Facing UP to the Facebook & MySpace Generation by Don Philabaum

Facing UP.. ..to the Facebook/MySpace

Generation Everything you need to know about social networking communities and but didn’t know what to ask!

Don Philabaum President & CEO, IAC www.iaccorp.com

Administrators who should read this • Principals • Superintendents • VP’s of University Relations • Student Services • Admissions • Orientation • Alumni • Development

Index

Introduction

pg 1

Facebook .................................................................................................. 3 MySpace ....................................................................................................4 What do social networking websites provide your students? .................... 6 Are social networking websites simply fulďŹ lling a student need? .............. 7 Why has social networking taken hold so fast? .........................................8 Is this a fad, or is it something your school should address? .................... 8

Five issues you face

Your IT department is dealing with technical issues ................................10 Your brand is being affected ....................................................................12 Commercial websites are capturing data that you should have .............. 15 You are dealing with student issues ........................................................17 Students are exposing personal information ...........................................18

Four Things you can do

Determine your organizations ofďŹ cial position .........................................22 Develop Rules & Regulations ..................................................................23 Adopt Social Networking Educational Programs .....................................24 Adopt our 10 Guidelines ..........................................................................25 Introduce Internet based Social Networking Programs ...........................26 Junior High/Middle and High Schools ...........................................27 Alumni ..........................................................................................28 Admissions....................................................................................29 Orientation, Residence Hall & Student Services ..........................31

Summary

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Introduction For as long as colleges have existed, they and their alumni associations have not had significant cause to worry about anything or anyone competing for their alumni’s attention. Now, three of the most successful social networking websites are encroaching on what has always been sacred territory for colleges. Classmates.com, with 30 million members, recently sold for 100 million. MySpace.com, with 48 million members recently sold for $580 million. Facebook.com has 8 million members and a valuation of $100 million. And they’re all working around the clock to build relationships with alumni from your college and every college in America—and around the world. This report will help you understand how these increasingly powerful commercial social networking communities are negatively affecting your college. And I also want to show you how you can fight back—by giving your students their own college-endorsed communities. More specifically, you as a school administrator face serious potential risk if you: 1. Fail to develop written policies clearly stating terms of acceptable use of sites like MySpace and Facebook. 2. Fail to disseminate these rules and enforce them. 3. Don’t give students an alternative “university-approved” social networking community. You’ll read in this paper how administrators of junior high schools, high schools, community colleges and universities and colleges are facing serious competition from sites like Facebook, MySpace and other social networking websites. These sites are threatening their brands, their intellectual property, and their students’ privacy. This report recommends that you move forward in the following three ways: 1. Develop a modified social networking community built around a yearbook that can be easily updated. 2. Create policies and procedures on acceptable use of social networking communities. 3. Teach students the risks of exposing too much information and how to protect their privacy. Organizations that implement these three recommendations will: • • • •

Protect their brand, image and intellectual property. Lessen the tension among administrators who are trying to catch up to the issues social networking communities are creating for them and to make clear what is acceptable and what isn’t. Protect students from exposing personal information that a future employer might ﬁnd objectionable Increase their retention rate and decrease their summer melt

"MySpace has junior and senior years in high school …This will roll into college years."

Chris DeWolfe, founder

In the beginning….. In 1996, my firm created a website www.studentaccess.com to provide free home pages to college students. At the time Geocities was beginning to take off, our team felt a website that provided college students a place to “live virtually” would be well received. Our vision was to provide free home pages on which students could update personal information and search for others. As the technology was being refined, we looked for ways to promote the site. Our marketing department placed ads in student magazines and waited for the flood of students to arrive. It didn’t! After a couple brainstorming sessions, our team concluded that what we were really doing is creating online yearbooks for students. To test our theory, I used a connection I had from the Akron Sales and Marketing Organization to organize a meeting with the President of Taylor Publishing, one of the largest publishers of yearbooks in the country. The meeting was hastily set up, so I changed my flight from a visit with my mother in Florida to stop in Dallas, Texas. I arrived and set up my PowerPoint presentation designed to show the President that the Internet will eventually replace the printed yearbook directories. The President showed up in the conference room late, looking disheveled and distracted from the pressure his firm was under. Apparently the firm had just converted to digital printing and was running into significant problems in quality and, as a result, deliveries were running behind. Naturally, the last thing he wanted to do was sit through a meeting in which I’m telling him the equipment he’d just invested a million dollars in—the poorly functioning equipment—was about to be replaced by something called the Internet. After the presentation, I realized we were a bit early on this idea and decided we might as well do our best to attract students to our online community. All that changed with one single registered letter.

Out of the blue, we received a letter from a law ﬁrm representing Princeton Review. They were suing us for infringing on their copyright. It appeared that Princeton Review published a series of books for law, medical and professional colleges under the banner of Student Access.

sit back and assess our situation. We’d already invested more than $50,000 in technology, advertising and marketing and related expenses, and yet the site was not ramping up as we expected. So the decision was made to pull the plug on www.studentaccess.com and give the URL to Princeton Review.

After spending nearly $6,000 in legal fees and facing a court battle, we had to Comes the revolution: Facebook & MySpace Fast forward seven years later to 2003 when a group of students created an online community called thefacebook.com for Harvard students. The founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg wanted to provide students with a directory that listed their activities and what was happening in their lives. A generation of students who were immersed in instant messaging, email and related Internet technology rapidly embraced the new website. Suddenly, you were OUT if you were not IN Facebook. No advertising was necessary for the new website because the strong need to be part of something “neat” spread from residence hall to alumni to friends of the students. In true viral marketing fashion, Facebook was taking off. In less than two weeks, two thirds of Harvard students had registered and posted their photos on the website, proving that an online student directory would indeed be supported by students. The Facebook got off to a rocky start when the three creators of ConnectU ﬁled a lawsuit against fellow student Mark Zuckerberg. They alleged Zuckerberg stole their idea for an online college directory and launched it before ConnectU could get up and running. The lawsuit they said they’d hired Zuckerberg in November 2003 to help them program their website, then called “Harvard Connection.” They also claimed that Zuckerberg stalled for months on ﬁnishing the project and then launched Thefacebook.com on his own—three months before ConnectU went online. While there was no formal agreement, ConnectU owners felt they had an oral agreement with Zuckerberg, which should have been honored. Facebook.com has experienced incredible growth, developing a fanatic user base among college students across America. Consider these statistics: • • • • •

8 million registered users and growing at 20,000 new users each day Coverage of 45% of U.S. colleges (2,000 representing 8 million students) 80 percent penetration among students of colleges that have Facebook 10th most-visited Internet site in the U.S. 5.5 BILLION page views a month (230 million page views a day)

