Social Media Policies

My social media guidelines:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FPG-Opj6c9mselSjQv06B9t3xh0JXfklJSomdJceunQ/edit?usp=sharing

I work in the Marketing at for my college and my department is responsible for the college’s social media account. We recently hired a staff member dedicated to social media and our social media presence has expanded from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to Pinterest, Instagram, Tumbler, and Google +. With the expansion of our social media presence, the need for policies and guidelines became obvious. I reviewed our social media guidelines and was very happy to find them to be through and well thought out. I have included several of our guidelines in my own policies, but also looked to other colleges and university to see if anything could be added. The following sites were very helpful to be in my research.

• http://www.hamilton.edu/social/creating
• http://www.k-state.edu/socialmedia/bestpractices.html
• http://www.colorado.edu/social-media-cu/social-media-guidelines

• http://web.vanderbilt.edu/resources/social-media-handbook/

In my document, guideline 13 states that all new social media sites must be approved by the Marketing department. I debated this guideline because it seems to contradict the organic nature of social media. However, as we have discussed in this class, digital footprints are impactful and rouge sites must be mitigated to protect the College image.

It is in the best interest of the College to protect its image and to do so, the social media policies and guidelines must be known throughout the organization. In an effort to communicate with staff and students, the following tactics will be used to information the organization about social media guidelines:

·         Place policies on the public website

·         Place policies in the staff/student portal

·         Send a campus-wide communication via email

·         Included education about the policies in the orientation for new student clubs

Social Media Cases

I'm not an educator and my background as a webmaster wasn't exactly a content area that fit well in regards to social media projects. However, at the college where I work my role is in the Marketing Department and when I broadened my line of thinking to social media and marketing projects I found a lot of examples to curate.

I had never used ScoopIt before and since I used Delicious for the last curation assignment I thought it would be beneficial to mix up the technology use. Scoopit was easy to use and I liked the visual elements it pulled in from each post.

http://www.scoop.it/t/social-media-education-projects

I found a wide variety of assignments that analyzed and evaluated a company's social media usage. In almost all of the assignments, blogs were the technology medium used for students to share their work. However, I think a Facebook group like our class is using could be used instead. In a lot of the examples I found there seemed to struggle to get the students to interact with each other - there were a lot of blog posts but not a ton of comments on them. I think that's why Facebook might be a better tool - it's easier to comment and would provide a central location for all the interaction rather than skipping from blog to blog. I think that it's difficult to mimic the community aspect that more organically formed groups have and Facebook helps to foster that.

My favorite project that I found compared the Facebook pages and interactions for Wendy's Frosty vs. the corporate page. First of all the author of the post had a sense of humor that is always appreciated. I think this type of project is great because it uses a comparison of an actual project that the student is familiar with. Many of the projects I found showcased sites like Nike and H&M - companies that are connected with the students.

This assignment was more difficult than I thought it would be. After struggling a bit to choose a topic, I then found it challenging to find actual assignments...in the end I think I found a nice variety of assignments that had a mix of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and blogs.