Social Media Strategy in Higher Ed

I am counting down the days until the public release of Google Wave.

...but that's irrelevant.

I am still out of a job at the end of September, so if you know anyone hiring a web and social media strategist, please put in a good word for me.

...but that's kind of irrelevant too.

My only regret from the past 14 months with Terry College is that I haven't been given the opportunity to do anything really big and awesome with social media beyond just establishing a presence for interactions.

My supervisors will occasionally send an email out to my department, a FWD from the Dean that says "Look at the creative ways these other universities are using social media! This might give you some ideas for how we can direct our efforts." It kind of sounds like they wish we could do these things, and almost like they want us to do these things. But the truth of the matter is that I have been trained to understand how we're "too busy" and have "higher priorities" than to develop a marketing strategy that is custom-built for leveraging social media.

I have ideas, but the response to sharing them would go something like this: "I agree, it would be great if we had time to develop something like that, but unfortunately right now we just have so many other things that we need to get done before we can commit resources to that kind of thing." You see, we can do these things - I can do these things - but my ideas would be brushed off as non-mission-critical. Which is a mission-critical mistake. After all, when was the last time we ever ran out of stuff to do in higher education?

This lack of innovation will stunt our ability to adapt to trends in the future and since we are already lagging on these social media trends, I would say that the future is now. One day Terry College will need to be more engaged with social media. At that point, I will be long gone because my job expires in a month and two weeks. I'm just a temp employee. Which sucks because I would very much like to take them further into this era of new media.