Considering the fine print with social networking

Today I did an Academic Impressions webinar about social networking and alumni relations/development. :::sigh::: I suppose my biggest problem with things like this is that it seems as though the presenters never actually USE the mediums they are experts on. They can talk for days about what the tool CAN do but rarely talk about how to create VALUE based on how normal people ACTUALLY use them. They leave out the fine print when discussing possibilities. For example, you can't just create an alumni Facebook group and let it do its thing. You have to have someone ENGAGED in it on a daily basis. You can't just put your recruiting video on YouTube and except it to be a viral hit. It has to be clever, quirky and fit the style of the medium.

I also don't think the presenter took into consideration the culture of some of the mediums. For example, on MySpace his argument is that you shouldn't have music automatically playing when your profile loads because that is usually frowned upon in traditional web design. However, this does not take into consideration that this is the norm on MySpace. I don't think there's anything wrong with having a fight song of a university play when the profile loads, though I wouldn't necessarily do it on the official .edu page.

Though it wasn't all that bad. There were good points made about blogging:
-Consistency is key.
-Giving people a topic to focus on is helpful
-Blogs have great internal uses.



My last peeve with the webinar wasn't anything that was the fault of the presenter: it was the users. It still baffles me that schools are so baffled by this idea of control. It's very similar to my last place of employment: They are more interested in controlling negative comments about the university online than in fixing the things at the university that cause the negative comments to begin with. Here's the thing: There will ALWAYS be negative comments. However, if the majority of your students/alums have/had positive experiences, they will come to the defense of the university.

Giving up a bit of control is a great way to engage the users....and the users that are inclined to engage with the "official" web 2.0 sites are probably going to have an affinity towards your school. For example: I'm never going to give money to my graduate school because I had a horrible experience with the administration. Therefore, how likely do you think it is that I'll be inclined to engage with the school on a social networking site? I couldn't be less interested. I might mouth off about them on my blog ( ;-) ) but I'm certainly not going to do it in an area they have control over. I suppose this is all a really long-winded way of saying that they shouldn't be worried about controlling people who probably have an affinity towards them anyway: They should spend that energy building a strategy that engages those users to translate that affinity into a donation.