noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646
DURHAM -- The tweets range from a brief mention -- of course, they're all brief mentions -- about hating gym in school to a quick reference to a report that statins significantly lower the degree of inflammation within prostate tumors.
The Facebook notes mention remarks by Duke President Richard Brodhead and messages about Coach K's 1,000th game.
YouTube videos range from a "Conversation in Ethics" to raw footage of President Obama at the Duke-Georgetown men's basketball game.
If you're interested in Duke you can find all of it in one place.
The university has created a new social media Web site -- socialmedia.duke.edu -- for students, prospective students, faculty, staff, alumni and anyone with an interest in things Duke. The site offers access to more than 100 official school Twitter accounts plus the university Facebook fan page and links to Duke sites on YouTube, iTunesU and Flickr. It also links to Duke's new on demand Web site.
"We're trying to have Duke University communications reflect where the world is going," said David Jarmul, the university's associate vice president for news and communications. "The days in which a university could communicate only through official news releases is long gone."
Michael Schoenfeld, the university's vice president for public affairs, pointed out that "growing numbers of Duke people and departments are engaging in lively conversations through social media."
The new Web site, he added, provides them with "a one-stop shop for anyone interested in Duke to make connections, find out quickly what's happening and engage with our community."
The idea for a single site that aggregated all the different components had been discussed on campus for several months, Jarmul said, and had taken about a month to design and put together. It builds on Duke's already successful forays into Internet-based social media.
"There's been a lot of enthusiasm for this," Jarmul said. "Our Facebook site now has more than 16,000 fans."
Last year, when Oprah Winfrey was the featured speaker at Duke's commencement, university staff sent out regular Tweets on her remarks.
"We got a note about that from a Duke alumnus who was on a train in Beijing and was following the Tweets," Jarmul said. "That's the way the world works now."
