Higher education, social media and an era of emergencies: Tools for managing communication minefields

The start of the 21st century may go down in history as having been defined by crises, with populations facing rises in natural disasters, disease outbreaks, terror attacks and other emergency issues. Institutions of higher education are not immune. They have had to handle increasing numbers of natural and human-made crises, including hurricane evacuations, school shootings and violent political and racial protests. As a result, higher-education communicators have to navigate some tricky terrain, where spoken or printed missteps may threaten lives and the health of institutions. To do their jobs well, they need the sort of situational-awareness building and evidence of crowd sentiment that can come from social media scanning and social listening. At the same time, however — in part because of the proliferation of social media — communication duties have exploded, leaving teams with little time to stay abreast of the many issues that may appear online. Ideally institutions would increase staffing to meet this need, but tight budgets often make this difficult. This paper looks at tools and techniques — including crowdsourcing through virtual operations support teams — which may help communicators on a budget stay informed as they navigate communication minefields.