Online Networks: A New Tool for Alumni Relations
In the following essay, the authors
- present a new challenge for alumni organizations, the public social network;
- propose a simple definition of “alumni networks” for the purpose of this discussion;
- describe their own fledgling efforts to explore the relationship between alumni networks and other online networks;
- introduce simple network dynamics;
- discuss the balance between private and public networks; and
- propose a reason for collaboration among alumni organizations in this arena.
Are Third-Party Online Social Networks a Threat to Alumni Online Communities?
Alumni Associations have traditionally thrived by isolating the alumni experience from everyday living. We highlight the traditions and activities unique to our campuses; we invite graduates to reunion with their classmates, to travel with fellow alumni, to form local clubs and chapters centered on their common bond, and our publications and web sites are branded with our campus images and traditions. These practices reinforce the idea that the alumni community is exclusive.
Naturally, alumni professionals react defensively toward third-party social and business networking web sites such as LinkedIn, Tribe, Friendster and Classmates. These sites, with their inclusive “anyone can join” approach, seem to be co-opting the online activities of our alumni, in spite of our efforts to drive users to our own sites. And some, such as Facebook, attempt to mimic the exclusivity of alumni sites by requiring a .edu email address before a user can affiliate with a particular school.
Meanwhile, alumni community software vendors have warned alumni professionals that third party sites are co-opting their alumni and that we should develop our own tools to keep alumni where they belong – in the alumni-only world of our own electronic communities.
A recent survey of new college graduates claims that “Social networking is a dominant new trend, replacing many traditional avenues for entertainment and the sharing of information. There is a big shift away from alumni networks, supplanted by significant gains in social networking sites and the use of instant messaging. In fact, only 32 percent of respondents indicated they would seek out alumni for social purposes, down from a high of 70 percent in 2003. Conversely, visits to social networking sites have grown by 30 percent among frequent visitors.”
We propose that third party social and business networking sites are potential partners for alumni organizations. Since our alumni are already using these sites, we have a foothold inside them. Rather than worrying whether social networking sites will co-opt our users, we should adopt an assertive approach that turns these well-funded sites (with their sophisticated tools) into allies in our effort to provide alumni with relevant and useful services and tools.
We further suggest that these third-party sites, with their millions of members, are a place where the exclusive alumni community interconnects and overlaps with the world outside our campus. This is not a threat to us; these sites simply offer alumni a service we cannot provide because our raison d’etre requires that we restrict our audience.
The Caltech Group on LinkedIn
We offer first a very brief summary of the practical efforts made at Caltech in the last year. Our general comments which follow are in the context of the following experience: At the California Institute of Technology we had always assumed there is such a thing as a network of alumni to which all graduates belong. We decided to help alumni “activate” their alumni network by creating an online directory of alumni, searchable by a variety of professional fields such as employer names, job titles, industry, and career expertise.
We then decided to help alumni link this alumni network to their existing professional and personal networks. To do this we created one of the first official higher education alumni groups on the LinkedIn web site.
LinkedIn is a business networking web site that describes itself as “an online network of more than 5.2 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 130 industries.” Users join for free and create a profile which summarizes their career accomplishments and expertise. They then seek out formal connections with trusted contacts who they know through work and professional interaction. The user’s network includes these connections and the people to whom they are, in turn, connected.
This network then serves as a source of job candidates, job leads, introductions to other professionals, clients, deals, investors and so on.
When an alumnus voluntarily joins the Caltech group, an identifying logo appears in his profile and next to his name in search results or listings on the site. This brand identification allows alumni to identify other Caltech alumni, to “advertise” their own connection to Caltech, and to use specific contact settings to communicate easily with other alumni.
Once he establishes his Caltech identity, each user has not only his own alumni network at his disposal, but the non-alumni networks of all those alumni to whom he is connected. The link between the alumni and non-alumni networks acts as a multiplier which magnifies the value of each network.
Since June 1, almost 600 alumni (from a base of 19,000 contactable alumni) have joined for free and established their credentials as affiliates of Caltech (mostly alumni, plus a few faculty, staff and postdocs). Their membership allows them to maintain connections within both the smaller Caltech alumni population and the larger non-Caltech population on LinkedIn. Quantitatively it appears that the effort is succeeding.
Do Alumni Networks Exist?
An important question we have asked is: is there such a thing as the alumni network? What do we even mean when we talk about a network of alumni?
