alumni futures

In-House Online Communities: Good Investment?

Over in the interesting comments to last week's posting about free speech and online venues, Peter Osborn asked

Why do you think an investment of resources in private-label social networks is a bad one and under what circumstances would you change your mind? Do you, for example, see any potential in LinkedIn alumni groups?

On the topic of LinkedIn Groups, my short answer is "Yes, I see potential." I've explained why in prior posts. Recently, for example, I wrote about using Group discussions on LinkedIn, and the second half of my posting about social network growth last July contains my latest views about making LinkedIn Groups useful to alumni associations. Last April, my colleague Elizabeth Allen guest blogged about managing Groups, and has written about social site group management on her own site as well (and plans to do so in the future). 

[Updated 31 October, 2009: Here's another posting from Liz Allen about using LinkedIn Groups effectively: LinkedIn Group Management: Are You Using the Tools?]

As for an alumni association building its own site, I was a little surprised CASE CURRENTS pursued this in the article I mentioned last week. The value of asking the single question ("Is it worth it to have a private label network site?") has decreased steadily with the rise of third-party sites such as Facebook. 

Instead of a single question, now there are several inter-related questions to answer, and the answers will vary from institution to institution.

• Can we provide alumni (and students) with content or services they can't get elsewhere? 
• Does our audience need this content, either because it helps them solve a problem or because it fulfills some desire for them? 
• How many alumni need to be active, for how long, and how frequently - and in which ways - before we can declare that our site is a "success"?
• Can portability address the issue of putting our brand in front of our alumni, without requiring them to visit our site?
• What do we measure to evaluate the service, and how do we compare our information to metrics from other venues (including third-party services and traditional, face to face interaction)?
• How about opportunity cost? Could time spent on our in-house community be better spent on traditional activities, third-party site community management, or new endeavors?

The point is, arguing for or against school-hosted and school-managed network sites is complicated, and will become more complex as commercial services (some of which are yet to be invented) provide additional utility to alumni. My initial feeling is that in the face of tight budgets, static or decreased staffing, and more external venues to monitor, only organizations with very generous resources can justify the commitment to designing, building, launching, marketing and maintaining a truly private in-house site. 

As for the other part of Peter's question (about "when I might change my mind"), I will do so when third-party sites are flexible and open enough to allow seamless integration with our own online communities. If alumni associations didn't have to think of social networks in terms of "public" or "private" and "open" or "closed" then this wouldn't be an issue. We would be talking about functionality and utility and not access. Meanwhile, it is very important to remember that LinkedIn and Facebook are not completely "open" networks – yes, anyone can join, but you can't connect with their members unless you join as well. They are "walled gardens" too – they're just vastly larger than our alumni-only walled gardens. 

We have many other challenges in the meantime: understanding changes in regional club or chapter behavior, partnering with career offices in a weak jobs environment, the evolving integration of printed and online "publications," the relationship with fundraising activity – the list is long. Even if you are lucky enough to have the resources for staffing an in-house community online, you still have to address how our audiences expect and need us to participate in third-party sites. For almost all of us, the answer is still difficult to see clearly – we are still in the early stages of true online community.

I am interested to hear examples of how both internal and external services are helping your program, or harming it. Leave a comment.

Student Comment Via Facebook? Our Lawyers Will Be In Touch

[Updated 22 October: See response to this topic from Ohio State's Ted Hattemer in the comments.]

The October 2009 issue of CASE CURRENTS magazine was sure to make it into this blog. But this posting isn't about what I thought I'd be writing about.

I was ready to launch a rant about whether private label social networks are a good investment for cash-strapped under-staffed alumni operations (answer: No). Then I noticed the informative article about reputation management by Kim Fernandez (Operation Reputation: How to manage and protect your institution's online image, p. 32. CASE member log in required for online access). This is a good resource for educational institutions navigating the sometimes turbulent waters of unmoderated online discussions.

The two paragraphs that caught my attention were about Ohio State University's reaction last spring when a student questioned university president Gordon Gee's membership on the board of an energy company. The company was under scrutiny for questionable environmental practices. Rather than ignore the question, answer the question, or thank the student for participating in the discussion, university officials deleted the question and disabled the comments function on that page.

A few days later, after some negative publicity, the school reinstated the commenting capability on its Facebook Page. I recently presented this as an example of a school that "learned how social media work, and how to live with the uncertainties of Web 2.0." I believed – or rather, I assumed – that OSU's decision resulted from a thoughtful understanding of the new landscape we face, and an awareness that someone who complains or challenges the school is an engaged constituent. The most important thing, I explained, is not whether they agree with everything the school does, it's that they care enough to participate in the discussion.

But it turns out I was wrong about OSU's reasons for reinstating Facebook fans' ability to leave comments. 

In CURRENTS I read that 

Ted Hattemer, director of new media at the university, says the policy reversal boiled down to a free-speech issue. 'What we found is that...Ohio State property has the requirement of meeting a basic freedom of speech. We quickly reversed the decision [to remove the post] once we figured that out, thanks to good advice from our legal affairs departments.'

I'm all for free speech, but that's not what this is about. Making this decision on the basis of a legal opinion makes OSU technically correct, but reveals a lack of awareness as to why "free speech" is important in online forums.

Students, alumni and friends expect to be heard because they can be heard – not because a lawyer said it's OK for them to be heard.