According to Michael Arrington of the blog TechCrunch: • • •

60 percent of users log on each day 85 percent log on at least once a week 93 percent log on at least once a month

These are astonishing statistics when you consider the site had less than 300,000 users at 99 colleges in September 2004. Even as Facebook is looking to expand its services worldwide, it is also rapidly advancing into 22,000 high schools across the United States. Both Facebook and MySpace sell advertising to generate revenue. Think of each of them as an online magazine. Students supply the content, and—even better than a magazine—and the members access the site daily for extended periods of time. As you can see by the figures above, Facebook’s 230 million pageviews per day as of November 2005 represent a lot of advertising dollars. To get a quick peek at what information students provide, visit the Facebook demonstration profile page at http://harvard.facebook.com/profile.php?id=11752&1=732749925d Myspace MySpace was founded in July 2003 by Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson who wanted to provide a website for bands. MySpace’s service enables independent bands to gain a larger audience for their music. Bands can post photos and give their fans the ability to download the band’s music. It’s been a huge hit with the teenage and 20-something crowd. Members can see which bands are “cool” and what “cool” people think about different bands. Fueled by viral marketing and built around users’ desire to connect with each other, MySpace grew from 2 million users in June 2004 to more than 48 million users by the end of 2005. The site, along with the company that nurtured MySpace in its formative months, was sold in May 2005 for $580 million dollars to Fox Interactive Media, an arm of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. As the end of 2005, MySpace was the place to go for advertisers wanting to reach the 16-24 crowd. Boasting more daily hits than Google and more registered users than America Online, MySpace has become the fourth most popular site on the web, and yet few parents are aware of it. Sconex, Xanga and other “school oriented” communities Sconex—www.sconex.com (a combination of school and nexus)—identifies itself as “your high school online.” Press reports are limited, and we are unable to provide details of the penetration of this service within high schools. However, it’s growing rapidly.

Founded in 1999 to provide an online community to share photos, Xanga—www.xanga.com — identifies itself as “The Weblog Community.” Press reports I found showed that many schools were banning or asking their students to delete links to their profile pages from school computers. For many teens, blogging has become a way to vent about daily frustrations with teachers, parents and peers—a modern replacement for personal diaries and journals. School officials have found themselves swimming upriver as they try to stop students from using these sites.

What does all this mean for you? Whether you like it or not, MySpace, Facebook, Sconex and Xanga, and sites like Classmates are now competing for the hearts and minds of your students and alumni. Each are membership organizations that provide online directory and social networking tools to engage and involve your alumni. Their effect on the K-12 market and the college market is tremendous. All are introducing issues and situations that are costing time, causing aggravation and pitting administrators against students. While admissions, alumni, advancement, student services and residential life ofﬁces are connecting with their constituents the old-fashioned way, prospective students, students and alumni are forging a whole new way to connect, communicate and relate to each other. Organizations that fail to understand the signiﬁcance of this phenomenally rapid change will lose touch, lose data, and lose a critical opportunity to network and communicate with their constituents.

What do social networking websites provide your students? Empowering students to share information and post their own personal information is one reason students spend so much time on Facebook. Primary services that sites like Facebook provide include: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Searching Friends Walls Parties Messaging/Poking Groups Visualization

Facebook.com provides a number of ways for members to show the world who they are. When students initially sign up, they are asked to share what their favorite books, movies, quotes, music, political preferences are. While you’re not required to fill in any data, the more data you share the more chances others will find you when they go searching. Students can upload photos of themselves, friends, artwork or photography. They can share their own personal feelings and a diary of what is happening in their lives, as well as post comments about others’ websites. Once students are registered, they’re able to find anyone within their college that matches the search criteria. If a coed wants to find out more about the guy in her chemistry class—Who does he hang out with? What does he like?—she can instantly go online and check him out. With a few keystrokes, she sees a flood of information that might have taken years to learn a decade ago. Additionally, she will be able to find out what classes he’s in, what high school he attended, his relationship status, and what parties he is going to. A popular tool that receives a great deal of use and shows some creativity on the part of students is the ability to create a group on the fly. For example, you can create a group of people interested in photography or join a group that plays disc golf. Some are just whimsical groups like, “Do you know what Fred Smith is up to today?” Others, as we’ll discuss later, are built around sex and drinking. Another is announcing parties and gettogethers and, of course, one of the most popular is creating your own network of friends. It’s not unusual to hear students who have 300 plus “friends.” These friends are not the traditional interpretation of friends but rather, they’re acquaintances and or friends of friends of friends. A survey we conducted at the National Orientation Conference in 2005 showed that Orientation Leaders were spending online an average of 79 minutes on these sites. The times ranged from a low of 30 minutes a day to a high of five hours a day!

When asked why they like Facebook and MySpace, the most common comments were: • • • • • • • • •

Ability to meet new people Reuniting with old friends Expressing themselves as individuals on a social and global level Networking Entertaining Socializing with those you might not meet face to face Helping ﬁnd individual identity Learning more about friends Easily accessing information about others

Are social networking communities simply fulfilling a student need? ABSOLUTELY! In a book I wrote in 1998, “Create a NET-Centered College Campus,” I suggested that colleges should begin to develop online communities of their own to network students, parents, graduates and alumni. Student Online Communities, Parent Online Communities, Graduate and Alumni Online Communities I suggested would fulfill students’ need to connect with each other. I am finishing a book for the K-12 market in which I share similar suggestions. Within the K-12 market, we are suggesting colleges take a cue from students and build password protected “School Online Communities” where students can interact with each other, yet live within the community morals and rules. Within the college market, I remind administrators that building multimillion dollar health and wellness centers and student centers are not the only thing they should include in their strategic plans. Most colleges, however, have continued to focus on building infrastructure and administrative tools to run their school. Most have done a marvelous job at using the power of the Internet to help their students: • • • •

Nearly eight years ago, I remember having a discussion with a representative of a company that provided online directories and communities to alumni associations. His son was deciding between Rochester Institute of Technology and Rensselaer Polytechnic University. His son, who was obviously Internet savvy, then viewed both sites and told his dad that RIT’s site seemed backward and didn’t “get it” the way RPI’s site did. Based on that, and certainly other variables, he chose RPI.

Why has social networking taken hold so fast? Obviously because the market wanted it! Prior to MySpace, Facebook, Sconex and Xanga, the world was warming up to social networking websites. Friendster and Tribe were two popular sites that “wired” tech savvy people started living and playing in. But a generation of students who grew up on the web took to MySpace and Facebook like kids to candy. Both sites let the kids share who they were and included technologies that encouraged rapid spreading by word of mouth. Facebook, MySpace, Sconex and Xanga have caught on because: • • •

They are targeted to narrow niche markets. Their audience is tech savvy with time on their hands. There is a strong “you’re either in or you’re out” message.

