Want to learn a little more about social media? I wrote a short ebook on it for the Kindle.
Our department has been working on revitalizing it’s web presence – ok, it’s mostly me working – for about a year now. The web site for our particular student activities board (we call it UAB – union activities board) is out of date at best and completely useless at worst – for a look at the devastation, visit http://uab.ncsu.edu. The students do not employ a webmaster, so most of the work for creating and updating the website has fallen to the staff.
Strangely, our department has some similar issues ( http://www.ncsu.edu/activities/), the website is not very well put together and, in my opinion, is out of date in the age of new media and social networking. People want to be connected to the web not have to search the web. It sounds geeky, but searching for things is something we did in 2004 not 2009. Now things and people should come to us.
I wanted to try a different method of marketing so I set up a departmental Twitter (http://twitter.com/ncsucampusactiv) and Facebook account (Facebook) to see if we couldn’t better approach our communication through the use of New Media. I’ve been using this account to update students on upcoming events (that I know about) for our department and for the Union Activities Board.
I try to friend students with the account, using the “people you may know” tool, a friend suggestor. The account gets friended without my assistance by about 10 students a week. There are currently over 900 people that are friends with the account, but I see this number continuing to grow in a viral fashion as we are able to connect with more students.
One particular event that I wanted to talk about was the aforementioned comedy show. Here were some things that I was able to do using Facebook that I would not have been able to do without a great deal more trouble on a personal website.
1 – solicited student feedback twice when we were looking at which comedian to bring. The first time, we looked at all the suggestions the students had and let them know that either availability didn’t work or price was too high. The second time was to ask them specifically what they thought of Ralphie May. We got several responses – all very positive.
2 – created an event invitation and invited 900 students to the event in a matter of about 20 mins. Through the viral nature of Facebook and social media, almost 2000 students were personally invited to the event. We had 650 students indicate that they were wanting to attend – the venue only held 430; we figuratively had a sellout in a matter of hours with no publicity other than Facebook.
3 – Sent a request to all people on the guest list for post event feedback. We received about 50 responses within a couple hours with direct feedback on the event, both positive and negative. The student who runs the committee I work with (and ran the event) was able to compile the feedback into a brief summary, which he then sent back out to the entire guest list and to administrators.
The beauty of this case is that we were able to communicate quicker and more efficiently than we have for many of our events. I hope we can take this model and implement it elsewhere.
Want to learn a little more about social media? I wrote a short ebook on it for the Kindle. 
