Guidelines

Here's how to start:

A social media presence can take many forms, depending on your needs. You represent yourself as a person, a project or maybe a unit at the University. Before choosing a particular social media and creating a new channel, it's important that you ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do I need a short-term or long-term presence on social media?
   If short-term, e.g. in connection with a project or campaign, it is very likely that one or more channels already exist that can fulfil your needs just as well or better than a newly created channel without followers. You can go on detective work yourself or contact the relevant staff above to examine existing channels.
2. Is there an existing channel that could solve the task just as well or better?
   In collaboration with the relevant employee above, you can identify if this is the case and enter into a collaboration on a channel that can help you and your purpose. Often, administrators of preexisting channels are pleased to receive input and help running a channel, and you can benefit from the audience and credibility that a given channel has already built up. Of course, you should be critical about whether the channel fits your message.
3. Is my presence personal or does the University/unit/project serve as the sender?
   If your presence is personal, you can also contact the appropriate employee above for help. Find HR's social media courses for researchers and staff.
4. If you’ve concluded you need your own channel, create a brief channel strategy and send it to the relevant staff (see the support page for contact details). Sparring helps ensure your channel is a success from the get-go.
   A channel strategy should at least contain the following points, but may also contain even more:
   • Purpose 
   • Target audience 
   • Benefits of choosing this channel 
   • Challenges 
   • Content (e.g. description and catalogue of ideas) and frequency 
   • Tone of voice and dialogue 
   • Organisation (who’s in charge of daily operations? Who does what?) 
   • Crisis management 
   • Monitoring and reporting 
   • Resource consumption and budget 
   • Success criteria and goals

Multiple administrators

If multiple administrators are associated with a channel/account, they may want to work together on the style and tone of voice. It will be confusing to your audience if your channel reflects many different personal styles and genres.

Am I allowed to moderate the debate?

By nature, social media is all about interaction. You cannot share any content on your channels and subsequently ignore any questions and comments that may follow. Check regularly for questions and comments and respond to them within a satisfactory time interval.

Positive and negative comments, questions and dialogue must not be deleted. The University of Southern Denmark supports open and free dialogue and friendly debates. However, if content/dialogue is offensive, disrespectful, threatening, vulgar or downright illegal, we can delete it or report it to the police.

Privacy policy and confidentiality

You also need to exercise common sense when committing to social media. As a rule of thumb, you cannot avoid having to adhere to rules or legislation on social media. 

You should pay particular attention to:

1. User information
2. Case work
3. Third actors

Meaning:

1. If we come into possession of personal information on students on social media, we need to be aware of what to do about the data. We cannot prevent people from writing any such information to us or elsewhere, but in order to do anything with such data, we need to transfer people to our closed, approved systems (e.g. SPOC).
2. If people ask something on social media, and answering them in reality means that we engage in their concrete, personal case, we should not answer them directly. We should instead ask them to contact us through other closed channels (e.g. SPOC).
3. If you work with a third party (such as a agency/consultant) on campaigns, content, etc., where (limited) access to our systems is required, we need to run a data processor agreement/ data protection addendum/data management policy (we have many names for the things we love!) by the legal advisors at RIO (sdu.persondata@sdu.dk). As a minimum, please check whether this is required.

Terms