OCM manages Skidmore College’s flagship social media presence and sets standards for Skidmore-affiliated social media accounts, online engagement, account creation, and public comment moderation.

These guidelines help protect Skidmore’s reputation, ensure consistent and accurate communication, support respectful dialogue, and clarify how College-affiliated accounts should be created, managed, and maintained.

Official Skidmore social media accounts

Skidmore’s flagship social media accounts are managed by OCM and represent the College to broad public audiences, including prospective students and families, current students, alumni, parents and families, employees, media, and the general public.

OCM-managed accounts are official College channels for broad institutional storytelling, announcements, and reputation-building content.

If you need support with your College account, please review how OCM can help.

Skidmore-affiliated accounts

Departments, programs, offices, teams, and other College-affiliated groups may maintain social media accounts when there is a clear audience, purpose, content strategy, and plan for ongoing management.

Before creating a new Skidmore-affiliated social media account, contact OCM. OCM can help determine whether a new account is appropriate or whether the communication goal can be better met through an existing College channel.

Skidmore-affiliated accounts must follow College brand standards, accessibility expectations, privacy requirements, copyright law, platform rules, and all applicable College policies.

Account management expectations

Each Skidmore-affiliated account should have at least one full-time faculty or staff member responsible for account oversight. Login credentials should be stored securely and shared only with authorized account managers.

Accounts should be active, accurate, and maintained. Inactive, outdated, duplicative, off-brand, or unmanaged accounts may be reviewed by OCM and may be subject to revision, consolidation, or removal.

Account managers are responsible for ensuring that posts are accurate, appropriate, accessible, and aligned with the purpose of the account and the standards of the College.

Student-managed accounts

Students may contribute to Skidmore-affiliated social media accounts under appropriate faculty or staff supervision. Student workers, interns, clubs, and organizations should receive guidance on voice, content expectations, accessibility, privacy, copyright, and appropriate engagement before posting on behalf of a College-affiliated account.

Students should not create accounts that appear to officially represent Skidmore College, an academic department, office, program, team, or institutional initiative without approval from the appropriate faculty or staff sponsor and OCM.

Online engagement and comment moderation

The meaningful exchange of different ideas is central to Skidmore’s liberal arts mission. Skidmore welcomes social media as a space for thoughtful engagement, discussion, and community connection.

When commenting on or interacting with a Skidmore-managed or Skidmore-affiliated account, users are expected to remain respectful and to engage online as they would in person as thoughtful members of the Skidmore community.

Skidmore may monitor comments and interactions on College-managed accounts. OCM and appointed account managers reserve the right to interpret and enforce expectations for respectful dialogue and may delete, hide, move, or edit comments that violate these standards. Users may be blocked or banned for repeated trolling, harassment, spam, or egregious violations.

Skidmore does not and cannot review every submission and is not responsible for user-generated content posted by others. Users are solely responsible for the content they submit.

Users may not knowingly post content that violates copyright, trademark, patent, intellectual property rights, privacy rights, or applicable law. Users may not post content that is libelous, defamatory, obscene, abusive, threatening, discriminatory, harassing, or otherwise inappropriate.

Users are responsible for removing content if they discover that it violates these provisions.

All activity on social media platforms is also subject to the user policies and community standards of the relevant platform. Violations may be reported to the platform, and subsequent actions may be handled by the platform independently of Skidmore.

Privacy, accessibility, and copyright

Social media posts should follow College expectations for privacy, accessibility, copyright, and appropriate image use.

Do not post confidential, private, or protected information. Do not post photos or videos in a way that violates privacy expectations, FERPA requirements, or College photo and video policies.

Whenever possible, social media content should be accessible, including the use of captions for video, alt text or image descriptions, clear language, and readable graphics.

Do not use copyrighted music, images, video, graphics, or other materials unless you have the right to do so.

Crises, emergencies, and sensitive issues

Collegewide announcements, crisis communications, emergency updates, legal matters, personnel issues, and sensitive institutional topics should not be addressed independently by Skidmore-affiliated accounts unless directed by OCM or another authorized College office.

During emergencies or sensitive situations, account managers should pause scheduled content as appropriate and follow guidance from OCM, Campus Safety, or College leadership.

Questions

If you have questions about Skidmore social media accounts, account creation, moderation, content strategy, accessibility, or social media standards, contact OCM.