College of Engineering News Room

Engineering Social Media Workshop

The Communications and Marketing Department in the College of Engineering held a social media workshop on July 27 to provide training for 15 staff  members who are responsible for maintaining the social media presence in the seven engineering academic departments.  The workshop focused on best practices and analysis of each department's social media activity, as well as an open question and answer session.  The workshop was developed and presented by the College's Communications and Marketing Officer Janet Gillis and Social Media Coordinator Gabrielle Pata.

Earlier in July (9-10), Gillis co-organized the first-ever Engineering Communicators Conference for the American Society of Engineering Educators (ASEE) members in Washington, D.C.  In her conference role, Gillis moderated the panel session Effectively Using Social Media  comprised of engineering communicators from Cornell University (Dawn McWilliams), Georgia Tech (Ben Wright) and the University of Michigan (Cara Gonzalez). 

Not since the introduction of email has a development "disrupted" the job of engineering communicators like the arrival of social media, roughly 10 years ago. Now a mature platform, (but withe new tools appearing seemly every few months) communication professionals have extensive experience using social media in their jobs, but need to learn and keep up with new strategies. (from the ASEE Communicators Conference program)

The 120 conference attendees had the opportunity to meet with media professionals from the Washington Post, Inside Higher Ed, Science Magazine, and the Chronicle of Higher Education as well as communicators from the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.  In a special session, the engineering communicators participated in an interactive session with a presenter from the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science.