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Queen's University experiments with Twitter for alerts |
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| Written by Neil Sutton, on Fri-February-2010 |
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In a lot of ways, 2009 was the Year of the Tweet, with countless celebrities, politicians and pundits joining Twitter to get their message out. 2010 may be the year that more security professionals get in on the game and make the micro-blogging service a useful part of their daily operations.
Steve Gill, technical coordinator for Queen’s University campus
security, is already ahead of the game, having signed his department up
for an account (@campussecurity) back in 2008. In Twitter terms,
that’s practically prehistoric.
Canadian Security magazine (@securityed) contacted Gill recently to
find out what piqued his interest in social networking tools and the
types of outreach he’s been able to accomplish.
Canadian Security: Whose idea was it to start a Twitter account for campus security?
Steve Gill: I was aware of Twitter not long after its inception and
eventually considered it as a potential communication vehicle for our
department. I contacted Twitter in February of 2008 to clarify a
discrepancy in their online instructions for using Twitter on cellphones in Canada, and then brought it to the attention of our
department administration. Our account was created and first "tweeted"
on in July of 2008.
CS: What initial goals did you have in mind?
SG: Our initial goal was engagement and to provide an additional
communications option for members of the Queen's University community
to receive information from our department.
CS: Who is responsible for providing updates? Is it a team effort?
SG: Currently our Twitter posts consist of what we have also published
to our website. The source of that information is typically a
collaborative effort, i.e. the staff who respond to the incidents and who document the
details. General incident reports are published online by the technical
coordinator, whereas Campus Wide Alerts are constructed and vetted by
the department's administration and occasionally other administrators
on campus as well.
CS: What other social networking tools do you use for campus security?
SG: Twitter is the only social media tool per se that we are actively
engaged with right now. We have a number of communication outlets
integrated into our Emergency Notification System, and Twitter is part
of that multifaceted approach. At Queen’s our approach to emergency
communication is both layered and redundant as we are not relying on a
single means of communication.
Having too many social media accounts to update would require
additional time management in emergency situations, and people seeking
information online will certainly gravitate to the platform we are
actively engaging with.
However, due to the popularity of Facebook, and the recent ability to
post Twitter status updates to a Facebook account automatically, we are
considering using it as well. Plus, Queen’s University already has a
dedicated group page on Facebook where we can post important
information or alerts as needed.
CS: You currently have 371 followers. Is this about what you expected?
SG: We actually tested the system for quite some time before promoting
or even linking to it. I believe it was just last March that we added a
link on our website.
And of course the number of followers does not reflect people who
subscribe to our account’s RSS feed or have bookmarked our profile page
for future visits.
The exposure of our posts is also not just limited to our own
followers, since many of them will retweet to their accounts or
otherwise disseminate the information online (e.g. on Facebook or to
their personal blogs).
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