Administrators who are running today’s schools and campuses have learned about the Internet from vendors delivering administrative tools to their college and from their IT staff sharing what they have to do to keep systems reliably functioning. Little if no discussion, investment or focus has been spent on listening to, observing, or asking students what other types of services they wanted. Today’s students have grown up in a rich environment of electronic gadgets and Internet delivered products and services that never existed—in many cases, even in the previous year. As a result, administrators haven’t had a chance to understand how these are affecting their students’ needs and behaviors. Is this a fad, or is it something your school should address? Based on the metrics I previously shared, I’d be willing to predict the concept is here to stay. Research by the Henry Kaiser Foundation, “Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds,” published in March 2005, indicated that teens spend an average of ﬁve minutes a day checking e-mail and 48 minutes surﬁng and visiting websites. In September 2005, Facebook opened a high-school version of their product, designed to attract the time, data/content and attention of students from 22,000 American high schools. To students, social networking communities are a source of entertainment. In a world in which everyone is time-starved, the social networking sites encroach on other forms of entertainment, including TV, studies or participation in campus organizations. Your students’ addictive participation in Facebook, in particular, led to Accel Partners putting $12 million into the company recently, giving the Facebook a valuation of more

than $100 million dollars. Considering that IAC bought MySpace in 2005 for more than $550 million dollars, our investors and owners will continue to focus on the high school and college markets that colleges are failing to serve.

we are only beginning to see where this industry is going. Annie has been working my wife over for nearly a month asking permission to participate in MySpace because many of her friends are already there. Our family has taken the position that the site requires users to be 16 as a reason she and her friends should not be on there. We mention all the obvious reasons, but Annie just wants to be one of “the gang”.

Knowing the usage statistics of social networking sites and watching my 12year-old use Internet technologies to communicate with her friends, I’d bet

Assuming that how my 12-year-old daughter and her friends use of the Internet is a microcosm of pre-teen and teen behaviors, you can expect the demand and expectation for social networking communities to only increase, not decrease, among prospective students and your student body. And on the international front, this same concept is being repeated in countries around the world. One country that might surprise you is Korea. CyWorld, was founded in 2002, but really gained participation after it was acquired in 2003 by SK Telecom Co. (Korea’s largest wireless service provider). It provides very similar services to MySpace. CyWorld currently has as many as 20 million Koreans using the community on a daily basis. Keep in mind that, with 48 million people, South Korean is a country SMALLER than Virginia. Participation has reached fever pitch. As many as 90 percent of Koreans in their 20’s are registered CyWorld users. CyWorld has become a kind of cultural phenomenon and has created a lot of addictive users, called, “Cyholics”. CyWorld is owned and operated by SK Communications, which is currently opening a Chinese equivalent online community to CyWorld. Next stop for CyWorld is Japan, before they focus their sites on the United States. Over the last year, I’ve held focus groups at area colleges and had students respond, “Facebook is like God!” Others have indicated they could not live without their Facebook account. The following paragraph is taken from an article titled, “E-Society: My world Is CyWorld” that appeared in the September 25, 2005, issue of Business Week. It provides compelling evidence that on-line social networking communities have been embraced by this generation WORLDWIDE! For Lee Yu Jin, an 18-year-old freshman at Osan College in South Korea, Cyworld isn’t just another Website. It’s the nexus of pretty much everything she does. The graphic design student posts all of her artwork and school papers on the site. She puts up photos of her friends, her family, and her parties. She keeps a daily blog there and chats with her boyfriend via the site’s instant-messaging service. She even meets new friends, when their avatars, or digital stand-ins, stop by her Cyworld site. “I simply can’t do without it,” says Lee. “If someone is to block Cyworld today, I’ll probably have to sue the person.”

It looks like SK Communication looks deﬁnitely made the right investment. The trafﬁc in pictures and blogging posts is enormous. Picture posting and viewing of picture galleries is now the most addictive part of CyWorld. Revenues in this area are ahead of music and just behind gaming revenues, averaging $3.40 (US dollar) per user. In Silicon Valley, and throughout the advertising world, all eyes—including your students’—are on Facebook and MySpace. Keep your eyes out for a slew of others that may follow, however, supported by HUGE advertising and marketing campaigns—to the tune of millions of dollars—that organizations like SK Communications can afford to spend. This year—2006—is destined to be the year that Social Networking Communities have matured and taken the global stage!

”Students tend to think Facebook is secure because it is somewhat restricted – members must have an email address that ends in .edu.” Student interview published by the Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio, in November 2005

Five Issues you Face

Should your school be concerned about commercial social networking communities? Yes! Social networking communities are presenting ﬁve issues that your organization and staff are having to deal with: 1. Your IT department is having to deal with technical issues 2. Commercial social networking websites are using your brand that you have carefully cultivated over many, many years 3. Commercial social networking websites are capturing data and information about your students and alumni that your development ofﬁce should be receiving 4. Your school and college has to deal with issues that develop within social networking communities 5. Students are disclosing personal information that could come back to haunt them

Your IT department is having to deal with technical issues.

With up to 80 percent of a student body accessing Facebook and MySpace, uploading photos and accessing photos, both high schools and college IT departments are having to deal with a signiﬁcant demand on their Internet lines and hardware. Warburg College Information Technology Services elected to block access to the website because of the enormous load it was putting on its servers and Internet lines.

Baylor University’s IT department shared with their students why they were getting locked out of Facebook periodically. Apparently their problem results from the way Internet Explorer is designed. They carefully explained that when students open and view friends’ photos and information, IE leaves these connections open for 24 hours. If one student looks at 20 different proﬁles of other students, the university computer system will keep the 20 connections open for 24 hours. Their computer system then reaches a maximum number of connections open. When this happens, no one can get into Facebook until 24-hour-old connections fall off. That makes it a hit-or-miss affair for students trying to get through to Facebook. In an attempt to quickly solve this issue, their IT department suggests students download Firefox, which handles connections differently. In a relatively brief period of time, a number of colleges and high schools are beginning to block student access to Facebook: •

•

St. Norbert College posted information to explain to students that Facebook does not encrypt students’ passwords, so anyone can intercept it. They advise students NOT to use their St. Norbert College password, and if they have, to change it immediately. Palm Beach Atlantic University blocked access to both MySpace.com and Facebook because a group on Facebook called “Operation Destroy PBA’s Firewall” was providing information on how to bypass PBA’s ﬁrewall. Not only did this violate the school’s computer usage policy, it was a federal crime. The University of New Mexico’s CIRT department elected to ﬂat out block Facebook from their servers. Students on campus found themselves unable to access their Facebook accounts unless they dialed into AOL or another noncollege Internet access provider. The technical administrators cited the following major issues: • • •

Facebook sends a great deal of unsolicited email traffic to university faculty, staff and students. Facebook mimicked the color and design of the official UNM website, including their UNM logo, which caused their legal counsel to raise issues of copyright and trademark infringement Facebook requires students to use their UNM Net ID to register. Because of the design similarity, students used the same password for Facebook as they did for the campus web tools. This prompted officials, who were concerned that security breaches on Facebook’s website could jeopardize their stewardship responsibility to the security of their student and college data, to pull the plug

Administrators at some colleges are blocking student access to social networking sites because of religious or philosophical reasons: •

The United Arab Emirates issued the following statement on their website: “We apologize that the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates.”

