Lunch & Learn: Blogs, lulz and tweets: Social media comes to Princeton with Shan Hilton and John Jameson

Why has the use of Face­book and other social net­work­ing sites exploded? Per­haps, sug­gest John Jame­son and Shani Hilton of Princeton’s Office of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, because it is now pos­si­ble to inter­act socially with very large num­bers of peo­ple in ways that are no more dif­fi­cult than send­ing out a sim­ple e-mail.

Most users need not worry about the cod­ing or the con­struc­tion of their pages. They can sim­ply con­cern them­selves with what they should share, and not share.

The tech­nolo­gies are chang­ing rapidly (MySpace, for exam­ple, has lost 20% of their users in just two months), bring­ing enor­mous oppor­tu­ni­ties, chal­lenges, and some sig­nif­i­cant pol­icy headaches.

At the Octo­ber 15 Lunch ‘n Learn sem­i­nar, Shani Hilton and John Jame­son showed exam­ples of social net­work­ing from the University’s insti­tu­tional pres­ence as well as fac­ulty activ­ity within the social Web.
There are, for exam­ple, numer­ous fac­ulty blogs, in many ways the entry point to social media. In these, the social inter­ac­tion is lim­ited to com­ments about each post and pop­u­lar­ity depends pri­mar­ily upon each author’s abil­ity to post reg­u­larly, to be inter­est­ing or provoca­tive, and it cer­tainly helps to respond use­fully to com­ments. Almost all of the blogs offer the abil­ity to search, to sub­scribe, and to com­ment.
Ed Felton’s blog, Free­dom to Tin­ker, from the Cen­ter for Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy Pol­icy, is notable because, in addi­tion to tap­ping his own celebrity sta­tus to entice a large audi­ence, he offers to more than half a dozen aca­d­e­mics the oppor­tu­nity to post there reg­u­larly, essen­tially shar­ing the bur­den of cre­at­ing fresh con­tent. The result is an inter­ac­tive and engag­ing aca­d­e­mic jour­nal.
Per­haps the most read fac­ulty blog is Paul Krugman’s Blog at the New York Times. By part­ner­ing with the main­stream media, fac­ulty gain a pre-built audi­ence and a staff to help main­tain the traf­fic. It is a tempt­ing approach which nonethe­less sac­ri­fices some inde­pen­dence in for­mat if not in thought.
Uni­ver­sity depart­ments also have blogs. Obvi­ously, you are read­ing one right now. Hilton and Jame­son also showed off EQN, the School of Engi­neer­ing and Applied Science’s blog, essen­tially an exten­sion of the news sec­tion of their web site.
Depart­ments inter­ested in start­ing a blog should go to blogs.princeton.edu which will assist with the set­ting up a Move­able Type weblog.
A few fac­ulty are also using Twit­ter. Melissa Har­ris Lacewell, a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics and African Amer­i­can Stud­ies and a fre­quent con­trib­u­tor on nightly news sta­tions also shares pro­lific “tweets” to more than 7,800 fol­low­ers. The Office of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions offers up tweets to com­mu­ni­cate infor­mally about events of rel­e­vance to the com­mu­nity.
Princeton’s YouTube chan­nel has 950 sub­scribers. It infor­mally describes cam­pus and aca­d­e­mic life, and offers some fun videos includ­ing a fly-over of the cam­pus.
Princeton’s Face­book site now has 9,000 fans. Career Ser­vices and even Lunch ‘n Learn have their own Face­book pages.
As it turns out, these kinds of sites are enor­mously pop­u­lar. More traf­fic comes to Princeton.edu from Face­book, Wikipedia, Col­lege Con­fi­den­tial, FARK, and Stum­ble­Upon than any main­stream media news site. As you might imag­ine, con­trol­ling Princeton’s image on these social media sites is not always pos­si­ble.
“I’m not con­vinced,” offered one mem­ber of the audi­ence. “There’s so much more noise than sig­nal…. And I ques­tion if there’s any ben­e­fit in this.”
Lau­ren Robin­son Brown, Assis­tant Vice Pres­i­dent of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, replied that the Uni­ver­sity Trustees are extremely inter­ested in uses of social media pri­mar­ily because the stu­dents are there. In addi­tion, the trustees, as par­ents, have per­son­ally expe­ri­enced the power of these tools. For Prince­ton, the tools pro­vide acces­si­bil­ity and more flex­i­bil­ity. They open up the Uni­ver­sity to more of the world, and often in a man­ner that is less for­mal than it would appear on either the home page or in more tra­di­tional news sources. A story on Digg.com might reach 80,000 read­ers in an hour, traf­fic that we never had before.
Hilton and Jame­son also explored the role social media can take in a strate­gic com­mu­ni­ca­tions plan.
For depart­ments and indi­vid­u­als con­sid­er­ing estab­lish­ing or expand­ing a pres­ence on the social web, Hilton and Jame­son review the con­sid­er­a­tions that should be addressed before tak­ing the plunge. They stress the impor­tance of care­ful plan­ning, espe­cially when sites rep­re­sent a depart­ment or the Uni­ver­sity as a whole. Ask the right ques­tions to save time and to increase the department’s impact. Give care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion to your audi­ence and what they expect, set poli­cies regard­ing inter­ac­tion care­fully in order to reg­u­late the amount of main­te­nance that such sites will require, and cor­rectly incor­po­rate Uni­ver­sity web poli­cies to avoid poten­tial legal pit­falls.
Shani Hilton and John Jame­son chair the Social Media SPIN com­mit­tee, which con­sists of cam­pus com­mu­ni­ca­tors lead­ing depart­men­tal and insti­tu­tional social media ini­tia­tives. In that role, they are draft­ing best prac­tices for the use of social media at Prince­ton.
Hilton and Jame­son work in the Office of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, to which they bring nine years of pro­fes­sional expe­ri­ence and 826 Face­book friends.

A pod­cast and the pre­sen­ta­tion are available.