Lexington, KY - No matter your opinion on social media, its global invasion of leisure time has influenced the world in ways that most marketing strategists could have never imagined.
Faculty and staff at the University of Kentucky recognized the power of the friend, follower and click-through years ago, and they have quite a few accolades to show for it.
StudentAdvisor.com, owned by a subsidiary of The Washington Post Co., recently released its third edition of the top 100 social media colleges and universities, and UK was ranked No. 6 for the second time. UK has joined the upper-echelon online elite, consistently beating out Stanford, Yale and Dartmouth, as well as its Southeastern Conference peers.
How did a land grant university housed in a sleepy Bluegrass town take the lead in higher education's social media jet set?
While there are many pieces to UK's Web 2.0 puzzle, the university's department of public relations began strategizing in January 2010. Social media chair Julia Meador, a recent college graduate, knew that her friends were on Facebook and Twitter.
"UK needed to be there, too," she said. "A lot of other universities were online, and we weren't. Instead of re-creating the wheel, we decided to join the conversation."
Athletics also joined the online conversation early as well - and this was before Coach John Calipari's 1.1 million followers on Twitter.
"DeWayne Peevey had a lot of foresight when he recognized the necessity of social media three years ago and decided UK needed to be there," said UK Athletics' assistant director of new media, Guy Ramsey. "Most businesses would love to have the kind of commitment we have from our fans. We need to keep them satisfied."
Ramsey maintains blogs for many teams and live blogs most sporting events as well, which fans have come to expect.
"Fans demand unfiltered information about their favorite teams," he said. "I see myself as a sports journalist, trying to get information to UK fans as quickly as possible."
But the area in which UK really rises above its peers is in the classroom. Professors in the Colleges of Arts & Sciences and Communications recently revamped general education writing and communication classes to include social media.
"We want our students to have the skills necessary to function in today's workplace," said UK Division of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Media (WRD) director Roxanne Mountford. "Integrating social media into our writing and communication classes is vital. This is what employers want and what students need."
WRD professor Adam Banks plans to teach a social media course on campus next semester.
Banks said that professors have an important role to play in the conversation surrounding the constantly changing medium.
"We need to move beyond the basic use of digital tools and spaces," he said. "It's our job to get students to understand how social media fits into the framework of society. Even though students have the advantage of being enmeshed in the technology and way of life, they don't always take a step back to examine what they've stepped into."
Banks will be challenging his students with critical questions about the role of social media and writing practices in identity and community.
"One of our jobs as teachers is to lead students through a critical examination of social media, as we do with other forms of media," he said. "Higher education's reaction to social media is a balance between the fast pace of change in the world and the need to be relevant and the slow, deliberative processes of higher education. Through curriculum advance-ment and the A&S 300 class, the College of Arts & Sciences has given us the ability to do both."
In addition to theory, Banks' class will include practical pieces.
"Students will launch a social media campaign of their choosing, and they will be encouraged to use less dominant social media tools like Delicious, Flickr and Mashable," he said. "There will be presentations and lots of practice. Students will be answering theoretical questions, but also exploring and examining social media tools on their own."
The scholarly component of social media is essential, said Banks, because of its sudden ubiquity.
"We really need to chart this landscape and see what we've given ourselves over to," he explained. "When Facebook has 800 million members and Twitter has 100 million followers, you're talking about a fundamental change in the definition of society, how we participate and how we connect."
The political and policy implications for how communities answer larger questions have also changed through social media.
"When Obama does an interview on LinkedIn, we realize that these social media spaces are becoming central to what it means to participate in culture and maybe even the government of that culture," Banks said. "Yes, social spaces are changing rapidly, but continue trying to ask the big questions."