Colin Wylie on Social Media Storytelling and Career Growth

During PRSSA’s ICON 2024 in Anaheim, Calif. on Oct. 13, Colin Wylie was among the keynote speakers who provided insights to students on how to forge a successful PR career.

Wylie is the social media manager for enterprise leadership at the Ohio State University. Before his current role, Wylie worked as a strategic communicator at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh and Brigham Young University. 

His contributions have earned him notable recognition, including being named Communicator of the Year at the 2022 PRSA WisCOMsin Awards and receiving the Walt Seifert Award for Outstanding Service to PRSSA in 2023. A former PRSSA leader himself, he was honored with the National Gold Key Award and the National President’s Citation.

Wylie, a volunteer leader with PRSA’s Central Ohio Chapter, talked with Strategies & Tactics about storytelling on social media and the transition from student to professional.

What does your role at Ohio State entail?

I’m the social media manager at The Ohio State University, part of our university marketing-communications team. We manage our main university social media channel. We’re on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Threads, YouTube. 

Social media has to be audience-first. For higher education, you’re thinking about current students, prospective students, alumni, parents, donors. We have people on our team who help with content or visual creation — photographers, videographers. A lot of [my role involves] gathering assets that others have captured creatively and then writing copy. 

Sometimes, there’s event coverage and photos. I help support the university president, so there’s a level of executive communications, which I’ve really enjoyed. 

Does the story change depending on the social media platform where it’s posted?

We try and tailor content based on the channel. In the fall, we were fortunate that Ohio State had a Nobel Prize-winning physics professor. It was a multi-channel effort. We were in email and there were events, newsletters and feature articles about him.

From the social side of things, we wanted to have nice visuals, so we had videos on TikTok and Instagram that went viral, which was cool. It was a heartwarming story that people connected with. For other platforms, it was photos and quotes.

TikTok is generally a younger audience of current students. We do sillier, fun, lighthearted content there, compared to what we post on LinkedIn. 

How do you facilitate collaboration among all the social media accounts from various Ohio State departments — academic programs, athletic teams, etc.?

We have our main marketing office, but all the academic colleges do their own thing. I’ve tried to develop an open invitation to anyone who’s doing social media [at the school] to be part of our community. We do regular meetings. We send out regular newsletters, regular touchpoints. 

We try to give resources and empower all the individuals running — I think probably over 2,000 Ohio State accounts — across all the different channels. There’s a lot. 

We don’t want to dictate what they’re sharing. But we do have brand standards from a university perspective. And we encourage brand standards to be followed. We have an application process and an audit process where we try and know what’s out there, so there’s not a million accounts being created every day.

Part of that application process is asking individuals who want to start, say, a new LinkedIn or Instagram account: “First, do you have the resources? Do you have visuals, if it’s a visual platform?”

But then, in addition to that: “Do you feel you have the time and ability to do it?” We don’t try and discourage anyone, but to help them understand, “Is this the right platform for you?”

It’s very difficult to run six different [social media] channels effectively. And so we encourage them: “Why don’t you focus on this for a period of time, and then we can expand as we go on?”

How should PR practitioners evolve their personal brands as they transition from student to new professional? 

Your brand is going to shift based on your experience. As a student, I was interested in certain industries, certain areas within PR and communications. But as I learned more and did informational interviews, I realized that wasn’t the path I wanted to take. 

My brand shifted as time went on, based on what I think I’m good at [and] what my value proposition is. When you are a student, the things that you’ve learned from PRSA and PRSSA can make a huge impact in how you portray yourself as a young professional. 

How important is a social media presence for a PR pro’s brand?

A social media presence is super important to your brand. I work full time in social media, but even as a student, I was focused on being engaged with PR professionals, communications professionals [and] other organizations [on social media], and brands whose practices I aspired to adopt. 

Make sure that you are not showing all your personal life. As a student, and as a professional, make sure that what you’re sharing on social media is not going to put you in a bad situation when you’re in a job interview. Try to show a strong version of yourself.

Every young professional should be on LinkedIn, X or maybe Instagram, trying to show things they’re learning and to capture that visually.