For this discussion we define the “Alumni Network” to be
1) Any group of at least two alumni interacting to the mutual benefit of at least one group member where,
2) the initial interaction results from a shared characteristic related to Caltech.
For example, the authors know anecdotally of a Caltech trustee who met two people socially who both turned out to be fellow alumni. After discussions about their interests and plans, she hired them both to work for her technology start-up. This fits our description of an alumni network interaction, because the initial interaction was a discussion about how they all attended Caltech; and that interaction led to mutually beneficial results.
Membership in an alumni network increases in value as the network expands because with more potential connections there is greater access to resources, contacts, and support from fellow alumni. For professional and educational networking, this has obvious benefits.
Network Dynamics
Before trying to measure the presence or utility of alumni interaction, we should review briefly the concepts governing interactions between individual alumni and between groups of alumni. This simple summary should add additional context for readers unfamiliar with network dynamics.
The value of some networks, such as the phone system, is based heavily on the effects described by Metcalfe’s Law. One person with a telephone couldn’t use it unless someone else also had a phone. Once most people had phones the network of phone users became quite powerful. Metcalfe says that the utility of the network increases as the square of the number of members of the network.
Reed’s Law builds on this and makes it relevant to alumni associations by accounting for the fact that in social networks groups can form. This is critical because accounting for groups means that members who self-identify and affiliate by interest or other affinity are dramatically increasing the volume of possible interaction within the network. According to David Reed, the presence of groups in social networks leads not to Metcalfe’s growth in utility, but to exponential growth (i.e., growth proportional to the number of possible groups). The larger the network, the faster its value increases.
Providing for Network Growth
So it seems that merely allowing alumni to connect in a single mass (e.g., being individually listed in a typical online alumni directory) is to miss out on the potential of the network to grow proportionally to its scale. Instead we should enable alumni to label or tag themselves with characteristics they find relevant and persistent to their networking needs. Many of these affinities are familiar to us and we account for them in our existing online directories: class year, house, Greek affiliation, collegiate athletic teams, local alumni club or chapter.
But many other characteristics exist independently of the college experience and we need to weave those labels, or tags, together with those associated with alma mater. This latter group of identifying features includes professional activity such as job titles and responsibilities, professional memberships and groups, expertise, employers, industry or other professional sectors and professional credentials or certifications.
Balancing Private and Public Networks
We now see that by enabling our alumni to self-identify we enable them to seek out and connect with those whose identity meets a need or goal of each person. What next?
Next we should find places where the alumni community connects with the outside world, and then use those intersections to:
• Drive structured data into our databases;
• Make alumni “discoverable” to one another outside of alumni-only communities;
• Show alumni how their exclusive but limited alumni network overlaps with their inclusive but potentially unlimited non-alumni network
So for each alumnus we should provide tools where he can identify two kinds of networks to which he belongs:
1) The “Alumni Network,” the universe of graduates of a specific institution; and
2) The extended “Public Network” of the alumnus’s professional and personal contacts. Some of these will happen to be fellow alumni, but this group includes alumni of other schools and people who never graduated from any institution of higher education.
Increasingly, the first network is available online in the form of our alumni directories; the second lives mostly on third-party social or business networking web sites.
For every alumnus, these two kinds of networks overlap partially. They intersect where the alumni network includes individuals the alumnus knows as part of his professional network too.
An individual’s participation in multiple networks has a cumulative effect which extends the value of all networks. The addition of external networks does not detract from the value of the alumni network; it increases that value.
Social networking sites that allow alumni 1) to self-identify as alumni of our schools and 2) to aggregate non-alumni into a trusted professional network provide an incentive and systematic means for connecting the two networks. To whatever extent the user’s Alumni Network and Public Network don’t yet overlap, we are creating opportunities for alumni to connect networks that previously were isolated from one another.
At this point we check for balance: the Alumni Network must always exist as a semi-closed group. Otherwise alumni status loses its networking value. The alumni organization must maintain the integrity, privacy and exclusivity of the alumni network; but it must also provide access to largely public networks via third party sites so alumni can connect their Alumni Network to their Public Network.
Tags
A useful concept for helping alumni make relevant connections is the use of labels or “tags.” These characteristics are part of the person’s profile on a social networking site, or in an online directory. They identify features that the person himself thinks are important or meaningful and that he wishes others to identify with him.
