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.”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters Life!) – Heading to a new university for Fall 2010 and want advice from other students? Looking for housing, textbooks, knowledge about a professor or class, or simply a ticket to the weekend’s big game?

Technology companies and your school may have answers on your computer or mobile phone, and it won’t cost a thing — at least not yet.

Colleges and universities across the United States are going beyond simply creating websites and pages on Facebook for students to “friend” or “fan.” They are working with technology companies to build their own social networks and integrate them into campus life to boost admissions and retain students.

One new app from San Francisco-based Inigral, Inc. allows colleges to create social networks within Facebook, while a mobile technology from Foursquare gives students the ability to walk into an event, check their phone and find other students.

Like many apps from technology start-ups, these student-oriented ones currently are free for users, but the owners see the potential to make big profits in the future as capabilities increase and usage grows.

“We want to be able to find prospective students where they are, and it is clear to us that Facebook is the dominant source,” said Columbia College Chicago’s executive director of admissions Murphy Monroe, whose college recently adopted the new app from Inigral, called “Schools on Facebook.”

“We want to meet them there in a secure way, and in a way that feels authentic to our school’s culture, and the (new) product gave us an unusual way to do that,” Monroe said.

The app, called “Schools on Facebook,” allows colleges to form private communities that give students school-specific profiles and keeps them separate from personal accounts.

When a student signs up, he or she gives Facebook permission to add the app, and school information is then waiting for them upon their first login.

“We use the data given by the students and the school to introduce them to other students like them,” Zanders said.

Alicia Castro, a sophomore majoring in interdisciplinary studies at Arizona State University, said the app helped her land a free textbook.

“I found a friend who had taken a (communications) class that I was going to take, so I asked him for his book,” Castro said. “I thought that was pretty convenient.”

BOOSTING ENROLLMENT

Colleges see programs like “Schools on Facebook” as being able to help increase early enrollment and retention.

Students who have been admitted to a college — but may not have chosen to attend — have access to the app, meaning they potentially can meet other students and build friendships before fully deciding to enroll in that particular school.

Monroe said schools have a short window of time to lure admitted students into attending their university. “Schools on Facebook” provides a unique way to build a single community where students can find each other, talk to one another and have conversations about college expectations.

“Hopefully through that process, students can grow some affinity to our school, and we hope that once these students arrive on campus they will already be somewhat enculturated (to the college),” Monroe said.

Sixteen colleges and universities are now using “Schools on Facebook” nationwide — up from seven at around the same time last year — including Columbia College Chicago, Arizona State University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Inigral CEO Michael Staton sees the market maturing rapidly with new functions over the next five years. “As we release capabilities the market is demanding, we expect our average price for an average school to be $100,000,” he said.

Similarly, Foursquare coaxes students to interact, but uses mobile phones and connects students at specific venues — the football stadium, for instance — within a college campus.

“Universities are recognizing the potential for using Foursquare to communicate with their student body,” the start-up’s marketing manager Anna Frenkel told Reuters.

Foursquare allows users to “check in” at venues via smartphones, and they are awarded points, “badges” and even discounts for a certain number of check-ins. When they check in, students can find friends or other students at the same location with whom to make conversation or ask questions.

Harvard University — former home to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — was the first university to begin using Foursquare after its launch in 2009.

“Harvard is made up of so many schools, campuses, libraries…and it seemed like great opportunity for us to say, ‘There are interesting location-based technologies that tie digital content to real life,’” said Harvard’s director of digital technologies Perry Hewitt.

Other schools that have launched Foursquare include Stanford, Syracuse University and The University of North Carolina Charlotte.

(Reporting by Carolina Madrid; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100817/lf_nm_life/us_schools_socialnetworking

Marco Masoni is a lawyer turned educator who co-founded Einztein.com to address the related problems of searching for good online courses and real-time coursework interaction.

Marshall McLuhan’s classic expression “ the medium is the message” hasn’t lost its luster yet, as entrepreneurs and designers re-invent products and services for the web, unleashing thousands of new applications and sites every single day.

The news industry is also in the throes of adjusting to the digital age, with countless print publications failing and folding after many years in the business while online news outlets and other platforms for news sharing, proliferate.

Education is the second largest industry in America behind health care, and it too is experiencing a similar shift as it struggles to adapt traditional design and delivery models to the demands of modern audiences who are accustomed to digital interactivity.

The challenge to transition successfully is especially pressing for online higher education. The Sloan Consortium reports that two-thirds of post-secondary educational institutions are seeing an increase in online courses and programs, so it’s a market that education providers simply cannot afford to ignore.

