November Updates Q&A - Robin Oliver

Certainly, there has been a transition in the management of content on our College social media channels as well as the production of news content, and as we mature the new model we hope to open more lines of communication with faculty who can and will share story ideas for content marketing and social media opportunities. If you have ideas for stories, please reach out to your Academic Marketing Strategist! That said, know that our goal is to create and amplify content that will drive readership as we historically have produced quite a bit of content that simply did not engage readers and therefore created work for our writers but little impact. In addition, we have noticed that our social media followers on our college accounts tend to engage more with the same types of content that drive engagement on our institutional accounts. For example, our College of Business account recently broke 1,000 likes on a post for the first time. The post was a lovely fall campus photo with the simple text: “There’s something magical about fall in Athens.” That is not to say that our College accounts won’t always feature College-specific content, but we will also mix in messages that are more institutional in scope with the intent of driving engagement in order to increase viewership and following on our channels. 

This is a common misconception about UCM’s work. Our work is absolutely broader than the undergraduate audience. While I showed some visuals in my presentation of our familiar on-campus signage, the large majority of our marketing work is external. We are running 70+ marketing campaigns at any given time supporting a variety of goals at every level from reputation to rankings to alumni engagement to program or campus enrollment. We support marketing for all of our service lines, including all campuses, OHIO Online, graduate programs, the medical school and more. We support communications initiatives for government affairs, and we can and do tackle initiatives aimed at expanding external partnerships or communicating with existing partners. We are also open to and interested in doing more of that work. I invite you to reach out to me directly to learn more about our scope of work and to share ideas for expanding our efforts. 

The Marketing Services Center is a new space, coming to the first floor of Grosvenor. It will be under the direction of long-time UCMer Gabrielle Blackwood-Johnston, and it will offer joint services from Printing Services and UCM. We will be putting small-scale production equipment in the space to handle basic printing and binding needs on site. We will also have a designer on site to assist with basic design needs. We hope to reduce or eliminate any traffic to our larger Printing Services production facility at The Ridges. On-campus customers of the Print Shop will be able to pick up completed projects at the Marketing Services Center. The Center will also be accessible to students and student organizations needing quick-turn printing services such as presentations or reports as part of coursework. Feel free to reach out to Gabrielle with additional questions or suggestions as we work on the development of the space.