•

Pope John XXIII Regional High School told students to stop participating in social networking websites like MySpace, Xanga and Facebook because of their concern about content and members’ photos that were against the philosophy of the school and religious beliefs. Saint Ursula Academy sent emails to parents telling them the school has blocked Facebook and six other social networking websites because they were concerned about the amount of data and personal information the students were sharing on the sites.

Does a high school or college have the right to block a website? It depends. A number of lawsuits have already been ﬁled after schools banned, blocked or demanded students or a student delete their accounts on social networking websites. Districts that tread down this path need to get advice from their attorneys. However, that being said, your organization should immediately build a policy of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable and begin to gain feedback from your community and parents. Armed with that, your attorneys will have a better idea of how they can help you make sure you don’t end up in a lawsuit. Also consider including in your student access agreements the right to block websites or take disciplinary action against students. The Electronic Freedom Frontier has identiﬁed some guidance for high schools—http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/fag-students.php

As social networking sites continue to expand and engage and involve your students and alumni, you are left with issues while they use your brand and get rich doing it, too!

Commercial social networking websites are using your brand that you have carefully cultivated over many, many years.

One thing I’ve learned after networking with private school and college administrators and consultants over the last couple of decades is how important the brand of a college and university is. At one point or another, organizations hold seemingly endless meetings to gain a collective understanding of what their brand and message should be and then spend an enormous amount of money protecting their brand and their intellectual property. They invest heavily in communicating this information to the public, alumni and contributors

In researching this white paper, I liked a statement by Larry R. Faulker, president of The University of Texas at Austin, when he talked about how important brand is to their community. (In an interesting side note, he reminds us the origins of branding started with Texas ranchers trying to distinguish their cattle from others.) “The University of Texas at Austin is many things to many people. It is superior teaching and research. It is opportunity. It is the ability to transform lives for the betterment of society. All of these aspects contribute to the university “brand,” which is a name we give to the overall perception that the larger world has of The University of Texas at Austin. The concept of a brand had its origin right here in Texas, where ranchers marked their cattle to differentiate them from others. But the word has a far broader meaning today. A brand is not simply a mark, logo or symbol. It denotes a pledge the university makes to people who look to it for leadership and excellence in higher education. It is important that we deliver on this pledge, that we tirelessly work to strengthen it, and that we effectively communicate it to the public.” Shirley C. Raines, president of The University of Memphis shares the following explanation of brand to her campus. “Everything we do as a University impacts what people think of us. From what takes place inside the classroom to what they see on our campus - from a simple University handout to a full-blown recruitment campaign - it is all a reﬂection of our University’s brand. Our brand is measured by what people know about us and feel about us. Much more than a logo, our brand is our image . . . it’s our reputation . . . and it must be managed with great care.” How is this brand impacted when commercial websites require students to use their campus .edu email address in order to participate? How is brand affected when a commercial website enables alumni to create their own reunions as Classmates.com does, as well as others who group all students and/or alumni under the banner or ﬂag of the institution? Patricia Tan suggested in her brand features-brand speak blog that universities follow the lessons from some of the top universities: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Focus on the experience, not the product. Stick to one idea. Speak with one voice. Remember: the brand exists in the people.

While a key feature of branding is the logo and identity statement, Tan reminds universities to remember that the experience is something that walks with their students and alumni every day of their lives. Facebook has become an “ad hoc” campus organization that is capturing signiﬁcant time and energy from your students. Students are joining groups and organizations and networking with others through the tools Facebook provides.

While your alumni and development office build participation in annual giving on the experiences and activities in which your alumni participated in while in school, it will be difficult to build future campaigns for a generation of students who spend an inordinate amount of time online “poking” others. Throughout the decades, campus life has been filled with events and activities that all generations shared. Tailgate parties, social events and group activities create a sense of nostalgia as time goes on. With more than 80 percent of students on the average campus participating in Facebook, your students’ future nostalgic feelings are being created in their experiences and time on Facebook. Your risk is the significantly diminished value your students place in and feel for your institution—value that had always been a standard part of the college experience. It’s your brand that makes them who they are! About six years ago, I contacted nearly 100 college presidents and the presidents of associations of which colleges are members. My concern then, as it is now, is that commercial websites like Classmates.com, Reunion.com, Planetalumni.com and others are using schools’ brands and images to collect members into these websites’ own communities, with the goal of generating revenue for the websites’ owners.

Apparently it wasn’t an issue at the time. As a result, Classmates.com as an example, has grown to more than 30 million users. Today, it’s not unusual for 10 to 20 percent of alumni from an organization to be registered on Classmates.com, which uses the college’s name and assembles the alumni in a common college community, thereby enabling alumni to even schedule their own reunions. What seemed obvious to me is that with more and more alumni using commercial websites like Classmates.com, Reunion.com and others, a pattern of behavior is emerging that will be very hard to break. The more people use something, the more they build their loyalty. All of these sites ask user to create a proﬁle page and to build connections between friends. As they build these connections and update their data, it makes it more difﬁcult for someone to stop using the site. They have too much time invested to quit.

