Chelsea Pfund is a graduate student in the master’s of writing and book publishing program, which runs the university’s publishing house. Portland State’s Ooligan Press publishes print books and has a website and blog. It also has a Twitter account and a Facebook page. But Pfund was at the university’s latest social media event, the Tweetup on Feb. 29, to promote another university social media site, the College of Liberal Arts and Science’s Facebook page.
“I just want to inform students that the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences encompasses a lot of majors and most people don’t know that they belong to CLAS. So we’re trying to get out there and promote community and get news and events out,” she said over the din of a popular R&B dance track and cracking pool balls in the Smith Memorial Student Union game room. “I met Christian a while ago when he was helping to set up our Facebook page.”
Christian Ray Anciette is the university’s social media specialist who organized the Tweetup event as well as its two predecessors. A recent graduate of PSU, he works for the Office of University Communications which is responsible for university marketing, advertising and branding. Anciette runs the university’s primary social media sites, helps university organizations set up their sites, and promotes the various university departments and organizations on the pdx.edu website. He sees social networking as indispensable to marketing portfolios of any modern higher learning institution.
“Social media is not an option anymore for colleges and universities to reach out to students,” Anciette said. More traditional mediums of communication, like brochures and websites, are insufficient to connect with the institution’s core demographic, he explained. “That’s not working anymore, from a marketing perspective and recruitment standpoint.”
Tweetup events are held for PSU students and focus on the creation of community within the institution and across departments rather than recruitment. By way of example, Pfund explained that CLAS can connect students across curricula within the college and inform them of events and scholarships that might interest chemistry and communication majors alike.
“Maybe you’re interested in English but there’s also an anthropology lecture you’d love to go to,” Pfund said, citing a specific example of how cross-curricular communications enable students to take more from their university experience.
It’s easy to see how electronic social networking facilitates this broader engagement of individual students in university communities. If a student “Likes” the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Facebook page, that student will get the postings from the page and can then post their own thoughts on the page. Right now on the CLAS page there is an announcement pertaining to a “flash fiction” contest and a link to last year’s winning entry; information about an upcoming lecture on the history and future of college research papers; and photos of students working in the Science Research and Teaching Center.
Julie Smith, director of marketing for PSU, manages the university’s “brand.” Her responsibilities include PSU’s logo and use of school colors, and maintaining the design and look of the school’s social media pages. She explained that student involvement is a key factor of success.
“Our goal is to have every student engaged in the institution. We have a lot of our fans who probably aren’t engaged and we want to give them an opportunity to come meet each other in person, because we know that students are much more successful when they feel like they have a tie to the institution,” Smith said.
The Tweetup is the only event that the communications office puts on and the entire school is invited
As Anciette said in several interviews he gave about the Tweetup events, “This is to bring our social media fans on Facebook, on Twitter, together in real life.”
Considering that every student is invited, whether they are on a social networking site or not, Tweetup simply brings people together. Tweetup has a social networking “focus” but the event entirely subverts the electronic social networking agenda by bringing people together in actual, as opposed to virtual, space. Anciette hopes to put on an event every term. He calls it an emerging tradition, another notion not commonly associated with digital social networking.
Big Town Hero, Pop Chips and the campus Ben and Jerry’s co-sponsored the event and provided food. Campus departments, PSU Athletics, New Avenues for Youth, Google Places and TwinStar Credit Union provided raffle prizes. The SMSU game room provided bowling, pool and video games free of charge.