The request made Grambling administrators realize there were no institutional guidelines or policies about using this latest wave of evolving media. With student, faculty and administration input, a social media policy was developed in time for students to stage their multimedia campaigns without breaking the university’s code of conduct or, more importantly, offending fellow students, faculty or administrators.
Grambling is among a growing number of institutions taking a serious look at social media, having seen it evolve quickly over the past decade as the instant communication vehicle for students, teachers and administrators.
“The university has had to catch up, not that we are caught up in all respects,” says Grambling spokesman Will Sutton, echoing officials at many other institutions. Sutton and his peers say social media is evolving faster than most institutions have enough money, people and time to fully use and monitor it. “There are students who are (on social media) all the time, except when they are asleep.”
Indeed, social media now extends beyond Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and includes a plethora of new vehicles, such as Google+, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Vine, Snapchat and Instagram, among dozens of others. Institutions are chasing these new media tools to stay connected with their student bodies. They are finding that social media can be used as a valuable tool for communicating with students, especially since students frequently are connected through an iPhone, smartphone or tablet.
While the proliferation of social media has put instant communications in the hands of more people, it is also being used by those that misunderstand the power of social media and instead choose to use it with less than good intentions.
Jackson State University, for example, suddenly found its president the target of a cyberstalking incident last year from a 20-year-old non-student who was posting threatening messages on his social media page.
