Marketing and Communications departments are going to have to decide whether they are going to get serious about integrating social media into web/print/etc and stop treating it like the “mutant adopted step-child.”

But I shouldn’t throw stones. At least Miami and FGCU are asking the questions.

As far as the robotweeting goes, our campus is guilty of that. We feed RSS news into our twitter account (but we also post tweets from real live humans from time to time). Those posts also then feed into our FB site. The funny thing about the FB site, though, is that people are interacting and commenting on those stories. We’re also joining the conversation there. Maybe people are starting to learn to live with the robots.

re: Robots
I think 2 years ago there was a grassroots effort to grow social media on campuses across the country. A challenge to make it work, to see it succeed, to prove the naysayers wrong. This was done under the radar, much of the time spent growing/nurturing such initiatives was off-the-clock, at home, on the weekends, during reruns of Ghost Whisperer.

Fast forward 2yrs and social media has been Obamaed/Oprahed (read: gone mainstream, and proven useful) those who birthed the accounts have had to give their babies up for adoption. The new parents don’t yet understand children or the time commitment it takes to raise them. They want things to work on their schedules, they want a hands off experience, they want… OK, I’ll stop the rant, perhaps to be continued in a blog post of my own.

But clearly the higher ed social media landscape is changing as it becomes widely adopted. Marketing speak and broadcasting are entering the room. Conversation is being replaced by scheduled shouts. The challenge now is in helping the new parents realize that it is more important to do what is best for the baby than for themselves.