When we redeveloped our website in 2012, Public Affairs experimented with having comments open on the blog and web pages. As it turns out, unscrupulous companies have been exploiting commenting to improve their own search results. In the blog post “Welcome to Spam-a-lot” we expressed our surprise in the sheer quantity of bogus posts. Even [...]

One of the toughest parts of developing a social media presence is ensuring your posts are appropriate for your department and the university. Here are some guidelines on posting effectively on social media. We suggest that before you tweet (or do any work on social media), you follow the acronym CHIRPS to ensure your messages [...]

In Public Affairs, we help manage the university’s online presence, including in social media. As social media becomes more popular and widely used, we’ve also helped other campus departments learn about using social media as well as set up their presence. In our conversations with campus groups, here a few of the top things to [...]

  Fun is a key element in social media. After all, people use Facebook and Twitter not just because it’s useful and provides information, but because it’s fun and engaging. #CPP1stday started as a fun way to generate and capture the excitement about the first day of classes. Public Affairs teamed with ASI in this [...]

  When we launched a department blog in Public Affairs, we hoped to expand the conversation about communication-related issues on campus. We knew that would take some time but were optimistic an online dialogue could take place. It turns out that in just a few months, we have had 81 comments submitted to our site. [...]