Should Universities Create Facebook-Style Social Networks?

[Updated May 4, 2008 with links, at bottom, to two other blogs.]

The April 25, 2008 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education features an article titled Colleges Create Facebook-Style Social Networks to Reach Alumni. Since I was among the people interviewed by the article's author, I was interested to see what his angle would be. The result is a surface treatment of a complex topic, but a couple of points are worth a quick review.

The author points out that it's difficult for institutions to gather data and contact info from sites like Facebook, and so some schools are creating their own versions of social networks. In these networks, he says, job seekers

can more easily identify and contact fellow alumni who are employed at companies where they want to work. Some employers that pay a fee can tap into the sites to recruit alumni from specific institutions or who graduated with certain majors.

This is a growing function for online networks, but is not a new service; online employment systems are finally maturing, but digital résumé posting has been around since the 1980s. A company called eProNet broke this ground first, but was fatally ahead of its time. While eProNet kept member schools' alumni résumés in a database, only eProNet could access the records, since the web hadn't been invented yet. They performed applicant matching searches for employers and returned printed copies of the results.

An annoying aspect of online networks as recruiting platforms is the relentless tide of headhunters trying to infiltrate closed alumni groups. Caltech verifies the alumni status of every person trying to join its official group on LinkedIn, and rejects between 20 and 40 bogus applicants per month. These are corporate recruiters trying to gain a leg up on the competition. Unless alumni associations make a conscious decision to provide non-alumni with group access, this is an aspect of online networks that university staff need to keep in mind.

Back to the Chronicle. Some additional thoughts:

• The article equates alumni events with online communities as a proxy for alumni engagement. One can argue that "the more people who sign up, the better the result," but it's a non-sequitur to say that your online community with 10% of alumni registered is twice as effective as events, which attract 5% of alumni. They are different behaviors with different drivers and outcomes.

• Describing the heroic efforts of Elon College to build a campus-wide, private Facebook-like site from the ground up, the Chronicle quotes an Elon administrator as saying that because the site has launched, "There really aren't any ongoing costs." Users and web developers realize the importance of updating not only content, but functionality as well. If college leaders think the site is "free" because it's "done" and they're not paying annual fees to a software company, someone should point out that users join and abandon social sites faster than developers can update them. There are, absolutely, ongoing costs. All sites are works in progress.

• It was gratifying to see the article acknowledge a point that Caltech's Liz Allen and I first made in 2006, but which has only grudgingly gained acceptance, that

alumni directors...see the restrictive nature of the social-networking sites offered by colleges as a major drawback.

The University of Southern California's Scott Mory is right on track with his advice that schools should "stay connected with current and former students through Web sites those people already use..."

• Finally, Elon's assistant vice president Daniel J. Anderson is quoted as saying that "the jury is still out" on how much the college's private social network site will be used. That's probably true, but it's more important to realize that with online services, the jury will always be out. There's never a "final decision" on what site, or which type of service, will work for the long-term.

Disclaimer: Despite what the article claims, I swear I did not tell the reporter that "social networking is definitely hot."

The article can be found in the print version of the Chronicle of Higher Education, in volume 54, issue 33, on page A18, or online here:

Colleges Create Facebook-Style Social Networks to Reach Alumni

[Update May 4, 2008:] Critique of the CHE article via Swift Kick Central

and

Conservative blog Phi Beta Cons mentions the CHE article too

Comments

[Charlie Melichar]

I with you on this and agree that Mory has it right. There are enough social networking sites out there already and all the niche sites, in my opinion, are just creating more noise (and passwords for people to remember). People are forming social networks because they have a desire to reach out, discover, and form community around some set of ideas or affinities. Narrowly cast sites limit a user's ability to do so.

It's kind of like the difference between a strip mall (individual sites with limited offerings) and a flea market (a big tent where you may find people and items you didn't know you were looking for). Hey... I should use that!

BTW, I know you meant to say that social networking is definitely "the bee's knees" rather than "hot."

[Shannon Mouton]

I concur with Andy, Liz and Scott. Let the experts do what they do best, tech gurus and geeks (I mean that as a term of respect) around the world are developing and launching social networks almost weekly. They are constantly monitoring and upgrading functionality, bells & whistles. This is what they do, let them do it; most do an exceptional job and offer great services. Our constituents are finding, joining and participating in these social networks, with or without us. It seems our resources would be better spent doing what we do best, the majority of which is on the ground programming, and encouraging our alumni to participate in a few select sites, in which we will have a strong presence.

[Bradjward]

On the topic of finding out what alumni are already on Facebook, etc., I am reminded of our short conversation on using Rapleaf:
http://squaredpeg.com/index.php/2008/02/05/rapleaf-wants-to-help-web-20-you/

I had a chance to browse their API and it seems pretty powerful:
http://www.rapleaf.com/developer

[Matt Brandon]

Andy, I have always enjoyed your posts here, and wanted to expand on a nearly-direct quote from me in the article, and ask additional questions. I do realize that you don't have time to respond to every email you get for Alumni Futures.

I am the person who expressed satisfaction with LC's online community having attracted more than 2,300 registered users, but I did not make any qualitative correlation between those expressions of engagement compared to engagement that results from event participation. In point of fact, the online community is a primary tool for driving alumni to those events.

An important issue that didn't get covered in the article was related to usage patterns in online communities.

The article omitted the statistical support I gave to express why OUR online community usage is, to me, an indicator of engagement (I think I stated that it justified the cost). I found that a healthy number of alumni actually returned and clicked-through more than 20 pages during the average visit (more than eight minutes). With one page-visit being the more frequently-occuring number of click-throughs, I was shocked to see that 20+ was our second-highest frequency. I do consider this an indicator of engagement, but more importantly, it begged the question: do we have a viable definition of engagement?

I know, of course, that there is a movement underway to bring clarity to this issue, but as an active participant in that discussion, I am still not sure it can be pinned down neatly and concisely. Ultimately, my questions are:
What is engagement?
And presuming that all engagement is NOT equal, what would a scale of relative engagement look like? What types of activities indicate stronger engagement?
What is the impact of frequency of participation, type of participation, progression in participation (extreme poles being something like "outright dissatisfaction with institution" and "participates in more than 80 percent of all engagement activities offered to that individual") on a person's engagement score?
Is giving to the college (low-level Annual Fund, but with strong persistence, for example) automatically a stronger indicator of engagement than regular event or online community participation? If it is, we aren't talking about engagement, we're talking about financial value to the institution. I hope they are different.
I know this has become a ramble, but if we're going to argue that different behaviors and their corresponding outcomes can't be compared, I would like to hear more about this.

I am very interested in this topic and wanted to honestly pursue more in-depth answers. Thanks for your time.

Matt Brandon
Associate Vice President for Alumni Relations
Lynchburg College

[Mike Smullen]

As far as I can tell, it's all a question of integration. iModules, our online community vendor, is slowly groping towards the idea of using iframes to clip a previously existing Facebook, mySpace and LinkedIn account to their own site without destroying or dethroning either. The theory is that while they are the best at what they do, we are the best at what we do. Parallel roads intersecting.

In my opinion, it's all predictive searching in the upcoming years, coupled with more advanced predictive tagging.

Assistant Director
Kean University Alumni Relations