Digital Communications on College Campuses

It was very sad and strange to be on a college campus tour less than 200 miles away from Virginia Tech at exactly the same time the tragic events were unfolding last week in Blacksburg. VT was, in fact, one of the great engineering schools my daughter had considered before narrowing her selection to a handful of other schools.

As we sat and listened to Duke President Richard Brodhead talk about all of the wonderful reasons to attend his fine academic institution, I started wondering why all schools, and companies for that matter, don’t have a better system for instantly communicating with their students or employees during a crisis. The technology has existed for years, and by the looks of Duke and the other colleges and universities we visited, its obvious money really isn’t the issue.

The Internet has dramatically changed communications over the past decade, yet many executives and decision-markers have failed to implement changes in the way to connect with their most important audiences, in this case their student body, faculty and employees. Mobile text messaging for crisis communications is a no-brainer idea that every school and company should be considering. In fact, PR agencies and other communications consultants could easily partner with one of the many mobile marketers providers and brand a solution that many companies and schools would purchase.

Years ago at one of my previous employers I helped the corporate communications department set up a similar instant employee communications system based on short messages to department fax machines - years before anyone ever had a cell phone. Companies have always had a great need to speak to employees as fast as possible. In this day and age, there is no excuse for relying only on email as a way to do that.

Text messaging for breaking or crisis information wouldn’t have prevented what happened at Virginia Tech last week, but it would sure would have helped the university alert faculty and students to what was going on and given everyone a chance to make faster, smarter decisions on how to act and what to do.