In my previous post I talked about W&M’s Social Stream(a combination of the latest posts from the College’s official social media channels and a social media directory for all College-related organizations) and how it has evolved since it’s creation two years ago. While writing the code for this, (and truly satisfying my organizing obsession by going through our student club directory and A-Z office listings to ensure that our directory had all of the accounts listed that we could possibly know about) I began thinking “what is the
Photo by quinn.anya
purpose of having this directory?” Yes, like a phone book you can use it to look up a particular organization’s social media channel, but that usually means you already know it exists (either the organization or the channel). But what about if you’re a newly admitted student? Or a newly hired employee? Without even really looking at the particulars of the list it’s easy for them to see W&M is (as so many colleges are nowadays) very present on social media. By seeing this, they can look through the lists and find organizations that they want to connect with, or are interested in joining, in a more personal and interactive way than just visiting their website.
A social media directory isn’t just useful for new folks or for looking up a random account. If you’re in charge of social media for an academic department, you can go through and see what your fellow departments are doing, get ideas, share posts or tweets, perhaps even strike up a conversation with the person behind the page. For Creative Services, I know these lists are invaluable for keeping tabs on the happenings of campus and what our community is currently focused on. By following all of the student organizations on campus you get to hear about the little concert that is happening in the student run coffee house, or about the award a volunteer organization was given for their service, that you may otherwise not hear about. You can then share those stories on your “official” channels, helping your followers and fans feel more connected to campus.
Twitter lists are maintained on the main @williamandmary account for all of the Official-ish and Unofficial accounts and make sure that the main accounts follow every account on the list in an effort to show support for those accounts and what they’re doing.
Every three months Creative Services does an audit of all of the accounts, checking to see whether they have posted anything in the last few months. If a “slogger” (aka, slacking blogger) is encountered, an inquiry email is sent to the manager of the account, asking if it is still active or whether another page has replaced the one on file. It may feel a bit “big brother-ish” but often this helps the manager to realize that the page or account has been a bit neglected, and either they request help with ideas for things to post (this is where they are referred to the W&M social media resource pages and SMUG group), or the email simply spurs them to post just a bit more if it went off their radar over the past semester.
What other uses do you see for a social media directory?