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It’s About Course Quality, not Quantity

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All too frequently, providers meet the challenge of satisfying the rising demand for online education by simply throwing courses up on the web and seeing what sticks, without catering to student needs. This amounts to a loser’s gamble since it risks pushing away students looking for schools that boast high online student retention rates. After all, why would you want to spend valuable tuition dollars on a school that isn’t likely to hold your interest long enough to earn a degree?

What’s required are innovative approaches to course design that set aside old models of instruction where theory often trumps actuality. Online course providers must embrace the web’s potential to match students with the kinds of timely knowledge and skills that address current issues head-on, and enable them to thrive in the global marketplace.

It’s not enough for a course to be accessible online, it must also be designed in a way that keys into the digital pulse of current events, trending topics and insider knowledge endemic to the web. The three-quarters of 18 to 29 year-olds who have profiles on social networks are likely wondering why online course offerings aren’t nearly as enticing as the content that they find on their favorite social websites.

To attract and retain the typical college-age demographic, as well as the larger population of adult learners in search of relevant and engaging educational content, the next generation of online education must be characterized by courses that build in the social, real-time information capturing components that have made the web such a dynamic medium for sharing information and knowledge.

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Learning From Events in Real-Time

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Consider what’s happened recently in the Gulf of Mexico. BP’s major oil spill is perhaps even “the” news story of the year. By now facts, opinions, and graphic images of the damage and underwater video of the spewing oil have been circulated on countless websites, informing our shock and outrage. The wonders of the digital age have successfully kept us current on the disaster in real-time, but how can they help us repair the mess and learn about our mistakes? How can we enlist the social media zeitgeist in order to build a better online learning paradigm?

Unfortunately, higher education providers are not racing to develop online courses that can seize on important events events like these, as they happen. Beyond the immediate victims, there are millions of people around the world who would certainly be inclined to learn about the incident so that they can apply the lessons to their own lives and communities. In mid July, another major oil spill occurred in the Yellow Sea, after the explosion of an oil terminal in the port city of Dalian, China. And recently, in Michigan, nearly a million gallons of oil leaked out of a forty year-old pipeline and into the Kalamazoo River.

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Innovation Pays

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The web, as a real-time medium, is begging us to build innovative courses that can be used for the rapid delivery of education designed in a way that integrates current news, information, insights and research about topics like the oil spill and thousands of other current issues.

After exploring some of the leading interactive educational sites that have been created by public institutions and non-profit entities, including Webby nominee Your Life, Your Money and Webby winner The Ocean Portal, it’s hard not to come away wondering why online courses rarely rise to the same level of quality and relevance. The most obvious explanation for this is the relatively high cost of producing an online course with similar design and functionality, plus, the added back-end resources involved in administering such a course. But is the cost really so prohibitive?

One can’t help but wonder what would happen if an education provider came along that offered, for starters, 20 or 30 online courses that were of “Webby” caliber. Even if the courses cost more to initially produce than your standard offering, the high market demand for online education might show that innovation pays when you begin creating online courses that look, teach and engage like they were purposed for the online medium.

For the time being it’s up to innovators like the folks over at TED to remind us how to use the web for exchanging knowledge in the search for solutions to global problems like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Online education providers everywhere could learn a thing or two from this approach and take a chance by creating real-time courses.

Source: http://mashable.com/2010/08/06/online-education-social/

Those obnoxious Facebook users who collect friends like stamps and post a status update every other minute are more likely to stick it through college than less active users, a recent study suggests.

A study led by Abilene Christian University followed the Facebook profiles of 375 first-semester freshman students for nine months to examine how Facebook activity can be used as a predictor for a student’s likelihood to stay in school. The research found that students who returned to school after freshman year had significantly more Facebook friends and wall posts than those who didn’t return.

“The study was able to show that these students who are more active on Facebook are also out there getting involved, making new friends and taking part of activities that the university provides for them,” said Jason Morris, an assistant professor of education and director of higher education at Abilene Christian, who authored the research article.

The study, only recently published by the Journal of College Student Retention, focused on students from fall of 2006 to summer of 2007. Students who opted to continue on to their sophomore year had, on average, 27 more friends and 59 more wall posts than those who dropped out, according to the study.

For other variables, Abilene Christian measured the number of Facebook groups joined and photo albums posted by the students, but the statistical differences were negligible. Researchers determined that wall posts and the number of Facebook friends were the most significant predictors for determining a user’s Facebook activeness, which in turn reflected their enthusiasm in the academic world surrounding them.

Abilene Christian’s study emerges at an interesting time when researchers and technologists are debating over whether technologies such as social networking sites and smartphones are bringing people together or isolating them. In another recent study, University of Michigan researchers found that today’s college students are significantly less empathetic than college students of the 1980s and 1990s, based on surveys measuring empathy among almost 14,000 college students over the last 30 years.

