The University of Texas at Austin and North Dakota State University received separate bomb threats Friday morning, leading the schools to send out messages to evacuate campus buildings via text, email, Facebook and Twitter.
Thankfully, both instances were resolved -- no bombs were found and regular schedules resumed. But it got us wondering: What triggers universities to send these alert messages out?
Gary Susswein, director of media relations at UT Austin, told Mashable it's ultimately a decision for university officials to make, with the social media team standing close by.
"We've got several protocol in place here at UT Austin," he said. "The first is a text message system that 67,000 people are signed up for, including students, staff, faculty, and a lot of parents and community members."
Susswein said that the people registered in the system are alerted with an "emergency test" text every month. For "real deal" instances like today, he said, it's the same practice, only an email, Facebook post and tweet are sent out in addition to the text message.
"Today, our social media coordinator literally had a seat at the table with our university officials as they were figuring out what was going on," Susswein said. "So, when the time was appropriate, we got the messages out immediately, across all channels."
Here's the text message UT Austin students received this morning:
In 2010, after a student opened fire on the UT Austin campus, Susswein said he noticed a lot of chatter going on in the social media universe.
"We realized that we needed to be a part of that; we needed to make sure there was accurate information being posted out there, which is what we made a top priority during today's event," he said.
Here's a shot of North Dakota State University's Facebook page earlier today, showing how their social media team responded:
