Campus Life and Social Media

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 10:19:00 -0400
social-media

In the Office of Student Life, we spend much of the summer planning ahead (something that's all too difficult to do during the rush of a school year). This summer, a few of us have been brainstorming about how to harness social media to enhance campus life. We want to build better connections among students, and between staff and students. We're hoping to supply relevant and timely information about programs, student organizations, campus news and opportunities to make a difference in our community. We're ready to leap beyond static web sites . . . but into what? Foursquare check-ins and Twitter updates from campus events? TED Talks-style videos highlighting campus personalities and issues? Live online chats? If Student Life had an app, what would it do, or enable you to do?

We've given ourselves a deadline of August 15th to get our plans together and be ready to launch. We've taken a few tiny, preliminary steps: check out/subscribe to the Twitter feeds from UMBCEvents (Shannon Booker from The Commons), UMBCCampusLife and UMBCStudentOrgs (Sara Leidner from the Office of Student Life) and CoCreateUMBC (that's me), and see/like the newly created Facebook pages for UMBCEvents, UMBCCampusLife, UMBCStudentOrgs and CoCreateUMBC. There's not an abundance of content yet, but there will be (and SEB has been at this for a while; see umbcseb on Twitter, UMBC SEB and UMBC SEB Street Team on Facebook). Meanwhile, please, help us out here: What should we be creating? How can we/you use social media to enhance your UMBC experience?