​Two-year colleges harness services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for everything from building attendance at campus events to helping students stay in school. But colleges are also learning that once they establish open lines of communication with students on social media, those avenues will be looked to for all types of information, including fast, transparent, two-way communication in a crisis.

In the past 15 months, Atlantic Cape Community College (Atlantic Cape) in New Jersey has employed social media as part of an integrated communication strategy to update students, staff and other stakeholders about an impending hurricane, an on-campus manhunt, two bomb threats and a lockdown due to gunfire.

This article is part of a bimonthly series provided by the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations, an affiliated council of the American Association of Community Colleges.

Atlantic Cape’s emergency warning and notification plan uses a number of platforms and includes FM Alerts and fire alarms, text alerts, postings on Facebook and Twitter, website announcements and global emails. College staff members find that social media tools—due to their speed and reach—can help alert the campus in an emergency and meet the requirements for emergency notification and timely warning under the Clery Act.

A review of Atlantic Cape’s procedures, and those of other colleges around the country, identified these best practices:

• Include social media in your crisis plan. After an F3 tornado wreaked $7-million worth of damage at Volunteer State Community College in Tennessee and knocked out the school’s website, that college began to use social media as part of its crisis communication plan.

“We realized we were vulnerable when it comes to a crisis,” said Eric Melcher, communications coordinator at Volunteer State. “It taught us we needed several different channels.” 

When Collin College near Dallas, Texas, had a shooting several years ago, “we found Facebook and Twitter to be among the fastest and most effective when seconds counted,” said Lisa Vasquez, vice president, public relations and college development.

• Choose a text product that integrates with social media. Volunteer State uses SchoolCast by High Ground Solutions, which links text alerts to an RSS feed on the front page of the college’s website, then to Twitter, the college’s blog and Facebook page.

“One person using a cell phone can hit all sources instantaneously with one message,” Melcher noted.

Similar mass notification features are offered by Rave Alert—Atlantic Cape’s text product—and Blackboard Connect, among others. If your text alert product doesn’t have this function, it’s important that your communication plan spells out which tools you’ll use and in what order.

• Maximize the strengths of each tool. While text alerts and Tweets are short—limited to 160 and 140 characters, respectively—web postings and Facebook messages can offer more detail. Working with information supplied by its security department, Atlantic Cape’s college relations staff members first send out a text alert because of its speed and reach, then share that information via Twitter and Facebook. Next, a more detailed message is crafted and placed on the college’s home page. Shortened URLs are included in the texts, Tweets and Facebook directing to the website, which staff regularly update.

Throughout an incident, such last February’s campus lockdown while police searched for an escaped prisoner, college relations staff monitor and reply to social media inquiries and provide updates.

• Train multiple social media site administrators. You’ll need all hands on deck during an emergency, so it’s vital to have staffers outside the public relations office trained on social media. Atlantic Cape’s two top security officers have been cross-trained to send out text alerts which link to Facebook and Twitter. Volunteer State’s campus police are also trained on text alerts, and the public relations office calls on members of its student advising staff to assist when the volume of social media posts is high.

Be accurate and transparent. Not only will your social media followers watch what you post, so will members of the news media.

• Practice in advance. In an emergency, there is no time to run a message up the chain of command, so prior training for those who will craft and send messages is essential. Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology in Pennsylvania recently participated in a national security drill that featured an active shooter scenario. As part of the drill, the college successfully implemented their social media crisis communication plan, according to Chad Baker, director of marketing and public information. 
  
  
• Engage in two-way communication. Don’t think of social media like shouting through a bullhorn, but more like a conversation. As Hurricane Irene’s approach forced evacuation of most of Atlantic Cape’s service district last year, college relations staffers continued to talk with worried students on Facebook about their financial aid checks, ways to register online and the delayed start of classes. During the shooting at Collin College, Vasquez said that by monitoring questions posted on social media she and her staff gained a better understanding of what people needed to know.

“It helped us with two-way communication...knowing what people needed reassurance about and what they were seeing from the inside of the lockdown,” she said. 

• Monitor social media to detect potential threats or smoldering crises. Atlantic Cape’s two bomb threats were discovered on Twitter, made possible by monitoring tools such as HootSuite, Seismic and TweetDeck that allow users to receive notification when others on Twitter use key search terms such as the college’s name or its abbreviation. While most often colleges make use of these monitoring tools to answer questions and address customer service problems, they are also useful for detecting issues that could harm the college’s reputation.

Last January, students at Dakota County Technical College in Minnesota began making posts to the college’s Facebook account expressing concern because their financial aid overages—scheduled to be deposited into their accounts that morning—had not yet arrived. Administrators quickly learned that technical issues had caused a delay and began correcting the problem. Throughout the day, more than 200 posts were made to the college’s Facebook account, each of which was responded to directly, according to Erin Edlund, director of institutional advancement. Students later posted on Facebook thanking the college for its response.

So whether they use social media to help keep students, faculty and staff safe in an emergency or to detect an impending threat, colleges have a powerful new tool to help them with crisis and reputation management. And, as Collin College’s Vasquez noted, “Social media has really changed the speed at which we have to respond.”

Corbalis is executive director of college relations at Atlantic Cape Community College (New Jersey) and national secretary of the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations.