How is your alumni association using Facebook?
This social networking site (that floats somewhere between Friendster and MySpace), was in the headlines a couple of weeks ago. Britain's Prince William supposedly created a profile on the site and was - as you might imagine - quickly accumulating "pokes" from other users.
Meanwhile, over on the Unit Structures blog, UNC graduate student Fred Stutzman commented on this week's announcement that Facebook will, as the Wall Street Journal put it,
let other companies provide their services on special pages within its popular Web site...For instance, an online retailer could build a service in Facebook to let people recommend music or books to their friends, based on the relationships they've already established on the site. Or a media company could let groups of users share news articles with each other on a page inside Facebook.
To get the most out of this service, Stutzman says Facebook should "pay attention to the new class of user entering their system - the college alum." These users, he says
need something situationally relevant to do. Up until now, there wasn't any attractive, cost-free way to maintain old social networks, such as college friendships.
[By the way, Stutzman on the Unit Structures blog
has followed up with a breathless series of analyses of the Facebook
platform and API, for those of you who are really interested in this
recent development.]
Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but if Stutzman thinks free online alumni directories aren't "attractive," I agree. Many of them offer inflexible log-in schemes, clumsy interfaces, slow searches and limited profile functionality. Anyway, he recommends
leveraging these older users by giving them a chance to refind and rekindle old friendships. If I worked at an alumni association, I would be very interested in using Facebook to connect alumni. College remains one of the strongest bonds in many people's lives - if Facebook truly catered to the post-college new user crowd, it would put its efforts into exploiting old college ties. There's truly tremendous opportunity in activating those latent social ties.
That's non-controversial and valid. Colgate University's Charlie Melichar sort of anticipated this by a week or two when he commented on the value of social networking to older alumni, and then later when he talked about "the friendship curve."
There's a lot to follow-up on, and we didn't even mention the increasingly viable option for alumni associations to build their own social networks using freely available (and highly customizable) platforms like Netscape founder Marc Andreesen's Ning.
So...how is your alumni association using Facebook?
