One College’s Exercises in Taming Social Media (1)

At my last job as a Marketing Coordinator at a US school in Greece, I had all kinds of workdays. Some made me go home thinking I might have a stroke at the ripe age of 26. This was one of them.

It was November 2007. Facebook had been all the rage for a while. (This being the Balkans, Facebook became the online place to be – at least for everyone in our target audience – as late as mid 2007.) I had had a FB account for a little over a year because we had been doing some light advertising to US students for our Study Abroad programs on FB. Still, coming up with a specific strategy of how to use FB to the school’s advantage proved to be more challenging that I thought. As Brad J Ward wrote in his post, there were the issues of resources (my time basically), buy-in (which I couldn’t even think of a way to approach ) and strategy (huh). So about a week prior to the day in question, I was sort of relieved to see that a couple of alums (real ones) had made a group for the school. The name of the group was the same as the school’s name. They had used the college’s logo. They said that it’s a group for students, alums, staff and faculty. They claimed an open entry policy. I joined the group and I thought: “That’s great. Maybe this is all that’s needed.” In just a few days, membership reached over 300 people. (For a school with no more than 500 students at any given point of time – and around 2500 alums overall – we were happy.)

And then came THE day. I was checking out the group and noticed the little “join group” button at the top. That couldn’t be right. I had joined a week before. I thought I may have left the group accidentally and hurried to join again. A few hours passed (in which I did some work). I logged into FB again. I went into the group page. There it was again, the “join group” button active. I joined for the third time. This time I only waited for about 10 minutes. I went in again and yes, I was out of the group again.

My brain went into overdrive. I kept thinking “it must be some facebook bug”. I went into the members list. I scanned through them. A large chunk of the previous members were missing. My thoughts were so foggy that I couldn’t make the connection. I joined again and wrote on the wall of the group, stating the problem. About 10 minutes later, I was out again and my wall post deleted. It was only then that I realized that this wasn’t a bug; an admin was actually kicking me out! Kicking ME out of the group? I am an alum AND a staff member? Kicking ME out??? Seriously?

At precisely the same moment, I got 4 emails. All from my old college friends claiming they’ve been kicked out of the school’s group (you see, this was now viewed as the ‘official college group’). Brain started connecting the dots and I realized that I share something with these 4 people that sent me emails (and other kicked out ones that didn’t). I share the same primary network on FB! Incidentally, it is the name of a country.

You see, the school’s located in Greece. And the student body is diverse. We come in all shapes and sizes and from all Balkan countries. For those of you not familiar with the Balkans, ethnic tensions run wild around here. People have problems with other people’s religions, languages, nationalities and country names. There’s hundreds (if not more) groups on Facebook dedicated to this precise goal – to discuss why someone from a neighboring country is such an evil being.

I wrote a private message to the admin in what I thought was a relatively calm and objective tone. I explained to her that as long as the group has the same name as the school, it cannot practice selective entry policies because the school doesn’t (nationality is not an admission factor). I told her that even though I may belong to the ‘problematic’ network in question, I also am a staff member, and one that is directly involved in the marketing of the school and as such spoke to her from the school’s perspective.

What I got back was rage. The admin was screaming bloody murder in her message. She questioned my authority and my right to be working for a school located in Greece when clearly my origin (and FB network!) is not in line with that of the majority of local students. I’m not easily provoked. I offered her 2 solutions: rename the group to something more aligned with her interests/beliefs OR practice free entry. It took us about 20 heated back and forth messages and around 7 hours for her to finally allow free entry (she wouldn’t budge on the name change…oh yeah, name changing…).

It took our department a week of staff meetings and discussions to try and figure out a way to bypass this and do some damage control. We tried setting up a meeting with the admins to define some ground rules. It never happened. We gave up.

The group still exists to this day. It hasn’t changed the name. It practices free entry. It has somewhere around 430 members (it had 300 a year ago, prior to the ‘incident’). A lot of people have been unwilling to join even after it opened the doors to everyone, regardless of network. It’s kind of hard to go back into a room once the door’s been slammed in your face. The full extent of the consequences of what happened has not been examined in detail.

When the time was ripe, and resources and buy-in secured (about 6months later), we finally did what we should have done way back – we opened the college’s page on Facebook. We offered real content. People went crazy with it. They still do. But it’s a completely different story and one I’ll talk about in the next post…

Brad J Ward’s ‘2013 story’ pointed out to other things that can go wrong with groups due to the lack of control and ease of misrepresentation. Do you have your own FB group horror experience? Share it here.