Chris Martin is the vice president for university relations at West Virginia University, and as such she has to deal with a range of publics and issues. Here’s just a sampling.
In the spring of 2012, a crew working on the I’m Shmacked college partying documentary showed up on the WVU campus on a sunny, warm St. Patrick’s day and managed to tape a number of students drinking more than their share of alcohol.
Handling the story of students and alcohol is always an issue on college campuses, but one way Martin deals with this is by making sure that other, more positive stories show up higher in video search results about the university. For example, compare the number of views the Shmacked video has compared to this one of of the WVU marching band on Veterans Day. (As of this writing, the Shmacked video had about 345,000 views while the marching band video was nearing 3 million views.)
One of the ways Martin and her staff work at communicating with students, potential students, and their families is through microsites, such as this one used to share commencement stories.
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