Thanks to social media, the news cycle is now. Which means communications teams need to be plugged into their campus’s online conversation if they want to effectively monitor and manage a crisis.
Higher education social media managers operated in crisis mode for at least half of this year. It was—yes, I'm going to say it—unprecedented. It also highlighted, for better or worse, the essential role of social media in campus communications.
Crises happen. The ripples are felt in-person and online. While talking to every person affected would be helpful, it is not realistic. Social listening, however, gives campuses instant access to online conversations about a particular crisis as they emerge on social sites, in forums, on blogs, in the news, and on other websites. Furthermore, social listening allows for unique views into trends within those conversations as the crisis unfolds in real time. All in all, social listening puts campuses in a better position to plan or adjust crisis communication strategies in the moment based on emerging insights. But this is only effective with human analysts teaming up with technology to write the perfect query and easily visualize the data.
You can never be too prepared when it comes to social media.
Social media managers, how do you start each work day? Email? Seeing how yesterday’s posts performed? I like to jump right into issues management. What kind of fires do we have to put out today? From viral videos on Twitter of students canoodling in the library to faculty gone rogue to good old-fashioned trolling. You never know what’s in store when it comes to working in social media.
Whether you’re a social media pro in an enterprise environment or an aspiring thought leader sharing your work with the world via Twitter, chances are you’ve engaged in a form of social listening.
There’s a new kind of crisis on campus—the social media crisis. You know the one, the email interaction that gets posted to reddit, the tweet-gone-awry from an official account, or the local news story that catches the eye of someone influential online. Before you know it, a snafu that might have slipped under the radar in the past has sparked a national conversation, and there are literally thousands of people talking about the campus every day.