Social media

The Franklin D. Schurz Library does utilize social media, in order to reach the faculty, staff and students at IU South Bend. When the social media first getting attention a few years ago, the Library created a presence in MySpace and Facebook. Couple years ago, the Library also establish presence in Twitter. Periodically, the Library post announcement of resources, services and events offer by the Schurz Library. The Library also tries to utilize the pooling feature offered by Facebook to conduct quick pools; however, the response rate is low. The number of people in the Library’s Facebook group is pretty steadily, there are not many new group members or loss of current group members. Even with the PR via social media, the use of library resources and services is going down. Hence, it seems to me that the communication effort is in effective.

After reading the Community Relations 2.0 article, it is clear to me that social media plays an important role in maintaining relationships with the communities. To effectively utilize social media to build relationship with the communities, a dedicated social media team is needed. The social media team will develop a formal social media policy, monitor external and internal online communities, engage online communities, and act as first responders. In term of what types of messages that will work best in social media, I will suggest messages that target to the communities’ interest. The messages should not be just an announcement, but one that will initiative discussions and participations among community members. While social media are popular, there are still people who are neither participating nor inactive in social media. As a result, I don’t foresee social media making other marketing communication forms obsolete in the near future.