How should my college (i.e., workplace) social network?

May 11, 2009 9:27 AM

Which university/college sites are doing social networking right? Which networks should colleges be involved with other than Facebook, Twitter and YouTube?

I work for a liberal arts college and am trying to assess what social networking sites we should be involved with. We're on Facebook and Twitter. YouTube is coming. I joined Myspace, just to make sure we got our name, rather than to really do much with the page.

Am I forgetting any important sites? What about Flickr? Do you think prospective/current/alumni students care about us posting photos on there, in addition to posting photos on our own site and on Facebook?

The goal is to connect with both prospective students and alumni.

If you know of any colleges and universities that are doing social networking really well, can you share those, plus your opinions on the above questions? Thanks!!

posted by faunafrailty to computers & internet (5 comments total)

The Tuck School of Business Admissions Department runs a blog about the school. They have students, faculty and stuff write entries about what life is like at Tuck; I think it's really well done and a great thing for prospective students.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:32 AM on May 11 [1 favorite]

Unigo is something you should definitely consider.
posted by kidbritish at 9:44 AM on May 11

I don't want to seem like a killjoy here, but I work for in web-related stuff at a university, and I think that this is a tricky subject. My main concern is that a lot of colleges seem to be jumping on the "social networking" bandwagon without giving it too much thought. Before doing this, I would recommend that you answer the questions:

What are we trying to accomplish with this?
What kinds of things are we going to post on this? If it's a group/network where others can post content, what are our rules for what should be allowed here?
Who will be responsible for keeping it up to date?

From what I have seen, a lot of schools just fall into the practice of using each new social networking tool to just repeat the same information in a weird, uninteresting loop - for example, having a school twitter account that repeats the same stories that you can find on the school facebook account, which are the same stories you can find on the School's actual website and weekly email newsletter and monthly printed newsletter. I also am not a huge fan of just creating groups and completely depending on other users to post content. I think it's much cooler to use social networking tools to accomplish a goal that is uniquely solvable by that tool, and I think that you need to provide lots of quality content (whether it's images, words, video, etc) created by your department to engage with your users.
posted by sluggo at 1:02 PM on May 11 [1 favorite]

Carnegie Mellon seems to be using all those websites heavily. They have a Facebook page and an app that is aimed towards incoming freshman. They create hashtags on Twitter (like #cmuclass2013) or something like that and the @CarnegieMellon seems pretty active on Twitter too. They also post videos from school on YouTube and iTunes.

That might be a bit going overboard but Carnegie Mellon is one of those super-geeky places and they are trying their best to cater to that crowd.
posted by the_dude at 1:13 PM on May 11

My alma mater, Gonzaga (small liberal arts school in the NW), just started [successfully] using Facebook to connect with alums and to advertise events and campaigns. They also started up Zagwall, which they term a "unique social networking message board." Jury's still out on the success of that last one though.
posted by messylissa at 4:55 PM on May 11