Commercial social networking websites are capturing information about your students and alumni that your development ofﬁce should be getting

Forty percent of all colleges (less than two percent of high schools) in the United States have adopted alumni online directories and communities to gather email addresses and other data from their alumni. The point is to communicate more frequently with less effort, collect donations and build networks within their alumni. Alumni associations that don’t have online directories and communities are facing significant competition among their young alumni who rely on commercial networking communities. The registration forms on commercial networking communities capture a huge amount of data about your alumni. And, to the surprise of advancement officers we know, most students fill in every single line of information requested. The amount of data and information provided to the public and fellow classmates would make any development officer delirious with excitement. Your students are providing a rich assortment of data that shows their interest or participation in: • • • •

clubs, groups and organizations on and off campus events and activities classes sports and club sports

They provide a signiﬁcant amount of additional information, like: • • • •

who their friends are photos hobbies, interests favorite, books, colors, cars, places

Knowledge of the types of activities, interests, groups and organizations helps any development officer craft a more customized ask of alumni. The problem is, the information about events, activities and groups they belonged to is on a commercial website and will not be available to the development officers. Colleges that I’ve spoken to who face FERPA regulations are astounded at the amount of data students are sharing with others on their website. It appears that although the government wants to protect their privacy and information, students seem to care little or have yet to realize the implications of sharing so much data. Six years ago when I contacted nearly 100 college presidents and presidents of college associations, we had another concern that we still have today. The concern is that colleges are missing out on important information like address, phone and email changes and other valuable data updates that alumni put on these commercial websites instead. The information that alumni provide these commercial networking websites is not then available to help your development department: • Communicate needs in annual giving and capital campaigns • Send monthly eNewsletters to keep alumni informed • Network with alumni Years ago, sites like Classmates.com were using interesting survey techniques to get information that would help development efforts. For example, one of their questions was “Describe the type of car you drive.” Anyone who answers “luxury” might rate higher on a development officer’s call list if that data were available through a university sponsored community.

School... to Co h g i H lleg m o r e F

As students continue to update data and information within social networking sites like Facebook.com, they solidify a relationship and develop behaviors that will be hard to change. As their relationship with the commercial websites deepen, the chances of them coming to a college’s website to update data, learn about events, contribute or network with others becomes more and more remote. In an industry obsessed with capturing wealth-related information about their alumni, advancement ofﬁces are missing out on the biggest bonanza of data of the century. School districts that are not creating their own password-protected communities are losing out on ways they can build and enhance relationships and increase the chances of gaining support on future levies. Today, when you look at colleges’ reactions to student social networking websites, it becomes apparent that they still don’t seem to understand what they are giving up by not providing their students with college-approved social networking sites. By allowing current students and alumni to continue using other sites unchecked, the traditional alumni association will become less important as its relationships with its alumni—who would formerly have relied on the association to connect them with others— fade into the distance.

“Identity theft is the nation’s fastest growing crime” Federal Bureau of Investigation Statistics and the Federal Trade Commission

Your college has to deal with issues that develop within social networking communities.

In July of 2004, my ﬁrm held a client conference in Las Vegas. One of the side bar topics of alumni professionals attending was Facebook.com. With fewer than 100 colleges connected through Facebook at that time, our clients were already concerned about the long-term effects on their goals and strategies. The hundreds of colleges I’ve spoken with since then are all dealing with issues caused by commercial social networking websites over which they have no control. For example: •

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Using Facebook.com’s group feature, Penn State students created an instant group of people who admitted they stormed the ﬁeld after The Ohio State football game. University Police used the information to bring charges against those students. A student at Fisher College in Boston was expelled because of his online critique of a campus police ofﬁcer. Northern Kentucky University students received university code of conduct violations after posting an incriminating photo on Facebook.com. The photo showed the students in their dorm room with a keg in the background.

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In October, I was on the phone talking with a residence hall director from a Pennsylvania state college. During our conversation, he received an email informing him that a student placed on his proﬁle page a photo of himself in which he had a gun pointing to his head. The residence hall director was reporting that he now had to start an investigation to see if the student had mental health issues that could make him suicidal or if he had a gun on campus that could potentially threaten others.

Most colleges are struggling to come up with policies and guidelines to address the issues surrounding Facebook.com. To most administrators, the site grew with such enormity and so rapidly they were blindsided. Besides the issues that student services/residence hall administrators have found themselves dealing with, Information Technology departments in some cases are making signiﬁcant long-range decisions in response to the explosion of these websites.

Students are exposing personal information.

There are two major issues students are facing today when participating in social networking communities: • •

Identity theft Exposing too much personal information

Identity theft What is identity theft? It refers to crimes in which someone wrongfully obtains and uses another person’s personal data. (i.e. name, date of birth, social security number, driver’s license number, credit cards, bank account information, phone card information) for any purpose. Identity thieves don’t want to steal your students’ money, they want to steal their name and reputation and become them. Once they have the students’ identity, the thieves can fraudulently obtain identiﬁcation cards, driver licenses, birth certiﬁcates, social security numbers and travel visas as well as open bank accounts and acquire credit cards. According to a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report, 17 percent of identity thieves used the personal information to open at least one new account such as a new credit card, new loan, new telephone service, etc. For most victims, identify theft does not become apparent to them until a year or so after their information has been stolen. That’s when bill collectors and credit card companies start calling, and victims learn their credit rating is in shambles.

While identity theft tends to be an entrepreneurial business of con artists, it is already becoming an organized business enterprise. A New York identity theft ring was recently caught and charged with stealing the identities and affecting the credit histories of more than 30,000 victims. The ring used stolen information to charge huge sums to credit card numbers, empty bank accounts and fraudulently obtain loans. Those who experience identity theft are not alone. Nearly 28 million Americans have been victims of some form of identity theft within the past ﬁve years, according to a September 2003 FTC survey. In that survey, the FTC reported more than half of all reported complaints were Internet related. Consumer advocates and security experts say identity theft crimes will only become more common and the criminals who commit them more daring. For students, social networking sites are an exciting new way for them to connect with each other. With little history on how to behave and belong, and with no acceptable norms, students are releasing everything about themselves out to communities of friends and strangers. Among the information they are sharing with others are: • • • • • • •

Birth date Email address IM (instant messaging) Home address Cell phone number Residence hall room You name it—personal information including, “I got drunk, laid, cheated on my test” and other information

There are a couple ways your students could innocently give up their identity. Anyone could get on a social networking website and surf until they find someone who posted their home address and birth date and their email address. Once identified, the con artist can do one of two things: Phishing Phishing is a technique used to make the recipient of an email think they are getting an official email from an organization. My wife fell prey to this when she received an official announcement from PayPal indicating they needed some information from her. She innocently provided her credit card information and the special code on the back of her credit card. Fortunately, she shared the experience with me and instantly called to cancel her credit card. Think how easy it would be to dupe your students. Imagine this scenario: Your student receives an official looking email from MasterCard indicating there was some suspiciouslooking charges on her card in Los Angeles. The email says Mastercard is contacting her to find out if the charges are correct. She can check “yes” or “no”—but the HTML email also requires her to authenticate herself. To do so, she has to provide her account number, expiration date and her “special code on the back”. It’s really that easy. I could see “computer banks” in Europe, Mexico, India—where workers earn a few dollars a day—skimming information for unscrupulous others to use.

