This is a featured excerpt from the upcoming book, Social Marketing for Colleges and Universities, by co-founders Lauren Candito and Paul Lewis.
Training Alumni To Use Social Media
Of course, for many alumni social media is still brand new. To help its alumni learn how to utilize social media tools, MSU’s Alumni Career Services office gives tutorials and presentations on how to use social media for a plethora of purposes. Isbell from MSU said the office has done some 25 presentations, engaging 25,000 people, usually piggybacking at events for alumni groups.
Providing Tools To Spread Information
The University of California at Irvine (@UCIFuture) was looking for a way to share information with its alumni and at the same time give themselves more visibility. They came up with a publicly available widget that pulls content from the school’s website. This is part of a broader campaign to raise $1 billion. Mark Aydelotte, assistant vice chancellor of marketing, said there have been more than 1,000 installs of the widget since March, and that it gives the school much more exposure by spreading to other places on the web. Aydelotte said he has seen donors embed the widget into their sites and Facebook profiles because it features a story about their large donation to the school.
Sharing Alumni-Generated Content
Another way schools are engaging alumni is by allowing them to produce their own content, which includes things like the wikis at Stanford and photo sharing with the alumni network at other schools.
The University of Texas at Austin built its own photo sharing site that allows alumni to share photos of themselves showing the school‘s well-known ‘hook em, horns’ hand gesture, along with a brief bio.
It’s sort of a Flickr for alumni, but hosted on our website, said Nyleva Corley, Web and Social Media Manager at the school. The idea, she said, is to allow people to get reconnected to the school and their fellow classmates by sharing where they are now and what they are doing.
Oregon State University uses Flickr to encourage alumni to post photos of a cutout of Benny, the school’s mascot, taken in various locales. Colgate University uploads photos to its Flickr account and lets people interact with them, including this set from an alumni reunion. Melichar from Colgate said the content is what is important, not the container. “If we post our photos to Flickr, they have their own social life,” he said. “People can interact with them and one another.”
