Not quite the worst case scenario

So. The last week and a half has been pretty stressful.

It started when I read Mark Greenfield’s post asking about the worst social media crisis in higher ed. That led me to Jeremiah Owyang’s post about how to prepare for a crisis- specifically an organized protest.

Then things started going crazy on our own Facebook fanpage.

A little exposition. Our university has a strong relationship with another country. I’m going to avoid using the name of the country and politician because 1- it’s not relevant to my purposes here and 2- I don’t want any Google alerts directing traffic here. The head of state (henceforth HOS) of this country was coming to speak at our graduation this year. We have 50+ students from this country studying here now, and 10 were graduating this year.

What happened

So the day after I read Mark’s post, I check our FB fanpage after lunch and noticed suddenly we were being baraged with comments protesting HOS. Comments ranged from what I’d classify as hate-speech to addressing our university president and board, asking them to rescind the offer to have HOS on campus, saying that a Christian institution wouldn’t host HOS on campus.

This actually happened once in an isolated incident a week prior to the coordinated attack. At that time I contacted out PR office and they told me that in the future, because this is a HOS visiting, I would have to report any comments to the local FBI so they could document them before I deleted them.

This was a coordinated attack. They all became fans and left comments immediately, and at the same time. There were probably about 15 comments left within that first hour. Then it went on for the next 10 days.

So… when I realized what was happening, I kind of panicked. I called my good friend and higher ed genius Rachel Reuben, because I knew what my first impulses were, but I wasn’t sure what was best to do. She was very kind to listen to me and encourage me and help me think through different options.

What I did

For every comment, I first of course reported it to the FBI, then they let me decide what I wanted to do after they finished their documentation. I first looked at the commenter’s profile. I noted if they had just become a fan of our page (if they did, that indicated to me that they became a fan just to protest). I looked on their profile to see if they had any affiliation with our school. If they didn’t, and I thought there was a very good chance they were only interacting on our page to protest, I deleted their comment and banned them.

I don’t know if I did the right thing or not. Those who are all about transparency in social media would probably disagree, but I did the best I could at the time.

I will say that everything I did was in accordance with the “community guidelines” I had posted on our fan page about 6 months ago. I felt like that was more than sufficient justification to delete them.

To me, at the end of the day, my job as a community manager is to keep the space safe. Sometimes that means I have to be a bouncer. And most importantly to me- I did not want to detract from or mar the memory of this very special day in our students’ lives. I am so proud of them and their accomplishments, that I did not want these folks to divert attention from them on *our* fan site.

Assorted thoughts

The day after this started I was on the verge of a meltdown. I just felt overwhelmed and frustrated. What frustrated me more is that the protesters were using our own tools against us. Like most schools, at the end of the year we have a lot of really great activities that I was excited about using social media to leverage.

For example, we had 500+ people running in the OKC marathon and were using a specific hash tag, that lots of people were getting into using. Well, these folks started posting their protests with our hash tag! Oh I was going nuts.

I will also say that about day 3 into this, I started trying to figure out if this was *the worst case scenario*.  I ultimately decided it wasn’t. To me, it would have been much harder to manage if our own community members (those affiliated with the school) were posting comments.

But, for the 10 days until graduation, it was a constant stress of checking our page, reporting to the FBI, then deleting comments. Ugh!

Such is the world of social media! I’m just thankful that graduation came and went, and our graduates were celebrated and honored by having HOS come to speak.

I’d be interested in hearing your take!

UPDATE 5-4-2010

So, after I wrote this post yesterday, I was at home surfing Facebook and what ad popped up?

What the what! They’re apparently targeting our university community somehow through this ad. Good news is that no one has responded in a positive way to this event request. It probably helps that our university is in Oklahoma and this event is in Minnesota. This is just another way that people can use your tools against you- so be aware!

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