1. T h e D e p a r T m e n T C h a i r · W i n t e r 2 0 1 5 1 6
made a particular decision or acted under
a particular set of circumstances, you’ll
need to consider whether that value really
does reflect a principle that’s important to
you. Moreover, the mere act of regularly re-
flecting on these values will prompt you to
incorporate more authentic leadership into
your work as department chair. ▲
Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes
Honors College at Florida Atlantic University and
senior partner in ATLAS consulting; his latest
book is Change Leadership in Higher Education
(Jossey-Bass 2015). Email: jbuller@fau.edu
References
George, Bill. 2003. Authentic Leadership:
Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting
Value. san Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Greenleaf, Robert K. 1991. Servant Leader-
ship: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate
Power and Greatness. Mahwah, nJ: Paulist
Press.
Kraemer, Jr., harry M. J. 2011. From Values
to Action: The Four Principles of Values-Based
Leadership. san Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
smith, hyrum W. 2001. What Matters
Most: The Power of Living Your Values. new
York: Fireside.
spears, larry C. 1998. Insights on Lead-
ership: Service, Stewardship, Spirit, and
Servant-Leadership. new York: Wiley.
Wheeler, daniel. 2012. Servant Leadership
for Higher Education: Principles and Prac-
tices. san Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
iPad for the iPod you ordered, or we’ll just
let you keep it and give it as an extra nice
gift to one of your friends.” You happen to
know that one of your five friends recently
lost her job. do you then (a) exchange the
iPad for the iPod so that all five friends re-
ceive the same gift, or (b) give your recently
unemployed friend the iPad on the principle
that it may help her find another job or she
could sell it and use the money for things
she really needs?
For the purposes of this exercise, imag-
ine that you must select only one of these
options; no other choices are available to
you. Most people will choose b, which in-
dicates that, when it comes to a choice be-
tween generosity and impartiality, generos-
ity is the more important value. it’s the rare
person who would forsake helping a needy
friend in the name of utter impartiality.
conclusion
Your prioritized list of values is your entrée
into authentic leadership. Place it some-
where prominent where you’ll encounter it
several times a day. When you look at the
list, ask yourself, “What have i done today
that results from my commitment to [one
of the values on the list]?” You can’t
expect each of your core values to guide
you in a decision every single day, but if
you find weeks going by without being
able to think of a clear example when one
of the items on the list informed how you
.swf) provided by the Center for the Ad-
vancement of Public health at George Ma-
son university asks you to make decisions
in various types of situations. The smart
About Money website features a lifevalues
Quiz (www.smartaboutmoney.org/Tools-
Resources/lifevalues-Quiz/Quiz.aspx) that
asks you to make decisions in hypothetical
situations that require financial decisions.
The website www.yourmorals.org posts
several different inventories each month
that are intended to produce greater insight
into one’s personal values.
• harry Kraemer’s From Values to
Action (2011) and hyrum smith’s What
Matters Most (2001) provide a process of
self-reflection that helps you distinguish
between the principles you really believe in
and those you would like others to think
you believe in.
Prioritizing Your Values
Once you’ve identified your five or six most
important values, it’s time to put them
into priority order. Although paring a list
of principles down to no more than a half
dozen seems daunting enough, it can appear
almost impossible, then, to rank that short
list of values from most to least significant.
“how can i tell whether generosity matters
more than impartiality?” you might ask.
“i value them both equally.” The truth is,
however, that although we may believe we
equally value all of the principles on our
short list, that’s rarely the case. One way to
delve more deeply into this issue is to put
each value on your list up against each of
the others in turn by creating hypotheti-
cal situations in which you have to choose.
suppose, for example, you have ordered
from an online vendor five identical iPods
for five friends who are all equally dear to
you. But the vendor makes an error and
sends you four identical iPods and one iPad,
complete with cover, every possible accesso-
ry, and the largest amount of memory that’s
available. Because you value honesty—and
you do, don’t you?—you contact the vendor
to report the error. To your surprise, the
vendor says, “Most people wouldn’t have
been that honest. To reward you, we’ll give
you a choice: You can either return the
creating a social media Presence
for Your department
J A M i E h A Y E s
To our department’s great surprise, our
sociology Facebook page was selected
by the American sociological Association
as a potential model for other sociology
departments to consider as they implement
their own social media strategies. i present-
ed on this topic at the association’s 2013
department Chairs Conference, and since
then i have had a chance to reflect on the
growth of our department Facebook page
and reassess the strengths and weaknesses
of our social media strategies. What our
department has determined is that hosting
a social media platform within an academic
unit or department does not come without
some risk, but we still strongly believe it

2. T h e D e p a r T m e n T C h a i r · W i n t e r 2 0 1 5 1 7
is a very powerful tool for any academic
unit intending to accomplish the follow-
ing goals: raising your department’s profile
either locally or globally and—even more
important—creating a local community
that may eventually lead to retaining un-
dergraduate and/or graduate students.
