alumni futures

The Death of Email: 4 Implications for Higher Education

[Updated 13 October, 2009: 10 Reasons Email isn't Replacing Social Media]

[Updated 11 October, 2009: Why Email No Longer Rules... via Wall St. Journal - may require subscription]

[Updated 30 September, 2009: University of Nevada Eliminates Student E-Mail]

Most of us say we get "too much email." We wish it would just go away. But email never goes away. Or does it?

Email is going away. Slowly but steadily email is losing its pre-eminent position as the standard means of electronic communication and is being replaced by multiple tools:

• Text messaging (SMS) allows us to send a private message to one or more friends from our "phone."  
• Microblogging (e.g., Twitter in its current form) provides a platform for short updates and direct messages to those who opt in to read them.
• The Facebook newsfeed (fed by status updates, Page postings, application usage, group discussions and even photo albums) and LinkedIn group discussions give us a way to converse on topics of interest to us and to our "connections."
• Instant Messaging (Chat) gives us an always-on channel for friends, family and co-workers. And it's embedded now into other services (like Facebook or Google apps) and easily supports video. 

Still not convinced that email is morphing into many other things? Consider Google Wave's potential to change how we write and read the messages formerly reserved for old fashioned email. According to Gizmag, for example, Google Wave

combines the strengths of e-mail with the immediacy of instant messaging and the collaborative power of social networking – and wraps that all up into a killer web application that can then be embedded into any web page or used as a private communication system.

Click image to see early version of Google Wave software

Last fall I read that Boston College would no longer provide student email accounts. College officials, the article said,

realized that the students already had established digital identities by the time they entered college, so the new email addresses were just not being utilized. The college will offer forwarding services instead. Starting next year, freshmen enrolled at Boston College won't be given an actual email account...just an email address [that] will simply forward mail to the students' already established inbox, be it Gmail, Windows Live Mail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, or whatever else they may be using.

Ignoring for a moment that there might yet be good reasons to provide email accounts, think about this report from Nielsen: social networking has surpassed email usage as measured by time spent online.

What are the implications? Based on comments on ReadWriteWeb you might think the biggest implication is that Boston College students would lose their access to discounts at the local movie theater, which emails discount coupons to students. But there are bigger things to consider:

1. All those alumni email addresses we've worked so hard to collect will be useless for communicating with our alumni. We need to start using alternative channels and tracking the changes in our constituents' communication preferences.

2. Web-based registration pages will die. No more filling out a form to "sign up." Our digital identity will follow us across the internet and identify us automatically as we use "social-enabled" services.

3. We will have to change our definition of "lost alumni" (special thanks to Mike Teskey of Reed College for pointing this out). I believe we'll also need to rethink how we define "contact."

4. Finally, we'll need to make online content and interactivity portable so people can "take us with them" wherever they spend their time online (hint: that doesn't mean on our own web sites).

So instead of asking whether to provide email accounts, we need to ask whether students and alumni tomorrow will be using email at all.

Skeptical? Leave a comment.

NOTE: Alumni Futures is taking a break until the end of August or so.

Put Alumni Needs First: Best Practice for LinkedIn Alumni Discussions

[Updated 4 December, 2009: 8 Tips for Managing LinkedIn Groups via Mashable.]

[Updated 24 October, 2009: The school mentioned below opened up their alumni Group commenting as planned, and participation is steady.]

This is another of the increasingly common posts around the general theme of "We no longer control the conversation." If you're tired of hearing that, you might want to move on...

I found out recently that the alumni staff at a prominent U.S. university had disabled the Discussions tab in their official alumni group on LinkedIn. I exchanged e-mail with one of the school's alumni staff members about a different topic and took the opportunity to ask about this apparent oversight.

"Why did you turn off the alumni discussions?" To me, Discussions are the sole useful feature of most LinkedIn Groups. [Sample view shown above. Click to enlarge.]

She explained that when the service launched, the subject line on the daily digests sent to Group members indicated that the email was "from" the alumni association. The VP was concerned (if I understood her explanation correctly) that alumni might think that comments posted by other alumni had actually come from the school, and that they represented some official institutional position, or that the alumni association endorsed the comments.

 

This concern is misguided for a few reasons, but here are five that came to mind immediately: 

1) It places the Alumni Association's narrow interest above the alumni body's broad interest; 

2) It doesn't give the alumni credit for understanding how these forums work, and indicates that the parent organization might not understand how they work;

3) It suggests that we can control conversations online (we can participate in discussions and sometimes even influence them, but we cannot control them); 

4) It deprives alumni of one thing associations can uniquely provide via LinkedIn: a structured alumni-only forum for personal and professional interaction around topics of mutual interest – topics that matter to alumni (unlike most of the stuff we send out en masse); 

5) The school mentioned above has alumni-created regional Groups on LinkedIn with the Discussion tab active, so the train has, as they say, left the station. Alumni can't tell (and don't care) whether the Group was created by alumni or the alumni office. 

There are also active Yahoo! Groups for alumni of the same school, where discussion is the sole purpose and function of the service. Again, these are created and run by alumni, so there's a complete mismatch between the school's traditional, top-down control model and the organic bottom-up inclusive model used by the alumni the school wants to serve.

Bottom line, to me this is a good reminder to keep asking "How can we help alumni solve their problems and how can we serve their needs?"

Does your school have an official LinkedIn Group? Do you have Discussions disabled? If so, why?