Pretexting Pretexting is very similar to Phishing but requires a bit more time to pull off. In this case, the con artist, posing as the bank or credit card company, will call your student on his cell phone, give him a plausible story and ask him for the key pieces of information they need to ﬁnish stealing his identity. Imagine how a naive student would respond when “Sally” from the student health center calls indicating they have a new policy on campus to inform students about binge drinking. She says she needs to schedule an appointment with him, but “Sally” says she needs his student ID number. When he can’t remember it, “Sally” says, “That’s okay. Just give me your Social Security number and I’ll look it up.” Bingo! Now armed with our student’s name, birth date, home address and Social Security number, the con artists or their team can apply for credit cards and begin a spending spree in less than 30 days. According to the www.ed.gov website: • • •

Nearly half of all college students receive credit card applications on a daily or weekly basis. Many students throw these away without destroying them. Nearly a third of students rarely, if ever, reconcile their credit card and checking account balances. Almost 50 percent of students have had grades posted for students to see using their social security numbers instead of their last name

Disclosing too much personal information While in the long run social networking communities provide many positive beneﬁts, students need to understand that posting content could result in: • • •

losing a job opportunity in the future identity theft personal harassment

Students need some education in how to safely use social networking communities. First of all, they don’t realize that the information they provide on these websites will be around for a very long time. Bragging that “I’m 21 and love to get drunk” might be something they would brag about to their friends. However, putting it online for others to see, for other organizations to capture, can have negative effects in the future. It’s no stretch of the imagination to think of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other intelligence organizations potentially gathering any publicly posted information for later use. In fact, an article in The Missourian reported that Linda Kaiser, director of career services for the University’s College of Education, speaks with two types of people—employers and parents—who use Facebook to screen candidates for employment. While statements like “I love Coronas” or “I’m on Facebook to get laid” might seem innocent at the time, they might not look promising to future employers.

An article in the Daily Pennsylvania by Melody Joy Krammer sums up the potential long-term effect of students’ participating on Facebook.

Investigative reporters are just waiting for the day when students currently in college are running for political office and are holding corporate positions. Why? Our jobs will be so much easier. Want a Supreme Court nominee’s stance on abortion? Check his old Facebook groups. Need to know where a certain future president was during his National Guard duty? It’d probably be on his blog. I am really worried about the amount of information we are putting online without considering the repercussions. Every blog entry you make and every social networking site you belong to—whether it be MySpace, the Facebook or Friendster—can easily be stored on someone’s hard drive, waiting for the day when some nefarious columnist wants to write a scathing editorial about why you shouldn’t be nominated for the Supreme Court. The Facebook, one of the most popular social networking systems for college students, has “recently expanded to all schools in the nation,” and there are “now more than 8.5 million unique users” who use the service, according to spokesman Chris Hughes. He says that the site “gets almost 200 million page views in any given 24-hour time period,” which means it ranks “10th in terms of overall traffic on the entire Web.” If I personally created a database of 8.5 million college students tracking their birth dates, political affiliations, sexual orientations, interests, daily schedules, hometowns and photographs, privacy advocates would be enraged. If I told these privacy advocates that most of these 8.5 million college students continually updated their information, making it easy for me to track exactly what they were doing, they’d probably cry. Of course, this information is not only advantageous to would-be journalists. In June, the Department of Defense began working with a marketing firm to create a similar database to help the military identify potential recruits. A director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center called the system “an audacious plan to target-market kids, as young as 16, for military solicitation.”

So what can we do? There are four things you can do immediately: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Form a task force that includes students Adopt social networking educational programs Ten guidelines for students Adopt internet based social networking programs

1. Form a task force that includes students Part of the stresses both students and administrators are feeling today is that neither knows what to expect of the other. Social networking communities have become a significant “thing” on campus overnight, and administrators have definitely been caught off guard. As a result, a series of events are placing students and administrators at odds. Knee-jerk reactions are occurring to protect data and infrastructure. Students experiencing an enormous sense of freedom of expression are totally clueless about the long-term effects of information and comments they provide online. As a result, we recommend that you assemble a task force within your school or campus to evaluate what your policy should be. Your committee should include administrators, faculty/teachers and students/parents. Be sure to include people who have a variety of opinions. From our research, not all students are supportive of the time-consuming social networking communities. Make sure their voice and suggestions are heard. Your task force is responsible for: I. Determining your organization’s official position regarding social networking communities. Most organizations recognize social networking communities as a new media tool that enables students to express themselves. Others will find these sites totally offensive—not reflecting their moral and philosophical values. As stated earlier in this white paper, a number of religiously affiliated high schools are trying to ban/prevent use of these sites or have already done so. The United Arab Emirates is an example of an entire nation that has decided to block citizens’ access to Facebook in particular. At any rate, this should be the easiest step for your organization to take. But take it soon!

II. Creating a series of rules and regulations for social networking use Your next step it to develop a series of rules and regulations that provide students, administrators and others on campus the ground rules that your institution has taken on this issue. By all means, include your university/school attorneys in these discussions, but don’t let them dominate the discussion. Their job should be to share in the conversation and to make sure the discussion is within the guidelines of current law. If you haven’t yet developed your ofﬁcial positions on these issues, you’d better get busy. Task your committee with drafting ofﬁcial university positions on: • • • • • •

What to do when students post photographs that depict actions contrary to university policy, such as showing themselves drinking or smoking illegal substances What to do if students post a photograph that shows them inﬂicting harm on themselves, like pointing a gun at their head or having a rope wrapped around their neck How to handle groups that depict others negatively, promote racism or belittle a person How to deal with a student who is demeaning and degrading to another student Dealing with students who harass others What to do when a student registers a page as if he/she is the President, a professor or others on campus and uses the site to mock that campus ofﬁcial

Students need to know the consequences of failing to follow the rules on these matters. Whatever you do, make sure the rules and guidelines you develop are consistent with your current policies and are enforceable. In areas where you won’t be able to enforce a rule, provide clear guidance to reinforce the training you give students and administrators.

For example, here are steps some colleges and schools have already taken: •

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Officials at the University of California, Santa Barbara, announced the school could discipline students living on campus for photographs and information posted on their profiles providing evidence of illegal activity, such as drinking in the residence halls. At the University of Delaware, officials have notified students that violations of the academic conduct codes would result in charges brought against them. A sophomore was expelled from Fisher College, New Hampshire, in October 2005, because of comments made about a campus police officer on Facebook. Authorities judged the comments to be in violation of university student code. Two students were charged with criminal trespass for storming the field during the October 8, 2005, Penn State vs. Ohio State football game. Administrators identified the students after seeing the online Facebook group that encouraged and boasted about the violation. The University of Georgia has decided not to use Facebook as a resource to review a potential job applicant’s background. “As far as UGA’s policy is concerned, when we do background checks, we go through legal agencies for criminal background,” said Associate Director of Human Resources Sige Burden.”

