Blogging Policies

[Stefan Holodnick]

Hello Everyone,

We are currently looking to identify some of our students for blogging about their time at our school and was wondering what sort of strategies and policies that other schools might have implemented.  What has succeeded and what has not?  We are thinking of developing a "Social Media Release" kind of like a release form for student photos.  Anyway, I'd be interested in hearing what other schools are doing.

[Ann White]

That is a big question, or several big questions. :)

We still have bloggers, and have for the past 5 years. Of course in that time things have changed quite a bit.

A few key points I'd keep in mind-
-Don't expect them to blog too much. Overkill is killer and will burn them out.
-Multimedia is king.
-Hire good people.
-Niche blogging is in.

As for pictures, I assume that anything they post as the school's employee is something we have rights to.

My 2 favorite student bloggers in recent memory-
http://blogs.oc.edu/backstagepass/courtney
http://blogs.oc.edu/josh

[Mike Murray]

Like Ann's experience, our blog programs have changed considerably.

We started with student bloggers "officially" blogging for Admissions in 2006. The program was okay but there was very little incentive for the students to continue to blog. They wrote entries once every few weeks about what they were doing... usually we grabbed different students who were more involved. Most of them worked for the Admissions office as tour guides or desk workers, but they were not paid for their blogs.

The program eventually fell apart from disinterest, both from the writers themselves, but also from readers and staff. It was a canned message that was a chore to write.

We shifted focus after that to have bloggers who, while not paid, were able to trade in an hour of desk work/tour guide time for 1 blog a week. So, if they worked 6 hours a week in the admissions office, they could, instead, show up for only 5 as long as they wrote 1 blog entry that week. This tacitly worked.

We shifted to a microblogging component in 2009 which has been pretty successful, comparatively, but also have several blogs that are attached to specific classes. Those students are only required to produce 1 blog a semester, each, and there are about 20 of them in the class, so it usually spans the entire semester. It is part of their course credit for a Mass Communications course.