This article will describe the pros and
cons of implementing a social media
component in an academic department
and provide anecdotal insights into what
has and has not worked for our mid-size
sociology department. i will also discuss
the pitfalls of using social media and what
it takes to maintain relevance in the ever-
increasing marketplace of academic social
media sites.
Advantages to using department
social media
Promote faculty publications. You
can promote faculty book and article
publications, grant awards, research
projects, and accomplishments. For
example, one of our junior faculty
members published a book that was
receiving national attention, and we
used our department Facebook page to
republish promotional articles and reviews
that had covered her book. These posts not
only reached our internal university media
outlets but also showcased this junior
faculty’s work to potentially interested
graduate students as well as colleagues in
her field.
This use of cross media can serve both
the university at large and the department
because such articles can be shared and/or
reposted on the university-level Facebook
business pages as well as other department
Facebook pages (we often share media
materials with other social science depart-
ments). And if a post happens to go “viral,”
it could ultimately drive traffic back to
your faculty profile webpages, all of which
can be tracked using Facebook and Google
analytics.
Manage and control your department
“brand” by determining what is unique
about your department compared to others
on your campus and nationwide (shin
2010). For instance, we offer a specific
urban experience due to our downtown
Atlanta location, and this theme appears
not only throughout our social media
platforms, but also on our website, in
our department newsletter, and in other
ancillary marketing materials. it is also a
useful strategy to determine your student
demographics and to target specific
populations such as first-time/full-time
students, nontraditional students, and even
current and potential graduate students.
These types of marketing concepts and
techniques are vital to keeping departments
competitive in the changing landscape of
higher education.
Look to social media as a form of
“cheap” public relations (shin 2010)
because it is still free to sign up for a
Facebook business account. When a
department chair compares a social
media budget to a budget used for print
brochures, flyers, toner, and so on, using
social media can yield a higher return for
a minimal investment. That said, the great
“cost” will most always be in the form of
staff and/or faculty time and resources
spent on producing and monitoring social
media content.
disadvantages to using
department social media
Be aware of Facebook trolls. The main
concern should always be how your
“brand” can be damaged. And, if it can be
damaged, is the payoff worth it? in fact,
our own brand was slightly jeopardized
in the form of a Facebook troll (someone
whose posts are geared to anger or disrupt)
who used our social media platform as a
way to express disgruntled opinions about
his experience in the graduate program
many years earlier. Our troll was vigilant
about responding in the comment section
to our posts and, by social media law and
university policy, we were not allowed
to delete his comments, no matter how
defamatory they were. As a result, our
digital interactivity with audience members
went way down. ultimately, after several
meetings with our university legal team, we
opted for a disclaimer that corresponded
directly to the main university Facebook
page. Although this disclaimer did not
solve the issue entirely, it started us in
the right direction of the final solution,
which was to completely ignore our troll’s
comments altogether. This method was
ultimately effective, but only after months
of diligence (again, faculty and staff
resource allocation becomes important
here).
more social media tips
for consideration
Assign a manager. Enlist a faculty liaison
to provide oversight to a staff member or
graduate student, and assign a graduate
or undergraduate student to write digital
posts and report on department events.
Be aware that such endeavors will be
time consuming and the choice of who
monitors your social media will be crucial
because the digital space offers little room
for error or retraction (Mcnicholas 2011).
View Facebook posting as akin to
digital journalism. Create story ideas and
develop leads and marketing schemes
that endorse your department “brand.”
When writing a post, consider who your
target audience will be and stay consistent
with your university’s approach to social
media. By creating journalistic ideas and
implementing them from start to finish,
our department has also used social media
to build bridges with other departments.
For instance, we created a public relations
event for the sole purpose of using it on
our Facebook page by setting up a meet
and greet with the athletic department for
a basketball game. A few of our faculty
members were introduced before the game
and we were given the game ball with
signatures from the players. This proved
to be an excellent photo opportunity for
all involved and translated very well to our
Facebook page as a department event. We
later used the same public relations strategy
for the homecoming football game, where
we were introduced on the Jumbotron. All
of this was posted in just a few hours to the
sociology Facebook page and it became a
valuable marketing tool.
