The Teeming Web
Bob Robertson-Boyd
Capital University
http://www.fuzzycontent.com
Dimitri Glazkov
Estrada
http://www.glazkov.com
Stop fooling yourself. You are not in control.
You have an integrated marketing mix, a family of publications, a powerful content management system and a portal for students, faculty and staff. You think you’re in control. But you’re not.
Millennials now make up your prospective and current student audiences and the alumni you’re most likely to lose. They are many disjoint networks of like-minded individuals who share opinions, ideas, links and interests about your institution on Web sites like TheFacebook, MySpace, Xanga, Live Journal, Bolt, Alloy and dozens of other social networking Web sites. As a whole, their opinion of you has more credibility and reaches more people than you can hope to.
It’s time Web publishers realized that our readers are in control. More importantly it’s time we capitalized on it. Universities are in a great position to use this amorphous mob to our advantage, but only if we embrace the fray.
That means knowing about all the social sites out there. Bob and Dimitri provide their perspective on a number of these sites in a PDF that all participants should download. But knowing which sites are out there; even joining and lurking around isn’t enough. Active participation by university staff and faculty is necessary if we hope to understand our students.
What better way to participate than to bring social networking to your .edu? Can a prospective biology major find out if other bio majors are online right now or visited recently? No? Why not? Visitors to your site will start asking you “Why not” in just a few short years.
Bob and Dimitri evangelize the cause and show an example of how one university might take on the teeming Web.
View the screencast (43:39); will load directly in a Flash-enabled browser.
April 17th, 2006 at 6:30 am
Live from HigherEdBlogCon: How to use the Facebook to keep in touch with your alumni
Thought Facebook was only for current or prospective students?
Wrong.
In their 43-minute screencast for HigherEdBlogCon, The Teeming Web, Bob Robertson-Boyd from Capital University and Dimitri Glazkov Estrada explain, among other things, how you sho…
April 18th, 2006 at 12:50 am
I’m a senior PR major at Auburn University currently completing an internship with the University’s Office of Development (a fancy name for fundraising for anyone not familiar).
Facebook came to Auburn in 2004 and last I heard there are 22,000 users from our .edu domain. It has crept its way into the Major Gifts office where I work because of young people like me logging on in our spare time.
What no one here has realized before and part of what I’ve preached to our development officers is that the facebook is a treasure trove of information about future donor prospects.
Sure, recent alumni and soon-to-be graduates like me may not have the money to give now. But, as your screen/pod/skypecast pointed out, the majority of users will keep their profiles long after they are students. That means all their clubs, interests and social networks are at our disposal to aide in identifying and cultivating future donors.
Besides the information resources, Facebook is an opportunity to establish a giving atmoshpere among young alumni. Imagine a Facebook group exclusively for donors that honors them for certain levels of gifts, no matter how small. Suddenly, giving becomes popular and a whole new generation of donors has been established.
Those are my thoughts, anyway. Thanks for talking about this subject.
April 26th, 2006 at 8:35 am
Todd,
I hope you have, or will, take the time to listen/watch the presentations that were given on April 18. Those were all about alumni and how social networking will and is impacting alumni relations.
There was much talk, in the afternoon chat, about how alumni offices can use social networking services, either their own home grown sites; alumni-specific, vendor sites; or third-party, public sites like facebook.
After our presentation, I convinced our alumni director to set up a facebook group for Capital Alumni just to protect that group name. We’re not sure how we will use the group, but at least we realized that it should be used in some way.
Like you, and nearly everyone else, we’re figuring this out as we go.
The chat that followed the alumni presentations raised a number of issues that we should look forward to. Some participants hoped to organized into a group that could collaborate with the companies that run these public social networks to format and retrieve data on specific affinity groups. That would help you out a lot! Others looked to sharing data between the institutions network and the public networks. I personally hope that technology gives us users/members/alumni more control over our online identities allowing us to slip in and out of social networks of all kinds while maintaining our affinities from one to the next … if we so choose.
Watch for the transcript of that chat. Very interesting.