When acting as a professional representative of the college and/or a department, office or organization via social media, uphold the same standards you would if interacting in person, on the phone or via email. Be courteous and try to understand their concerns or questions. Obviously, avoid things like obscenity, insults or hate speech. Realize that you may be their primary or only point of contact for the college on that issue, and you need to put the best face forward while providing accurate, helpful and timely information.

Once you've started working in social media, you often find yourself asking two key questions of content strategy: 1) What should I post? and 2) How often should I post? These are subjective questions, but consider the following points to answer.

For the college's main official social media channels, the Office of Communications and Marketing — including members of our student social media team — regularly posts on, monitors and responds to any queries. If you have social media channels, you should check them at least once (if not multiple times) a day at minimum. Basic customer service rules apply, in that honest questions should be responded to promptly, courteously and sometimes with additional details such as links or contact information. Like anything on the web, not all comments may be friendly or on topic.

SUNY Oswego utilizes several social media communities to communicate and converse with its range of stakeholders. You can find a complete and updated online inventory of Communications and Marketing-related social media outlets, but what follows are basic information on popular options and how we use them — which we hope will help you ponder what to do.

Before we go any further, anyone interested in representing the institution or an entity within it should know and commit to five behaviors in social media.

Every few years Oswego experiences heavy snowfall, and the college has established procedures to manage the difficulties that these storms may cause.

SUNY Oswego is one of many State University campuses that have adopted New York Alert, an emergency messaging platform powered by Everbridge -- a global company that provides enterprise software applications that automate and accelerate an organization’s operational response to critical events in order to keep people safe and businesses running. 

Most emergencies that will affect the operation of the college will be large enough in scale to affect the larger community and region. We will coordinate our campus response with other governmental and service agencies. Depending on the nature of the situation, they may be the best source of emergency information. You can also find campus resources for different types of emergencies on University Police's Emergency Preparedness page.

Campus emergency telephone numbers
Emergency assistance, 315.312.5555 or 911

The SUNY Oswego campus is just within the 10-mile zone of the nuclear plants at Nine Mile Point, east of the college in the town of Scriba. Federal regulations require that counties that are home to nuclear power plants prepare emergency response plans for the area within a 10-mile radius of the plants. Oswego County has such an emergency response plan through its Emergency Management Office.