2. Adopt social networking educational programs Like it or not, you’re in a new business now—the business of teaching students how to use social networking communities! I speak with hundreds and hundreds of administrators at colleges around the world and constantly encourage them to adopt their own social networking communities. While lately more administrators appreciate what I’m telling them, I still meet many who believe this is an area they shouldn’t be involved in. I remind them that they never wanted to be in the business of educating and informing students about date rape, nor in the business of educating them about binge drinking. But as our culture changes—quickly and continually—it’s critical to address the new important issues that arise. Since you’re already educating and informing students about other tough issues, it makes no sense to be afraid of providing a university-approved social networking community. Instead, take advantage of the power of social networking communities—they are highly effective tools for teaching. It’s up to you to show your students how to use them the right way to communicate and network with fellow students.

As an educational institution, you’re already generating discussions and sharing deﬁnitions about date rape. You’re probably already delivering extensive training programs on how to drink responsibly. Now it’s time to start training your prospective students and newly admitted students how to responsibly participate in social networking communities. How much time you commit to this effort depends on your institution. Let’s take a look at what colleges are doing to help educate students be socially responsible drinkers. More than 120 colleges and universities now require ﬁrstyear students to complete “AlcoholEdu,” a three-hour course developed by Outside the Classroom, Inc. The program, provided by a third-party organization, is tailored to any size incoming freshman class and costs anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 per year to provide to the students. A recent article on student binge drinking reported that an annual survey by alcohol companies asked what is happening on campus. Drinking always tops the list. This past year, the survey indicated social networking sites like Facebook may be closing in on drinking as the number one thing happening on campus. The alcohol industry is understandably concerned. Frankly, I expect that, while the alcohol industry’s public relations agencies will be working to promote safe and informed drinking, those responsible for increasing sales will see Facebook as a great way to increase market share. Expect to see a lot of paid alcohol ads on Facebook.com. as well as for other activities aimed at creating buzz—all at very affordable costs. 3. TEN guidelines for your students to follow when participating in online directories and communities One of the really fun things for students is the realization that Facebook/ MySpace/Sconex/Xanga are a separate world of which their parents don’t partaicipate and, in most cases, aren’t even aware of. At a recent dinner with friends and family, their sophomore daughter was shocked to hear that I knew about Facebook. Students have the misconception that Facebook/MySpace/ Sconex/Xanga is a private getaway that the rest of the world has not discovered. With no rules, no training, no experience on how to act and behave, students are creating issues for themselves and others as they blindly participate in an arena where society/college/school have failed to set rules or regulations. It’s up to you and your organization to help them—they need rules of conduct so they don’t self destruct!

Here are 10 simple guidelines to share with students: 1. Limit your contact information to name and email address 2. Use options available to show additional information to friends 3. Don’t include information that could help an identity thief, like: a. Birthdate b. Social Security Number c. Banking information 4. Don’t accept connections from people you don’t know 5. Be careful of what you say and how you say it online a. Think before you join a group—“Will the group offend a person, a place or a nationality? b. Think before you post information—“Will this content give an employer, friend, community member the wrong impression of who I am?” c. What you say online will still be there 20 years from now. Be careful of saying something you’ll regret later. 6. While you may think self-deprecating humor like pointing a gun at your head to show that you are stressed is funny, university ofﬁcials have your well being in mind—they will be forced to contact you. 7. Set a reasonable limit on how long you use the website each day. 8. Report to university ofﬁcials anyone you feel is harassing you. 9. Periodically check and delete unwanted connections. 10. Actively expand your circle of friends in the real world. Spend time with others who are like you. 4. Adopt Internet-based social networking programs for: • • • •

Schools Alumni Admissions Residence Halls and Student Services

The purpose of this white paper is to present facts and information to help schools and colleges understand the potential long-term effects they may experience if they 1) don’t adopt a playbook for dealing with commercial websites, and 2) begin to help administrators create non-competitive social networking tools for their students and alumni. By adopting Internet technology that students are already embracing, colleges will take the ﬁrst step in being able to capture data and nurutre the students’ sense of stewardship.

Schools Let’s look at how a typical teen uses the Internet. Today the typical 17 year old has an Instant Message “friends” list about a foot long, is registered in MySpace and two or three other social networking websites and is spending an average of 48 minutes a day online. Students’ online contact with their friends today is becoming more important than connecting in person. That wasn’t the case just five years ago. Chances are a 17 year old was using the home computer for games primarily. Social networking sites didn’t exist, broadband was just ramping up and students’ time on the home computer was significantly less than it is today. If you look at a typical 12 year old today, you will find them online sending Instant Messages to their friends, surfing and many are starting to join online communities. We are recommending that junior high/middle and high schools begin to adopt password protected online communities for their students. A password protected community will still provide students the opportunity to connect with their friends but it will protect them from cyber stalkers or accidentally happening upon X rated member sites with millions of members. While not meant to replace students participation in commercial online communities, a school endorsed online community is really the beginnings of an online yearbook. When you think about it your school could take a giant leap forward in engaging the students by giving them the opportunity to update and maintain their own “yearbook” page. Because this is a school sponsored and managed tool, students would have to agree to abide by the rules and regulations of the community and would risk losing their opportunity to participate if they didn’t. By adopting a school endorsed community • • •

Students, particularly younger students will have a safe - password protected area to connect with each other The school will be able to gather data and information that can become part of an alumni online community when the student graduates You help teach students how to protect themselves and participate in social networking communities

Predictions • •

Schools that do not adopt a “school endorsed” school community will fail to teach their students how to responsibly participate in online communities The schools emerging or existing alumni association will lose an opportunity to gather students in the school “approved” alumni website.

Alumni In January 2005, a colleague and I conducted an informal focus group at a small Eastern college to understand their use and acceptance of Facebook, then called www. thefacebook.com I was concerned then, as I am now, that students’ use of social networking websites outside of the university was setting a behavior pattern that would eventually make alumni associations irrelevant to graduating students and alumni. Our discussion revealed that: • •

Students assumed there was an implied condoning of the website because the site required a student’s college .edu address to register on and access the site. Some of the younger alumni were still updating their site and communicating with students on campus.