The idea of “labels” which exhibit our affinities and affiliations is taking hold in a variety of applications under the umbrella of “Web 2.0.” On sites such as the photo publishing service Flickr.com, tags are used to create a set of “metadata” that makes the site useful by providing a means of combining human-powered and automated searches. This makes the site more usable because the tags and their meanings are conceived, compiled and contributed by people using plain English to describe features of their photos that they find relevant.
In alumni networks, allowing alumni to “tag” pieces of data (“fields”) in their profiles will lead to a greater number of connections to them from other alumni; and it will simultaneously create a plain English way of communicating with other alumni what characteristics are important and relevant, personally and professionally. Further, standardization of these tags can make seeking and finding others more automated and efficient, thereby maximizing mutually beneficial contacts.
As an important aside, standardization will also allow us to gather structured data that will fit into our alumni and development databases, improving the accuracy and completeness of these databases.
We identify two types of tags in the alumni networking model: passive and active tags.
1) Passive tags are static over time and stem mostly from past affiliation on our campuses. They might represent class year, department, major, fraternity or dorm – or simply the person’s status as an alumnus of a particular school.
2) Active tags are dynamic and accrue to the user from activities they pursue after graduation and that tend to be connected to professional and career achievements. These include employers’ names, industry expertise, professional memberships, publications, certifications, and awards and honors.
Passive tags are the glue which connects members of an alumni network. People who attended the same school, lived in the same dorm or sorority, or participated in the same student clubs have a common experience unique to that institution’s alumni. The relevance of this shared experience however is not enough to create value in a network connection.
Active tags add a second layer of relevance which generates the time value of network connections. Until the alumnus needs something from his network, there is no motivation to interact. But when he needs to find someone who works at a certain company, who knows a particular programming language, or who belongs to a professional organization in his field, the active tags show him who those people are.
Combining the passive and active tags delivers the powerful combination of 1) shared past experience and 2) connections and resources that satisfy functional needs.
If we equate passive tagging with membership in the exclusive, private alumni network, and active tagging with membership in the inclusive, public third-party network, we see how the two networks overlap, reinforce and enable one another. This is a strong rationale for building bridges to connect these related networks.
Tim Ziegler has pointed out that such tagging works best “in non-anonymous systems” where users are accountable for the quality of the information and interaction they generate. If self-policed, this “friends of friends” system increases the value of one’s connections in a third-party networking site. If I trust my contacts, and you trust me, you can trust my contacts as well.
Using Social Network Sites to Benefit Alumni Associations
We have seen how an individual benefits from connecting his private alumni network with his larger public professional network. How can we as alumni organizations benefit from this?
It is unlikely that any but a small handful of alumni organizations can create these kinds of tools on their own, from scratch on their own sites. Instead, we have the opportunity to plug our own proprietary networks (groups of groups) into existing publicly accessible, free networks that provide the tools which enable effective connections.
One means of achieving the greatest influence on these third-party commercial networks will be to use what author Chris Anderson describes as “the long tail.” For our purpose this refers to the effect that a large number of small, interconnected alumni networks might have if introduced systematically and in a consistent manner as actors in third-party social networking sites. Although beyond the scope of this essay, a coordinated effort by a large group of collaborating alumni associations to introduce branded alumni subgroups on a major professional networking web site simultaneously could influence the role and perceived value of alumni networks overall. This may be a new use for an existing service.
Conclusion
Alumni networks do exist. The next question then is, are they important? Our answer is, “not necessarily.” To be relevant the network must help a member do something he needs to do, either socially or professionally.
As for online networking, third party networks are not our foes; they are potential allies in our strategic effort to 1) provide alumni with tools relevant to their real world needs and 2) garner up to date, detailed and useful data about our existing constituencies.
We should not give up trying to provide proprietary online networking tools just for alumni. In fact, there is more pressure than ever for us to provide such tools – our alumni are already comparing our services to freely available commercial sites. This means that we must exert our influence over existing third-party sites to provide us with data and perform functions our alumni will find useful. We can do this most effectively by joining together as alumni organizations to influence the further development of these sites.
We can best serve alumni by bridging the gap between alma mater and the real world. We must give them tools to link the exclusive Alumni Network with the inclusive Public Network which also includes a measurable fraction of our alumni.
A coordinated and collaborative partnership with third-party providers can form the foundation for just such a link.
Continue reading here: Issues In Libraries
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