The silver lining may be that the next time a well-intentioned senior administrator asks of your Facebook Page, "But what if a student criticizes us?" you can say that it's not a problem: OSU's new legal precedent - finally - allows people to use the internet to express their opinions.

Is Your School Too Old To Fail?

Recent news items about the anniversary of the failure of Lehman Brothers asked whether large, private financial institutions should be protected by government – whether they are, in effect, "too big to fail."

It's interesting to ask something similar of a college or university. If I told you that Oxford or Princeton was going to shut its doors, would you suggest that they should be bailed out? Protected? If so, would you advise using public money for the cause?

Many of the most prominent schools have been around for hundreds of years. 

Are they "too old to fail"?

The University of Bologna is more than 900 years old; just about the only organizations that resilient and long-lasting seem to be universities and organized religions.* 17 American colleges, universities and schools operating today are older than the United States itself. Few national governments can claim the long runs of which schools like these can boast. 

So schools last a long time. But what exactly is it that persists? Is the school we revere today really "the same" as the one that first bore its name? Of course not.

Schools (like many organizations) survive in name, but they must rebuild, reimagine and retool themselves ceaselessly, one small segment at a time. Saying that Bologna hasn't changed is like saying that a Model T Ford in an antique car show is "the same car" that Henry Ford rolled off the line in 1920. In reality, piece by piece it gets fixed up, "restored," and "maintained." A headlight here, a bumper there. Engine parts wear out and are replaced. Rubber moldings dry and crack and new ones are attached. The body fades and pits and the car is sanded and repainted. The upholstery gets torn, and....well you get the idea. Is it really the same car?

And so it is with our schools. We are lucky in some cases to have architecturally significant buildings that survive, but even those have to be updated for technological reasons, for safety, to please donors, or increasingly, to be "sustainable." So the buildings – like the institutions they serve – survive, but in forms that are new and often distant from their historical roles.

U.S. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes (Brown University class of 1881) famously quipped of his alma mater, "It is always the old Brown and it is always the new Brown." We would be hard pressed to sum it up more succinctly or more eloquently. And we'd be ill-advised to forget it.

* Iceland established a parliament in 930 A.D., but had no centralized administration until about 330 years later. 

Photo of old buildings and new students at the University of Bologna, from Michele Ursino via Creative Commons. Click photo to enlarge.

Final Thoughts from CASE Summit 2009

This week I joined in a planning discussion for the 2010 CASE Summit for Advancement Leaders. Our planning committee discussed a number of themes, issues and possible speakers to make the conference relevant and useful to our profession. Preparing for that discussion I reviewed my notes from last summer's conference, some of which I blogged previously. 

As I expected, there were a few more worthwhile ideas that I had jotted down last July, almost all of them comments from Tim O'Reilly. Here they are in bullet point form:

• Tim O'Reilly, in the discussion about what role institutions can play in their constituents' lives, said: "If the job is relevant [to students, alumni and donors], the institution will figure it out. It's not about 'how do we protect the old ways we used to do those jobs?'"  

Right on. This reminded me of Clay Shirky's comment in Here Comes Everybody, that professions must often redefine themselves. Most journalists, for example, didn't believe that user-generated content or Web 2.0 was a threat to their business model: "We're in the journalism business – bloggers aren't journalists!" Maybe, says Shirky, but the journalists defined their own profession inaccurately. They are in the communications business, and so are bloggers and anyone else "publishing" content online, no matter how informal or personal.

• O'Reilly again: Traditional higher education will suffer if it can't adapt to new attitudes toward learning, to new people doing things in new ways (his examples: the University of Phoenix and Canada's Athabasca University). "We may remember how things used to be and remember those who suffered. The parvenu companies that did something 'crazy' may end up as the leaders." 

• O'Reilly defined publishing as "spreading the ideas of innovators" (a not very subtle reference to the fact that he owns a publishing company). Universities should ask, "What do we really do? For whom do we do it? Can we do it better with the aid of new technology?" 

His point was that we should go back to first principles. Instead of automatically doing the same thing using new tools, we should first ask whether what we do should change, not just how we do it.

• Asked whether internet-based news was "dumbing us down," O'Reilly replied astutely that he's given 90-minute interviews to newspaper reporters who then quoted him in a single sentence that misrepresented his main point.   

• Finally, O'Reilly echoed something I mentioned here long ago: "The internet is just a user interface." I quoted Cem Sertoglu in January 2008 to the effect that the "internet is the dumbest network of all."

And in a typical instance of converging thought-patterns, Shirky again surfaces on this exact topic: 

...[T]he internet itself is just a vehicle for moving information back and forth – it's up to the computers sending and receiving information to make sense of it....The internet does not know what it is being used for.... [Here Comes Everybody, p. 157]

This provides us with the ability "to design and try new communications tools without having to ask anyone for permission." Like...the World Wide Web!

Final note: Despite a decidedly technical flavor to many of the sessions at 2009's Summit, there was no wireless access in any of the meeting rooms at the Hyatt hosting the conference in San Francisco. Not because CASE didn't request wifi for attendees; apparently Hyatt doesn't even have the ability to deliver internet access in its conference rooms. I find this mind-boggling. Last time I checked, the hotel's business offices had internet, as did the guest rooms. Let's hope the Marriott in New York gives us better online access next July.

HDR photo of Times Square from Nimo Photography via Creative Commons. That's the Hilton though – the CASE Summit will be at the Marriott.