Andrew Careaga

Last week, officials at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina conducted a drill to test the campus’s emergency response system. But the drill was apparently a little too real, and students and faculty were apparently unprepared. The Charlotte Observer reports that the test terrified students.

Here’s how it played out, according to the Observer report:

Last Friday, an intruder entered a classroom in Moore Hall at Elizabeth City State University and pointed what appeared to be a gun at assistant professor Jingbin Wang.

The man ordered students in Wang’s American foreign policy class to line up against a wall and threatened to kill the student with the lowest grade-point average.

“I was prepared to die,” Wang recalled this week.

Ten minutes after the siege began, police stormed the class and subdued the intruder. His weapon, it turned out, was red and plastic — a fake. So was the entire incident.

“The intent was not to frighten [students], but to test our system, and also to test the response of the security,” said Anthony Brown, vice chancellor for student affairs. Staff and faculty were notified five days in advance via email and text messages that a drill would take place.

Sometimes technology can aid in our ability to communicate. But I wonder if we have come to assume that sending out electronic notices means we are communicating, when sending a message is only part of the communication equation.

Also yesterday, the shooting at University of Arkansas-Little Rock, in which one student was injured, hit close to home for fellow higher ed blogger College Web Guy, who works at UALR. His post about the incident includes links to area news coverage. Even though the campus uses its emergency alert system to notify students, several of them apparently didn’t get the word, according to one news report CWG links to.

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Last November, we set up a Twitter account for our university and mildly publicized the fact on our Name Change Conversations blog. But we haven’t done much with it.

At this point, we have 11 followers, including myself and a couple other communications staffers, and we’ve updated eight times. I haven’t yet worked with our enrollment management team to inform prospective students of the site, and we haven’t notified our alumni through our traditional communications vehicles (email and the alumni magazine).

So, it’s been a very low-key campaign — if you could call it that.

I haven’t found any examples of other universities using Twitter for marketing, pr or external communications purposes.

This morning, I asked the Twittersphere how university comms/PR/marketing folks might be able to use this tool, and have gotten some interesting responses. Here are a few of them:

fcmartin3rd suggests that campuses use Twitter for “inspirational messages; connection with high schoolers; following thought leaders; reminders; pedagoguery!”

amandachapel says, “there’s very little value here. Besides, why would any org want to hold an open meeting on a lawless freeway?”

toster tweets: “I can see universities Twittering for comms, but little else. Even then, I would expect it to be only partially adopted.”

vargasl suggests: “What about twittering events at school? Gaining prospective student interest… ” (That’s how she handled the Oscars on Sunday night, live-twittering while watching E!)

You can keep track of the conversation on my Twitter page. But I’d also like to hear from you readers, too. I know some of you see little value in this tool, and I know others of you who use it regularly as a personal/semi-professional tool but not necessarily as an official representation of your school.

So, let’s hear all sides on the matter.

How could Twitter be incorporated in a college/university communications strategy?

Also, if you know of any universities currently using Twitter, please let me know so I can see how they’re doing.

Leave your comments below or, if you’re on Twitter and want to keep it to 140 characters or fewer, drop a Tweet to http://twitter.com/andrewcareaga.

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