“Make a phone call or email a colleague and you help one person. Post on an online discussion board or on social media and you help hundreds of colleagues.”
A major pet peeve of mine is the thought that many of us in school communications are reinventing the wheel in our efforts. That’s why I love social media so much. It allows us to collaborate without the geography, cost and time constraints of in-person conferences. (Not that I dislike in-person conferences. I’m lucky to have been to many NSPRA seminars in my short career.) Plus, social media leaves a digital, written trail for others to keep learning long after the conversation has “ended.”
This year I personally suggest the following resolution for all of us in school communications: let’s stop reinventing the wheel so much and learn from and share our knowledge with one another on a national scale. The summer NSPRA seminar and local chapter conferences are perfect opportunities for this, and we’re all very good at those. But let’s up our participation in the digital world. Don’t let the school PR community lose out on the opportunities in between in-person conferences.
How you can contribute to and take advantage of the online school PR community:
1. Subscribe to and comment on the following school PR blogs via email or RSS:
2. Participate in the school PR community on Twitter
3. Ask and answer questions on NSPRA’s LinkedIn discussion board
The discussions are getting more and more frequent. Chime in on the NSPRA LinkedIn group (for NSPRA members only).
4. Participate in School PR conversations on Facebook
Follow the NSPRA Facebook page and pages for local NSPRA chapters.
5. …and anything else I’ve missed
I am partially embarrassed to say I’m not active on Google+, but I know that some school communicators are, including Tom Jackson and Kristin Magette, who hosted a School Communicators’ Chat on Google Hangouts.
What other opportunities am I missing in the list above? What other venues should there be for NSPRA members and school communicators to share their knowledge on an online, many-to-many basis? I welcome your thoughts.
Let’s work to truly build up the online school PR community in 2015.
Do any of your schools run their own separate, but official Twitter accounts? What about PTAs and student groups? It’s likely that the people who are interested in the schools and therefore follow those accounts would also be interested in information from the district level. But perhaps they don’t know your account exists.