Social Media Ethical Dilemma: the Admin-less Facebook Group

Case Study: As with any institution of a reasonable size, Grand Rapids Community College has its detractors who occasionally express themselves via social media.

One of the handful of anti-GRCC groups on Facebook recently had its administrator vacate his position, leaving the group leaderless. The ethical dilemma I'm presented with is: do I seize this opportunity to join the group, establish myself as the admin, and promptly abolish the group?

The answer is, of course, no. That would be unethical, and I run the risk of making the problem worse. Here's why:

• First, criticism is perfectly fine - not everyone has had a positive experience and they're entitled to tell the world about it. Moreover, their complaints are powerful in helping frame the college's priorities which ultimately resolves the problems.
• Second, the deletion of the group may be noticed by those who are currently members as a status update, which may spark an investigation which (along with their resulting ire) will be directed at me - a GRCC flak.
• Third, the content on the group is barely-coherent and riddled with profanity, anti-gay slurs, misspellings and shoddy grammar - so it's unlikely many people will take it seriously.

Ultimately the group will go away of its own accord simply because it isn't a viewpoint shared by enough individuals to sustain it. Given the nature of the sentiment, here is a very small chance that reputation of the organization will be harmed by its existence as most people likely find it unpersuasive.

Social Media Case Study: the Shooting of Derek Copp

There's an interesting regional case study in the power of social media going on right now. Last week (Mar. 12), Grand Valley State University student Derek Copp was shot by police as they entered his off-campus apartment to arrest him on suspicion of drug possession. As details have dribbled out about the case, it's come out that he was not armed and did not resist arrest when he was shot.

Social media has played two central roles in the unfolding case:

First, the media began mining the public data on his Facebook profile for information to fill out their stories with (and have thus far used photos and videos in addition to quotes). I've been wondering how long it would take the media to figure out what a goldmine MySpace and Facebook are for gathering student data (I can usually get in contact with students faster through either of those platforms than I can requesting their contact information from the Student Records office).

Second, his friends quickly organized other students and have been engaging in a series of protests (primarily organized through Facebook). The first protest happened the day after the shooting (Mar. 13) and involved some 3o students. I checked the Facebook group students have been using to organize "Protest for Peace" over the weekend (Mar. 17) and it had 1,030 members.

It currently (Mar. 19) has 1,212 members and the shooting has morphed into a protest of US drug policy in general and has spread to Michigan State University and the University of Michigan. The GVSU group has 300 people signed up for a march, and the U of M group has 81 people signed up for a protest.

This will be an interesting case to follow.

Online Reputation Management (ORM) at the 2009 NCMPR National Conference

I recently made a presentation about Online Reputation Management (ORM) at the 2009 national conference of the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations (NCMPR) in Kansas City. It's an organization for advertising, marketing, pr, and foundation professionals at two-year colleges, and the people involved with are really good at sharing insights and best practices (especially compared to other professional organizations) so it tends to be a good place to benchmark against similar institutions.

My notes, bibliography, a short take-away document and a page of links to search and analytical tools to do a brief online reputation audit are all available at grcc.edu/ncmprorm

One of the best things about making presentations (and similarly, teaching) is that it forces you to re-examine your own practices and make sure that you're toeing the line. It also makes one formally think about strategies and tactics which leads to a bit clearer of an understanding of them. As a result, I was reminded that the title tags on our site are pretty shoddily done so I'm in the process of revising them.