Schedule your posts. Be candid, but
always be careful what you post, and be

3. T h e D e p a r T m e n T C h a i r · W i n t e r 2 0 1 5 1 8
monitored daily for negative activity, and
trolls can be quickly eliminated or unin-
vited if they become a nuisance. however,
if you would like to develop a national or
even international presence, offering an
open Facebook page, with all of its draw-
backs, could accomplish that in a fairly
inexpensive and efficient way as long as
department labor and assigned duties are
seriously considered. ▲
This article is based on a presentation at the American
Sociological Association Department Chair Conference,
August 10–13, 2013, New York, New York.
Jamie Hayes is a department academic advisor
in sociology at Georgia State University. Email:
jhayes14@gsu.edu. Special thanks to Don Reitzes,
associate dean of behavioral and social sciences
and former department chair of sociology at
Georgia State University, for reading early
versions of this article and offering valuable
insights into its overall scope.
References
Coniglio, Terry. 2013. “Facebook Basics.”
(Presentation, Georgia state university,
Atlanta, september 5).
Joyner, April. 2010. “30 Tips for us-
ing social Media in Your Business.” Inc.
Magazine, January 25. www.inc.com/
articles/2010/01/30-tips-for-using-social-
media.html.
Mcnicholas, Kym. 2011. “how to use
social Media to Promote Your small Busi-
ness.” Forbes, september 19. www.forbes
.com/sites/kymmcnicholas/2011/09/19/
how-to-use-social-media-to-promote-your-
small-business/.
shin, n. 2010. “Why Businesses should
use social Media.” Marketwired, January 8.
http://blog.marketwired.com/2010/01/08/
why-businesses-should-use-social-media/.
two photos—one for internal and one for
external purposes.
Use Facebook analytics. it is always
important to assess which posts gain
the most interactivity and which do not
resonate with your Facebook audience
members. ultimately, this will help your
social media manager determine the best
use of his or her time and which strategies
will yield the results the department
believes are most important in serving
your overall brand strategy. According to
social media expert Terry Coniglio, a post’s
success should be measured not only by
the amount of “likes” it generates but also
by the comments that follow the post.
More important, if the post is “shared”
on another person’s Facebook “wall,” this
signifies a successful post because it could
begin going “viral.” And having a post go
viral is the goal of any Facebook business
page because this means your “message”
and/or “brand” has spread far beyond
your own individual department “wall”
and moved into the larger digital space
(Coniglio 2013). From our experience, the
posts that tend to go viral are ones that
congratulate undergraduate and graduate
students on their achievements (awards,
graduation, acceptance into a program,
or a faculty job placement). lastly, we
strongly suggest that your posts contain
photos of the individuals being recognized;
otherwise, they may not have the optimum
effect of getting your audience’s attention
(Coniglio 2013).
conclusion
The questions posed by fellow department
chairs during my conference presenta-
tion were very helpful. One comment in
particular stands out and pertains, again,
to the allocation of staff resources. As
mentioned earlier, if running a depart-
ment social media page requires resources,
which solution is available when a depart-
ment has a small staff? One answer is
implementing a “closed” Facebook group,
which some departments have opted
for, especially Facebook groups run by a
graduate student organization. students
must be invited to the group and can be
sure that you post items that encourage
comments and engagement. stay current
in your discipline’s related trends as well
as trends in social media (Joyner 2010).
For example, we often repost from notable
sociology Facebook pages in order to keep
up with the conversation in the field. We
also “like” the posts of other sociology
pages to encourage a communal digital
space of “posting” and “sharing” material.
This is an extremely important tactic
because Facebook has an algorithm that
links pages’ interactivity. This means that
the more comments and/or likes on other
pages your original post receives (when
someone else likes or reposts your posts),
the more likely the algorithm will push the
original post up to the top of a user’s feed
(Coniglio 2013).
Gain faculty buy-in. For any social
media project to be successful, a fraction
of a department’s faculty members
must have real buy-in into the digital
strategy. This means that they will not
only need to submit success stories
from their publications, articles, media
appearances, and the like, but that they
also must respond to and occasionally
participate in the social media digital space
by commenting on posts by audience
members. Getting faculty to participate
in this last idea is very difficult, but it is
highly effective because it provides an
additional space for students to engage
with faculty.
it is important to know the limits and
boundaries of what to ask from faculty.
in other words, gauge who will want to
participate in a department social media
strategy and who should be left alone. Re-
member, not all faculty will be comfortable
with the digital space. This is easily solved
by simply asking faculty members what
they are comfortable with and respecting
those boundaries. For example, we have a
faculty member who is very uncomfort-
able with having photos of himself placed
on the internet. We have an agreement
that if a photo is taken of him at a faculty
function, he is simply alerted beforehand
and knows to step out of the frame after
the initial photograph, thus providing
Comments?
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