The University of Michigan researchers theorized that the drop in empathy might be due to students’ excessive exposure of media, such as violent videogames, which “numbs people to the pain of others.” They also suggested that perhaps connecting with friends online makes it easier to shut out real-world issues.

“The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline,” said Edward O’Brien, a University of Michigan graduate student who helped with the study.

However, Abilene Christian’s Facebook study led researchers to different interpretations. They believe that rather than sites like Facebook being an escape from reality, it’s actually a mirror for their real-life interactions. The students who were more actively connecting with people on Facebook were most likely already connectors in the real world.

“At the time we did this study, the big debate was whether or not the Facebook world was a virtual pseudo social world or whether or not it actually reflected real world relationships,” said Richard Beck, associate professor and chair of psychology at Abilene Christian, who came up with the idea of the Facebook study. “[The study] all seemed to indicate that what was going on Facebook was paralleling their social experience on campus. Rather than replacing it, it was mirroring it.”

Abilene Christian’s study is also an example of how social networking sites — as invasive to our privacy as they may be — can potentially serve as a window into human behavior more objective than surveys,  Morris said.

“Instead of using [students'] perceptions, we remeasured … with actual behaviors, which makes that a little more powerful as a study,” Morris said.

Brian X. Chen is author of an upcoming book about the always-connected mobile future titled Always On, due for publication Spring 2011. To keep up with his coverage on Wired.com, follow @bxchen or @gadgetlab.

Source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/08/active-facebook-users-more-likely-to-stick-it-through-college-study/

When Chase Carter, of the Oklahoma State University Alumni Association, began working for the Alumni Association as an intern two years ago, OSU’s social media presence was nearly non-existent.  Chase and a fellow intern used social media on a personal level and knew the majority of the student body did as well.  With the approval from the rest of the fairly young staff, the OSU Alumni Association began its social media presence with a Facebook group.  After only a couple of weeks, OSU realized the limitations of a Facebook group and moved to an official Fan Page.

“The Page grew slowly, but surely,” Chase said.  “There was always very steady growth, but we were really only promoting it at that time through our website and our e-newsletter.”

After Facebook, the association began expanding across platforms one at a time and is now active on MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Top Social Media Goals

Expand web presence

Reach OSU Alumni using social media

Grow email database

Keep alumni connected to each other and the alumni association

Challenges

Limited budget

Limited manpower

Maintaining the value of the dues-based organization

24/7 updates

Strategy Development

OSU aimed to extend their presence on social media because their students were already there.  Searching Facebook for OSU alumni brings almost 40,000 results.  With those kind of numbers, OSU got involved quick.

“It’s pretty unique.  I know, whether good or bad, a lot of other institutions put a lot of research into what they do, not that we didn’t, but it was a very hands on trial.  We said, ‘Let’s try this and see what kind of response we get,’ and the responses have been very good,” Chase said.

Armed with a $5,000 budget, OSU’s Alumni Association invests a lot of their resources into Facebook advertisements.  One of their nationwide Facebook ads targets alumni within 50 miles of an OSU Alumni Club.  Another targets alumni now living in Texas with the slogan “A different shade of orange.”  Chase credits much of OSU’s growth and success to these advertisements.  The association is now using Facebook ads to promote events.

Metrics

OSU uses free web applications such as bit.ly, Google Analytics, and TweetDeck to monitor and evaluate their social media activity.

According to Google Analytics, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter all rank in the top 10 for referral traffic to the OSU website.  “We feel like we’ve promoted our new and events well and that’s what is bringing them back to our site,” Chase said.

Learning Lesson

One thing Chase didn’t expect about managing the OSU Alumni Association social media accounts was the 24/7 nature of the job.

“As they’ve grown, our alumni expect to see posts from us about different academics or athletics.  Once you hook people in by keeping them informed on all these different venues, if you don’t continue to do that, it becomes a big challenge, and they get angry,” Chase said.

Words of Wisdom

Chase encourages other alumni organizations to keep track of what others in the industry are doing online.

“Explore and look at every other alumni association that you can to see what everyone else is doing.  I’ve gotten so many ideas from looking at other organizations and seeing how they’re doing things,” Chase said.  “I want us to be one of the best, so that’s one of the biggest keys.  Stay aware of what’s happening with the schools around you.”

Final Words

“I think we’re a pretty good example of how you can do a lot with a  little,” Chase said.  “We’ve got a very small budget, which it doesn’t’ take that much money to build a Facebook Page.  It takes a lot of hard work and effort.”

This is a featured excerpt from the upcoming book, Social Marketing for Colleges and Universities, by co-founders Lauren Candito and Paul Lewis.