By: Jenni Lewis, Director of Public Relations
The summer is ending and many students are scrambling to get back in touch with their college life. From trying to get settled in their dorm room or apartment, to figuring out class schedules, to seeing what they need to do to gear up to the first meeting for their organization, it’s a busy time of the year. The student leaders of PRSSA at Michigan State University had no problem with the latter; they were prepared for fall back in April when class let out, and kept in touch using social media throughout the summer.
Social media outreach is growing at a rapid speed. With nearly 73 percent of active online users saying that they have read at least one of the 200 million blogs, and 57 percent of people saying they have joined a social-networking site, the PRSSA executive board at MSU decided to keep the work going through the summer utilizing new trends in social media. While each of us saw this trend and knew it could potentially boost the number of services we could provide to future clients, we used it to keep in contact with one another over the summer.
We had people interning in public affairs offices in Lansing, Mich., traveling the U.S. with a corporate internship based in Detroit, Mich. and even people interning abroad in China, so scheduling a meeting where everyone could attend was impossible. Social media had us covered. We utilized social-networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to send messages in addition to our daily e-mails. We constantly updated each other on what we were doing, what news articles (traditional and non-traditional media outlets) we thought were good reads and commented on each other’s status via Twitter, a micro-blogging site.
Our social media outreach wasn’t limited to just keeping in touch with one another either; we reached out and kept alumni informed as well as redesigned our entire Web site. We sent screen shots, ideas for content and analytics to each other using some of the above mentioned social-networking tools. The finished product was an easy-to-navigate, informational, good-looking site that we were excited about as a team. We communicated, built the site and rejoiced in its outcome as a team using the World Wide Web. Additionally, we began to build our alumni database with this strong presence on social media sites.
In addition to ending the summer with everything in order for the year and a brand new Web site that can be viewed at msuprssa.org, we also can say that we are becoming experts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn; add that to the list of services that our new firm, which launches this year, will offer. While we hate to end the summer to head back to classes, we are excited about heading back and entering our first PRSSA meeting of the year with a bang -- a virtual bang that is.