Tag

coy barefoot

WTF? Friday: Internet Privacy, Netflix Sharing and More!

By Communications, Media

On Charlottesville Right Now with Coy Barefoot, we talked about our changing relationship with privacy. A couple of recent developments inspired our discussion. One, the possible settlement agreement that Google may reach, in allegations that it,

gleaned “sensitive personal information,” including e-mail and text messages, passwords and Web-use history, from non-secured Wi-Fi networks,the Federal Communications Commission said last year.

We all love Street View, which the information was instrumental in building, but at what cost?

And this news from Netflix and Facebook: do you want your social network to know that your favorite movie is Hot Tub Time Machine? A new app allows users to share their movie viewing habits. Are you on board with that?

Listen to the podcast here.

WTF

Digital Citizenship: Best Practices for Navigating Social Media as a Student

By Social Media

At Jaggers Communications, we’re all pretty big fans of education. It doesn’t hurt that we’re all parents, a few of us with teenagers (and older — oh my!). We’re committed to excellent education for our kids and in our community. We support it in a variety of ways, through contributions to scholarship foundations and in our work. We’ve supported communications efforts for educational programs, tools and schools at all levels from preschools to graduate schools!

Today we launched a pilot program, courtesy of friend of the firm Coy Barefoot. Coy was teaching a class on leadership to area high school students and invited me to speak. I have been working on a program for students on digital citizenship and thought this would be the best place to roll it out with a good test audience.

The program doesn’t dwell on all the safety and guidance parents and schools have offered to kids using social media (although some of that is reiterated as a reminder). Rather, this program helps by providing guidance to students as they begin to transition from solely personal use of social media, to professional use as college students, graduates and employees.

We spent a lot of time talking about managing your personal online reputation and what that means for people getting ready to go off to college, applying to schools or for jobs. General awareness of the tools that exist (besides Facebook; teenagers know a lot about Facebook) and how they could and should be using them, is important.

You’d have to attend a Digital Citizen workshop to get the full gist of what was taught and the conversation that takes place in class, but the students were interested in access to the full presentation, and I thought the rest of you might be curious, as well.

 

Tweetup with the C’ville Media — Tonight! #Meetthecvillemedia

By Communications, Media, Social Media

Tonight at 5pm, we’ll be gathering at CitySpace http://charlottesvillearts.org/cityspace/ for a fun and informative Tweetup — a Tweetup with a purpose. For those of you playing the at home game, you know we tried to hold this even a month ago and there was a power outage that forced us to cancel it at the last minute. That makes me even MORE excited to be finally hosting tonight’s event. Here’s the skinny:

Meet the faces behind the Twitter handles at this free, casual event hosted by Charlottesville Tomorrow and Jaggers Communications!

Charlottesville Tomorrow  and Jaggers Communications are bringing people in our community together to inform and engage in this unique event. Tweet-up with members of the media and the local Twitter community. 5pm — 7pm Thursday, July 12 at CitySpace. This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
We will be moderating a short panel discussion about the intersection of traditional media and social media; how news is delivered and travels in our community. Joining us for the discussion will be:
Join us for some fun discussion, interesting people and a little food and beverages. See you at 5pm! If you can’t make it, follow along virtually with #meetthecvillemedia on Twitter.

Truffles, and Social Media in Education, on the Air with Coy Barefoot

By Communications, Crisis Communications, Social Media

Coy Barefoot asked me what my last, best meal was. I had to tell him all about the amazing dish I had while in Croatia; pasta with delicious truffles. That’s it, there on the left. It was incredible!

Other than that, Coy and I talked about education and social media, online learning programs and more, on Charlottesville: Right Now! You can listen, here.

The inspiration for the conversation was the Education and Social Media Roundtable discussion hosted by Jaggers Communications this week. We gathered communications directors and school leadership to discuss how social media is being used by schools themselves, and by the students and parents who represent each school’s community.

It’s interesting to learn what challenges schools face that are different from businesses or nonprofit organizations, and to tackle the role social platforms play when the school is dealing with a crisis situation.

The discussion was interesting and great connections were made between individuals in those roles in the greater Charlottesville community — it’s always exciting for us to facilitate those relationships.

Something that came out of the Roundtable was the concept of fostering good digital citizenship. We’re fascinated by this and how we can assist schools in creating the programs that support it.

We’d love to host more Roundtable discussions in our community on a variety of topics. What industries or topics would you like to see in a Roundtable series?

 

 

How UVa Handled the Announcement of President Teresa Sullivan’s Resignation

By Communications, Crisis Communications

On Sunday, June 10, the University of Virginia released the news that Teresa Sullivan, a president with just two years’ tenure, had been asked to resign. I talked at length with Coy Barefoot on WINA Newsradio 1070, Charlottesville: Right Now on the topic of how the news has been handled.

The challenge with releasing news such as this is that no matter what it’s going to be a shock. There are going to be questions that are either unanswerable or not available for discussion, based on legally binding arrangements among the affected parties. The decision to hold the press conference on a Sunday morning was smart; missing the Sunday paper news cycle and letting the community wrap their collective minds around the information before the opening of business on Monday sidestepped a lot of immediacy in the need to be reactive. Of course, a sudden dismissal of this kind can rock the reputation of a university and of a community that depends so heavily on a university as its major employer, and UVa should be mindful and careful to monitor its online reputation as discussion of Sullivan’s dismissal ensues.

In crisis communications, we urge clients to share news with transparency and reassurance, and the University has focused their messaging on the future: what steps the University is taking to recruit and place a new president. While explanations for the action are somewhat vague and unsatisfying to the community, it’s likely that very few details beyond what we know now will be revealed.

What do you think about how the University has handled the news?

From C’ville Weekly:

“Around 11:30am Sunday, students and faculty received an e-mail from UVA Rector Helen Dragas and Vice Rector Mark Kington announcing that Sullivan would resign on August 15. Sullivan, who was quoted in the e-mail, said she and the Board had “a philosophical difference in opinion,” but didn’t elaborate.

At an emergency meeting with vice presidents and deans later the same day, Dragas briefly discussed the budgetary hardships faced by the Board and implied a difference of priorities between members and President Sullivan.

“We have calls internally for resolution of tough financial issues that require hard decisions in resource allocation,” Dragas wrote in a memo summarizing the meeting that was posted on UVAToday. She said the compensation of UVA’s employees is continuing to decline, and the challenge of filling vacated spots is “truly an existential threat to the greatness of UVA.”

The Board still has personal respect for Sullivan, she wrote, but indicated it wants a leader who is more bold and proactive on tackling difficult decisions.

“We are living in a time of rapidly accelerating change in both academia as well as in health care,” Dragas said at a press conference on Sunday.

“That environment, we believe, calls for a different approach to leadership.”

Read more:

The Washington Post 

C’ville Weekly

The Huffington Post