Social Media

While social media is a great way to share news with family and friends, students don’t always realize the implications for their ability to secure jobs in the future. Campus administrators have been trying to educate students, especially seniors, about protecting their “personal brand” online for several years. Recently, they’ve been taking steps to protect the campus brand, as reflected in select student posts, as well.

The search-based filtering techniques used by social media monitoring tools rely on spotting a specific set of keywords, including the name of the school. Since people can make valid threats using words outside that list, monitoring tools could never identify threats comprehensively.

In the wake of the Colorado movie theater shooting and noting the social media clues that appeared beforehand, college and university leaders are taking threats of violence posted to social media very seriously.

Case in point: Kent State University (Ohio) charged 19-year-old student William Koberna with a felony charge of inducing panic and a misdemeanor charge of aggravated menacing for tweeting, “I’m shooting up your school ASAP” and threats to the college president. Koberna’s tweets came five days after the Colorado massacre.

Just because your institution maintains a Facebook page and a Twitter account does not mean that you’re utilizing social media channels to the maximum benefit of your college or university. While establishing a platform for the university as a brand, attracting prospective students and faculty, and reaching out to students on the channels of their choice are all great uses of social technologies, there’s far more—and broader reaching benefits—to social media than simply posting news and campus happenings.

The experience students have on campus is what will keep them coming back, both while enrolled and after. But even if they love their classes, that joy can be overshadowed by frustration dealing with student services offices. The new report “Making the Grade: Optimizing the Higher Education Student Experience” from Oracle checks in on how administrators and students think higher education institutions are doing. The good news: 60 percent of students surveyed say their school meets their customer service expectations.