Meet a "new media officer"

“Ryan McNutt, the university’s first new-media officer - you can't make this stuff up.” - Ed Webb, blog commenter, Infocult

It’s true, Ed. You really can’t. I get some pretty divergent reactions from people when asked about my job. My friends in the communications and marketing business often greet my “what I do for a living” speech with a healthy mix of intrigue and confusion. Everyone else thinks that I’m a computer geek (which is only half true) and that I lurk around on Facebook for eight hours a day (don’t I wish).

Honestly, it’s not a job I would have expected to end up in when I graduated from my public relations program three years ago. My natural talent has always been in writing, so I figured that my career would lead me to tackle newsletter articles and magazine pieces. And during my work term at Dalhousie University, that’s largely what I did. Of course, that was also the summer that I joined Facebook, started my blog and first began reading up on the rising trend of “social media.”

I had caught the wave just in time. Over the next several months my coworkers and supervisors began asking me more and more questions about social media; less because I had demonstrated an interest in the subject, and more that as the “token 20-something” it was presumed that I knew all about it. The questions only inspired me to dive deeper into this emerging world, and eventually I was asked by my boss to put together a report recommending strategies for engaging in it on behalf of the university. Then two things happened, that you might have heard of, as they both received national and international news coverage. The first was the discovery of a Facebook group falsely claiming that our university was murdering dogs and puppies in medical experiments (you can read our stories on the matter here and here). The second was the spread of a slanderous YouTube video falsely purporting to be from one of our professors. These incidents demonstrated quite clearly to our community that what happens in social media can have as much effect on a university’s reputation as any newspaper article or television news story. In short: ignore this world at your peril.

So why establish a unique position for a social media specialist, instead of merely tacking it onto the bottom of someone else’s job description? I suppose that’s a question more for my boss, but let me take a crack at it. For one, it provides a go-to person for those within my office and in the wider university community should they have questions about everything from Facebook and blogging to wondering how best to get their stories “Dugged” on Digg. Second, it prevents some of the more time-demanding elements of the social media world – staying up-to-date on the latest trends and research, establishing social media monitoring policies – from getting lost among the daily shuffle. Finally, it ensures that when our team sits around the table to tackle an emerging communications or marketing issue that someone is responsible for assessing the social media opportunities and/or challenges it presents. Given how important these platforms are to many of our audiences, that’s a valuable perspective to have.

And what exactly does this “new media officer” do? Broadly, my job has three main responsibilities. The first is to lead any social media aspects of any initiatives that come out of our office, whether that’s providing a tool to our community like our new blogging platform or managing a project directly such as our Facebook Page. The second is to act as a resource to those across campus who are interested in using social media as part of their communications and marketing strategies, and in this capacity I’ve presented to everyone from the deans’ council to the president and vice-presidents here at Dal. The third is monitoring and measuring how social media is shaping Dalhousie’s reputation online, and offering advice on which emerging issues require further action on behalf of the university.

All that said, if all I offered Dalhousie was a whole bunch of hype about blogs and social networks, I probably would have been kicked to the curb a long time ago. A healthy minority of my time is spent on work that falls decidedly outside the social media world, and there are times when other business so overwhelms my portfolio that all the online stuff gets pushed aside for a while. One year into the role, I still sometimes feel as if I’m awkwardly trying to figure out the beat, and though I’m pleased with what I’ve accomplished so far in advancing awareness and use of social media at Dal, we’ve still got a long way to go before we’re where I want us to be.

Melissa has kindly asked me to pop in here at Academica from time to time with some thoughts, and I’m more than happy to share what few insights I might have. Hopefully I can provide something of an “on the ground” perspective from someone working in social media on a near-daily basis. More to come…