Email is Dead?
I have two brothers - one in high school, the other a freshman in college. It stunned me to hear from the industry that email is a dead communication vehicle for high school students when I know my two little brothers both have (and check) gmail accounts.
At eduWeb, I caught Karlyn Morrissette’s session on recruiting using interactive media (podcast). She discussed all formats to get the attention of high school students, with email being one of them. That’s the important takeaway…email being one of them.
News.com had an article that put this well for me. Email is not dead…but rather their forum to ‘talk to adults.’ For those of you in the admissions field, you and your institution are adults. When it’s time to move the relationship forward, email does it.
Catching their attention may be in other formats. Back to Karlyn’s session, she mentioned MySpace as one of her more popular forms to engage students and push messages. When the important steps come, or more personal communication, email seems to be the one that most teens will head to.
Find ways to incorporate email, social networking, and text messaging where appropriate. More importantly, ask teens when and how they want to be communicated with. You’d be surprised that some will give you a home telephone number. You’ll also be surprised when the only thing you get from them is a Facebook account. Regardless, adapt to them.
For my two little brothers, if I want to catch their attention, I facebook them. If I want to ask them a question, I message them on facebook or myspace. If I need them right away, I text them. If I just want to send them something, I gmail them. It just works.
The Third Party: Why Social Networks Work
Reading this site and many other blogs, we certainly get enough daily bread of what to do with social networks. Over the past six months, we have seen SN (that’s what the cool kids call it) expand on integration. What’s next for these little bundles of joy is certainly unknown, but through this whole time, the SNs that have held their own are the ones providing the most value.
Web 1.0 didn’t necessarily fail, but it wasn’t built for communication. But more importantly, it wasn’t built for anarchy. The level of control a site owner had on the content in his or her domain was controlled. Webmaster doesn’t like content…webmaster takes down content.
Now, the Web is finally realizing its own name. It’s a web of communication, relevance, and user ownership. Page references are a thing of the past, where content containers have taken its place. Syndication and taxonomy define not only how content interacts on your domain, but now where it is seen by the user. Where do social networks come in?
They have become the communication vehicle for content relevance. Content relevance used to be a one-to-one relationship. I find information I desperately need…and it ends there. Now, relevance adds a third party: Me, the information, and all my friends. In the past, if I found something that I thought “johnny” would like, I emailed him the link. Now, he sees what I do on social sites and joins in (if it’s relevant).
That is why social networks work. Action has become communication, which is filtered by relevance. It just doesn’t get easier than that.
Social Networks Growing Up
You know an idea is successful when large corporations get into the mix. Also, spin-offs of a great idea also tell me when the idea has arrived. In this case, we have social networks.
A history lesson is seeing Facebook geared toward educational communities, Friendster for dating (sort of), and MySpace to fill in the holes and allow companies to cover as individuals. LinkedIn has been highly successful because of their niche in professional development.
Welcome Disney to the mix. Xtreme Digital is geared toward pre-teens, pushing Disney content to those of interest. It’s early to tell if this will be a successful portal for Disney, or more importantly for the kids.
From Australia, FatSecret has been launched to help those trying to lose weight. It includes communities by diet or region, polling information, and friend networks.
Are these going the way of portals from 5-6 years ago? Not in my opinion. The failure of portals in their height of popularity was the need to be the next Yahoo. The difference for Disney and FatSecret is their focus. Disney, although overly commercial, stays in their sweet spot. FatSecret isn’t for everyone. One of Facebook’s failures, to me, is when they opened up the community to everyone. Although the number of users have grown immensely, I think they’ve lost a little of the close niche that they used to enjoy. Now, the only difference between Facebook and MySpace are policies and an innocent beginning.
Social networks are dependent on social policies. My personal friend network is by commonalities. I have friends who love hockey, I have friends in higher education, and I have friends that are technologically gifted. When they intersect, that is wonderful, but I would never mix groups.
Social networking is here to stay because of one word…focus. Find your communications vehicles that intersect with interests and you can use social networks to your advantage.
Social Media in Higher Ed
I did a presentation this week regarding Social Media in Higher Ed i thought I might as well post it. I think it is a pretty good primer to give to beginner to intermediate level people about social media in higher ed. I gave the presentation to a group of communications and marketing people on campus and they were very receptive and had lots of questions. People are still following up with me regarding it, so maybe we will get more going here on campus.
Facebook Groups for Schools
I was reading an article the other day which got me to thinking about how useful Facebook can be to you school.
Any here are a few idea
Student Groups
Problem
Most colleges have students groups like AMA, BSC, blah blah blah Lots of acronyms. Anyways they usually have a site for the group lets say http://myschool.edu/ama. It sits on some random server that IT hates to touch. They provide no support for it. So each semester you have to find one student in an organization that can hack up some kind of html. The level of experience varies each semester so sometimes the site is great, sometimes not so go. Some times the last person to do the site drops off the face of the earth and doesn’t pass on login or general info about the site.
Solution
Use Facebook for student group sites. All the things that are commonly on student groups sites are available on Facebook. Forum, pics, officer listings, member lists. All with no need for knowledge of html. It stays consistant, easy to maintain, multiple admins.
Hurdle
I told people at my school about this, they said why dont we make a facebook for our school. *Counter* No that is making another thing to join. Much less something run by the school. We should learn from Walmarts attempt at a Facebook and PASS! Everyone is already on facebook or can get on if need be. Facebook is open to everyone so there is no barrier to entry.
Groups for School
You can have a group for your school in general as opposed to student groups mentioned above. *NOTE* You cannot have a profile for your school. You can however create a group for your school. This can be a way to get in touch with prospective students. Some schools are slow to adapt these sites, personally I am all for it. Facebook and Myspace can make connections with students that you may otherwise not hit. I have lots of students connected to my profiles and have been asked questions regarding admissions, classes and various other topics. You can also syndicate things such as your student blogs on facebook using “Notes”.
