Posted on 04 September 2011.
SCSU?s Facebook page has been around since December of 2007, and as Facebook has become increasingly relevant in the lives of students and the community, University Communications has put in more effort into running it as well.
The SCSU Facebook page is managed by 19 administrators, including a graduate assistant, and follows a social media guideline document that was written a number of years ago.
?It?s a publication like [our] Outlook magazine, our website, SCSU Today, so many of the same rules apply,? said Jeff Wood, Director of Web Communications.
Wood said that they use a ?common sense sort of judgment? when it comes to moderating the comments and posts on SCSU?s Facebook page.
?It?s a pretty open kind of environment on Facebook,? Wood said. ?It?s a place where you can criticize, suggest; it is a community discussion.?
The moderation that Wood and his team of administrators do is kept primarily to commercial posts or comments. Wood said that ?anything of commercial nature are deleted.?
Since its inception, SCSU?s Facebook page has banned two individuals from commenting and posting on the page.
Wood and his team of administrators sometimes even check over the weekend ?in case there?s a hot topic and somebody goes off the rails.?
?Even though we didn?t post that comment, we?re responsible for it being there,? he said, ?and if it hurts a third party, even though we didn?t write it, we allowed it to be published.?
Wood credits Facebook?s insistence on accountability for the ?much more courteous? level of discourse.
?Contrast that with the St. Cloud Times chat, [where there?s] anonymity, and people say terrible things.?
Both SCSU?s page on Facebook, and Facebook itself, prohibits anonymous posting.
What sets Facebook apart from the various publications that University Communications put out is the level of engagement; Wood said that even Twitter does not offer the same type of conversation.
?Even our website, we publish and publish. On our website, we know people are coming to our front page but that?s about all we know,? he said,
?[With Facebook] we?re finding out things about people that we didn?t know.?
An example he mentioned was the roundabout construction on University Drive and Fifth Avenue South, which is not an SCSU project but affects and engages students a great deal.
?On the other hand we have a $45 million building that will start construction in October, biggest building project in the history of the university, and surprisingly little interest in that,? he said, referring to the new science and engineering building.
SCSU also keeps tracks of the statistics on their Facebook page, noting that a ?good chunk of our audience is actually older.?
?Recent graduates, employees, community members ? it rivals that kind of 18- to 24-years-old student demographic,? Wood said.
Other avenues that University Communications are exploring include Youtube and Twitter, though Wood said that Facebook is their flagship social media right now.
?A big story will yield 30 likes and 10 comments, and that?s a big day for us.?
Both SCSU?s ?Social Media Guidelines for Staff and Students? document and SCSU?s ?Anonymity on Facebook.com/StCloudState.edu? policy can be found on the digital version of this article. Note that ?Social Media Guidelines? is still in its draft stages.
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