Social Networking

[Your College Here] Wants to Be Your 'Friend'

• By Claudia Linh
• 09/06/07

Resourceful college administrators, marketers, and technologists are discovering that the best way to reach their students—and prospective students—is to speak to them in their own social networking space.

In the past five years, social networking has rocketed from a leisure activity to a "phenomenon that engages tens of millions of internet users," according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit that follows the impact of the internet in differing social environments. In a recent national survey on teenagers and social networking conducted by Pew, more than half of all online American youth ages 12 to 17— 55 percent to be precise—are heading to online social networking sites. What does this mean for higher ed? Simply this: Your incoming students are now expecting a presence of your college or university on social networking sites.

New Generation of Community Tools

"Since students are adopting these social technologies anyway, schools will be better served by delivering to students tools that are just as engaging as mainstream social networking tools, and that are connected to other campus systems, like student event calendars," says CEO Dave Hersh of Jive Software, a collaboration software provider. Jive recently launched Clearspace enterprise software for collaboration, which allows students and faculty to blog, wiki, share files, and instant message (IM) within one interface. "Students will be able to connect with each other in a much smarter and easier way," says Hersh.

Even eBook technology providers such as VitalSource Technologies (maker of Bookshelf) are integrating community 2.0 elements into their product lines. Says VitalSource CEO Frank Daniels III: "[Our] technology is somewhat analogous to social networks like MySpace, only the communities and interaction take place around books." Users/members have the ability to not only collaborate, but to communicate comments, as well. Bookshelf, for instance, enables students to load onto their laptops any number of texts (from hundreds to thousands), annotate them whether the students are on the network or not and, on a central server (as users connect via the web), send the notes to friends in their network. It's basically a Web 2.0 application that can be used from the desktop.

"Students are already massively engaged in social networks. It's part of their discussion environment to talk about different parts of their life. You need to put [their academic work] into the context they're familiar with, and that they understand," says Daniels. In the next generation of VitalSource's Bookshelf (just released this summer) users can rank each other's notes. That way, when studying, users may, for instance, rely most heavily on those notes/highlights that were ranked highest by their classmates, and create their own social or study groups.

But institutions are finding even more ways to engage the already Web 2.0- savvy student: They're using social networking to recruit the new generation of students, and they're using it in all sorts of new ways to keep students connected and collaborating—in and out of the classroom.

Campus Community 2.0 Recruitment

According to E-Expectations: Class of 2007, an annual report of 1,000 collegebound high school juniors conducted by the higher ed enrollment management consultancy Noel-Levitz, marketing solutions provider James Tower, and the National Research Center for College & University Admissions, 72 percent of those surveyed would like to interact with an admissions counselor or student admissions worker via IM. Officials at Mars Hill College (NC), a liberal arts institution, must have been paying attention to findings like this: They wanted to get closer to their current and prospective students, so they decided to do it by congregating where the kids actually congregate— online on social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and LinkedIn.

"Attending college or university is already an important part of the young adult experience, but so are technology, friends, and socializing," says Andy Mrozkowski, webmaster of admissions and marketing at Mars Hill. "So, it seemed natural to have a spot for the college within the normal online experience of our students; their social network environments." Mrozkowski knows a good deal about reaching out to various constituencies: He came to Mars Hill directly from the corporate world, where he developed training systems for top-flight corporations, and became an expert in the use of streaming media for training and outreach.

He is now focused also on social networking, and explains that many schools are beginning to understand the benefit of this interactive type of outreach. With little to no investment involved in setting up a profile page on a social networking site, schools can "push" special campus activity announcements and other communications to their communities in a matter of minutes. Of course, there are always concerns about investing the time and effort to adopt this type of online outreach, and there is the fear that after the work is complete, the students or the general community may not respond or even find the page. But Mrozkowski has forged ahead and coordinated Mars Hill student interns to build the school's profile on MySpace, and populate the profile page with facts about the institution that could be attractive to a prospective student. The unnamed MySpace project quickly took off when schoolmates of the interns added the college MySpace page to their friends list. The school's intranet produces information in XML format which, in turn, is consumed by the social networking sites. "All that is required is to specify the RSS feed and then every time the RSS feed is updated, the social network page is updated also. We use feeds for events, public news releases, and now videos!" says Mrozkowski. Whenever a faculty member adds an event to the school's intranet, it is automatically added to the school's MySpace page.

Though still a fairly new profile page (it launched this past spring), the Mars Hill College page is growing, and instant connections to existing oncampus content and resources give the site enhanced credibility and help it to grow virally. "[We figured that] if we couldn't get the attention of our own students, how could we expect anyone else to take notice?" says the webmaster.

