Community holds up a mirror to our flaws. Greendale’s spineless leader, Dean Pelton, represents what we loathe the most about higher education administration and administrators. The dean is afraid to make a decision and obsessed with political correctness. (His campaign to create a new non-offensive mascot resulted in the creation of the androgynous “GCC Human.”) Greendale’s campus, classes, teachers and programming scream mediocrity. Even though the dean’s and the school’s qualities are exaggerated, Community reminds us that sometimes people perceive those qualities at some level in all of us and in our institutions.

4. It’s cited in an important book. Community made its way into the pages of Anya Kamenetz’s book about the future of higher education, DIY U (reviewed here last spring). On page 16, in a section about how community colleges must constantly “battle stigma and invisibility,” Kamenetz underscores that point by writing, “In the fall of 2009, a sitcom titled Community, featuring Chevy Chase, premiered on NBC, illustrating all of the worst perceptions about community colleges.”

5. It stars Chevy Chase. Chase plays Pierce. It’s not his best work. Then again, Community is not Caddyshack. Still, it’s better than Spies Like Us. And Pierce’s quips are now archived on Twitter via an account his roommate Troy set up (@oldwhitemansays). (P.S. to Todd Sanders: the cast members also tweet, just like Modern Family‘s.)

Have a good weekend.