New media officer monitors Dal’s online reputation
More universities becoming social network savvy
(0)Ryan McNutt spends much of his workday surfing the Internet and browsing social networking sites such as Facebook.
For him, it’s all work. He has to monitor Dalhousie University’s World Wide Web reputation. As the university’s new media officer, McNutt is responsible for finding out what online communities are saying about Dal and deciding how or if the administration should respond.
He receives more than 120 e-mails a day, most from services that alert him every time the word “Dalhousie” appears on a web page, from personal blogs to news websites.
“Good or bad, we want to know what the world is saying about Dalhousie,” he says. “Despite the use of the word 'officer' in my name, I don’t get a badge, unfortunately.”
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Ryan McNutt, Dal’s new media officer, helps the university communicate with students online. (Photo: Katie May)
Dal communications and marketing added the new media position in January after a Facebook group popped up in July 2007 that alleged the university kills puppies for research. In late November that year, someone anonymously created and e-mailed a YouTube video to students that used a pornographic movie soundtrack to suggest a Dal engineering professor was selling his family for sex.
Before the university launched a public relations campaign to counter the online attacks, many Dal marketing employees had never even heard of Facebook, while many of the school’s 15,000 students are site members.
“Both of those situations, they opened up a lot of eyes,” McNutt says, explaining a lot of his co-workers still had an “old media mindset,” seeing editors as gatekeepers who safeguard against inaccurate, potentially damaging information.
“There’s no gatekeepers online. Anybody can post anything online,” he says. “It would have been to our fault not to do anything.”
That’s where he comes in. In addition to monitoring websites, McNutt also suggests ways for the university to communicate with students online. Dal created its own Facebook fan page earlier this month and the university plans to re-launch its iPod lecture portal later this year.
McNutt was the only employee under 30 years old when he began a work term in the department two and a half years ago, after earning a public relations diploma from Nova Scotia Community College, and a history and English degree from Acadia.
Now, he says his colleagues are realizing the importance of social media in marketing.
“The message is getting across that these platforms matter, in fact, they matter a lot,” says McNutt. “Social media needs to be a consideration.”
Other Halifax universities agree that monitoring websites is important but they haven’t focused on social networking sites the way Dal has.
Mount Saint Vincent University doesn’t have enough money right now to make room for a new media specialist job, says Robyn McIsaac, the school’s director of public affairs.
“We’re looking at a year where we have a decline in enrolments and we’re not looking at adding any new positions at this point. But having said that, new media is obviously a very important component to advertising, marketing, recruiting students, so it’s absolutely on our radar,” says McIsaac. “It’s probably more of a component of our overall marketing and advertising than it ever was before.”
Two weeks ago, Mount Saint Vincent launched an online game called Head Space, aimed at attracting high school students to the university by encouraging them to share their favourite sayings on the website for chances to win cash.
The university has been advertising online for years, McIsaac says, but it’s only just starting to advertise on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
“The Internet is where people are,” she says. “So if we focused solely on print advertising or transit shelter advertising we’d be missing a huge opportunity because high-school-aged students and students who are in the decision-making mode on a post-secondary path are on the Internet.”
Though students at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) are actively forming several of their own online groups through Facebook, NSCAD focuses its advertising on traditional media, says the school’s alumni co-ordinator of public relations.
“I wouldn’t say that there is a lot of emphasis put on it from the university’s perspective,” Susan Sheehan says. “It’s something that we certainly monitor – we pay attention to (it), but in terms of where we put our advertising dollars, it’s not something that we focus on at this point,” she adds.
“All the universities, I’m sure, are monitoring what’s happening with the social networking sites specifically.”
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