Mrozkowski and his team also dabbled with Facebook and YouTube. They attempted to launch a Facebook page, which initially took off and the school's network populated quickly. However, Facebook "put an end to the party," says Mrozkowski. "They shut down the page saying that their profiles were only for 'individuals' and not 'institutions.' We pleaded with them to reconsider, but got no response."

Clearly, college administrators seeking to establish a school presence on a social networking site should be warned: What can start off as a campus networking initiative can come to a screeching halt when the community managers at the mainstream social networks put the brakes on what they consider obvious marketing ploys on the part of school recruiters and PR folk.

The truth is, each of the commercial social networks has its own standards of what is considered appropriate user-generated content and what seems like a school's effort to grow its own networks. Generally, school profiles created by students stand the test of time, but when such profiles come directly from school administrators, they are flagged for investigation—and often are removed.

Admissions Counselor Nick Venturella at Wisconsin's Edgewood College (another small liberal arts institution) has, from his own personal experience, always understood the benefits of social networking websites. Venturella is a professional musician and, like most of his musician colleagues, he has been virally marketing his music on MySpace since the site launched. He introduced the idea of similar viral marketing efforts to the higher-ups in his department, and with support he was able to marry his social networking experience to his admissions background.

Says Venturella: "The basic macrolevel idea of creating the Edgewood College MySpace page was to stay connected to the campus community, and build and maintain relationships with traditional-aged college students and prospective students who are utilizing this kind of technology anyway, in order to stay connected, build, and maintain relationships with their peers."

Today, many schools are starting to support the idea of students, faculty, and staff being active on social networks. Although college and university staffers are in the minority on this front, many are starting to see the value in this type of networking. In fact, many now have their own personal pages, says Mars Hill's Mrozkowski.

And according to Venturella, "We figured if we were to use a social networking site like MySpace, and approach it in an appropriate, focused way, utilizing the five Edgewood College core values as guiding principles—truth, justice, community, partnership, and compassion— the college could benefit from the relationships it builds and maintains through the online community. It would thus become more of an integrated extension of the Edgewood College offline community. Then, through users' participation on the social networking site, it could become an additional recruitment tool."

Adds Mrozkowski, "In short, we are already their friends and they are ours, so why not make it official?"

Mars Hill continues to have its student interns access the school's MySpace profile to perform the occasional update. But Mrozkowski and Communication Director Mike Thornhill also have administrative access to the MySpace page; they help the interns oversee the sites. "The internet and web devices are becoming ubiquitous in everyone's lives, and virtually every new faculty member we've hired in the past couple of years has come with web pages of his or her own," notes Mrozkowski. He adds that if current faculty and staff join in the institutional initiative, he imagines the school's social networks will grow "at a blistering rate."

With the Good, Comes the Bad

As the new generation of students enters school expecting forms of online social networking, offline social networking is sure to take a hit, say campus pros. "I see [online social networking] replacing a lot of the face-to-face contact between students and staff, and that is unfortunate," says Mrozkowski. Virtual tours and video blogs from admissions counselors are starting to replace a lot of that face-to-face interaction, he admits. "On the positive side, we have had the opportunity to reach students who may never have thought about Mars Hill College, and each one who decides to attend makes the project worthwhile," he says.

There is also the issue of quality versus quantity: Not just anyone can be part of these institution-managed social networks, so many of the website administrators filter who legitimately can be admitted to the "friends" list (generally limited to prospective and current students). Because Edgewood College follows the mainstream online social networking models of filtering, its profile views aren't as large as other schools. But "Our focus is only on connecting with current and prospective students, and in that respect we have been successful," says Venturella. "I'm working on a metric for measuring level of site visitor engagement as well as effectiveness of the site; currently, we measure click-throughs, number of 'friends' and Edgewood College-related groups, and quality of content—positive, negative, or indifferent.

"Traditional-aged college students and prospective students know when they're being marketed to, and they don't always take too kindly to groups or organizations that try to use this kind of ruse to market to them," explains Venturella. "This is why we are very up-front in 'About Me' and 'Who I'd Like to Meet' about why we put this social networking site together. I also write brief, informal, informational blogs at least once a month. We have tried to keep it fairly light and fun, and we link the blog to the Edgewood College Facebook account so students can read the blogs from either site. We're definitely focused [on giving out information and acquiring friends]. And I think our MySpace friends appreciate that kind of honesty."

On the other hand, Venturella says, "I don't see social networking drastically changing the way we communicate with students, prospective students, and faculty/staff. I believe it will just become more widely used as a standard and expected communication tool. Those institutions that will get the most out of it will be those that adapt to it, use it, and are able to successfully integrate it into their general communications and marketing plans."

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