The quote by Mark Zuckerberg confirms that Facebook is aiming not just to develop a relationship with your students. They seek to maintain that relationship beyond graduation. Recently we held discussions with 14 faculty members and students at State University of New York Cobleskill. Students reflected the attitude of students around the country as they described their feelings about and relationship with their Facebook profile. One student, with a great deal of emotion and excitement stated “Facebook is like God.” I’m certain that her comment wasn’t intended to literally compare Facebook to God, but was meant in the same vein as John Lennon’s comment to the effect that the Beatles were as popular as God. To her, Facebook, is a VERY important part of her life. So, here is the problem for your alumni and development office. As Facebook, MySpace, UConnect and other social networking websites capture more of your students’ hearts, minds and time, you will lose out on the ability to develop meaningful relationships with them because they are putting the valuable data/ information you want on social networking websites instead. If your college had adopted your own social networking online directory as I suggested in my 1998 book, “Create a NET-Centered College Campus,” you would have had SEVEN years of data about students hobbies, interests, clubs and organizations to which they belonged, enabling you to send targeted emails to engage and inform them.

Ten years from now, if your college and university develops its own social networking community now, you will be able to keep in touch by email with alums: • • • • •

who were taught by Dr. Joseph Conrad who is retiring after 30 years of teaching Introduction to Physiology. who attended “the Grateful Dead” concert and invite them to an alumni gathering. who were part of the Orientation Leaders program, so you could ask them to become an alumni volunteer student recruiter. who were members of the Student Government, so you could invite them to be a part of the colleges study to identify a 10-year strategic plan. who were members of the Chess Club to ask their support in sending the current members to China for an international chess event.

Your advancement ofﬁce is missing out, too. For example, if you start your own student social networking community now: • •

Your annual giving officer will be able to send fun animated eCards to encourage them to begin giving as little as $5. This could be an initial gesture to create a behavior pattern encouraging their stewardship. The development office will be able to identify all the alumni who participated in an online opinion poll five years ago supporting the need for a capital campaign and invite them to help support the upcoming campaign.

Evaluate the cost. For a small yearly investment, your student online community will put at your ﬁngertips information and tools that will provide hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of dollars of additional contributions. Predictions • •

If your campus does not develop campus-wide social networking communities, students will form strong emotional ties with Facebook and will drift away from your own alumni association. Facebook will follow the path Classmates.com has taken and begin to attract alumni of all ages to participate in their online community.

Admissions Your admissions ofﬁce is about to experience a signiﬁcant shift in how you recruit students. Why not take your cue from social networking websites? Start using tools and services to capture important information and to reinforce your brand to prospective students! Think about it.

Your prospective students spend hours browsing the profile pages of others. You have thousands of prospective students who also provide detailed information about themselves on multiple social networking websites. Why not use some of the same techniques to engage and deliver news and information to prospective students? In the past, you were able to control the type of information students received about your college. You have always been able to promote your brand and image through the information you shared with students. Students received video tapes, CD’s, glossy brochures and information all supporting the great things the college has to offer. Students requested information, and you provided it. Today’s Y-Generation goes to blogs to get information about things they are interested. For example, a local youth, Timothy St. Hilaire, who lives in a small rural Ohio town of less than 1,000 people, started a blog called, www.oldgrandmahardcore.com to write about his 69-year-old grandmother who lives with his family and who plays video games up to 10 hours a day. The blog started out innocently enough, but after a while it was attracting hundreds of thousands of hits a day. If the Beach Boys, made “Little old lady from Pasadena” famous, this youth has turned his grandmother into an icon to youth who play video games. With all the interest by bloggers, gaming companies took notice and started sending their games to her to review. Blogs have turned completely unknown people into “stars” overnight. Featured on CBS Evening News, the front page of the Washington Post and on Good Morning America, Barbara St. Hilaire is destined to show up on boxes of electronic games for the rest of her life! So how does that relate to your admissions program? Because one day soon, a student, parent or person with too much time on their hands and a passion to write, will create a blog talking about your college. If you’re lucky, this person will write in glowing terms about all the wonderful things at your institution. If you’re not and the information is negative, you risk this individual’s blog becoming a magnet to other people, the media, parents and prospective students! Your admission office is soon going to realize that these Internet sites take away their control of the admission and recruitment process. Not adopting an Internet strategy that safeguards your control of your brand and image will have devastating and long-term effects. Within a few short years—no later than 2008—students will be making decisions on attending organizations based on blogs and comments provided by other students in social networking communities. About four million teens – or 19% of 12- to 17-year-olds who use the Internet – have created a blog, according to a study published in November 1005 by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Social networking sites provide internal blogs that can influence the viewer. It only makes sense that your organization should be offering this same opportunity to students on your own web servers with your own community—where your chances of promoting your brand and maintaining students’ sense of loyalty are much higher.

To help you understand what you can do today, consider a service my ﬁrm—IAC—offers: the Prospective Student Online Community. Leveraging existing student Internet behavior, you use IAC’s Prospective Student Online Community (PSO Community) to invite prospective students to register and share their interests, hobbies, career goals, favorite books/colors, etc. Once they register, they can search for others like themselves who are considering going to the college. The community doesn’t actually connect the students—no contact information is made public. Instead, it lets prospective students browse information about other prospective students. While they’re browsing, they can read news and information about the college. IAC developed this program based on studies of how teens use the Internet. The Henry Kaiser Foundation’s study, for example, showed that students spend less than ﬁve minutes a day reading email, but more than 48 minutes online browsing websites. By adopting an well-organized admissions Internet strategy—and IAC’s PSO Community can be an important part of it—your organization will be meeting your prospective students where they live and matching their expectations. Predictions •

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In the very near future—possibly 2007—you’ll see the ﬁrst colleges advertising to high school students on Facebook, Xanga, MySpace and other social networking websites. These sites will adopt Google-type advertising techniques, and colleges will pay a per-student rate for searches and clicks about their institutions. Your students’ decision on what college to attend will be greatly affected by what they read in online blogs and personal pages of other random individuals’ social networking pages

Orientation, Residence Hall and Student Online Communities While the ﬁrst step in offering campus-wide online communities would be to offer a PSO Community, the next logical step is to migrate students into an Orientation Online Community. Think of the Orientation Online Community (OO Community) as a Freshman directory on steroids! Instead of just looking at photos, students will be able to update their proﬁle page and information about themselves, and powerful search tools will enable them to be found by others. As previously mentioned, a student could search for someone from Akron who plays disc golf, likes photography and wants to be an attorney. As a way to get your foot in the social networking door, your college should consider adopting an online yearbook, built around your own social networking data and engine.

Many colleges around the country have stopped producing yearbooks due to the cost and effort required. One way to differentiate yourself from Facebook and MySpace is by positioning your OO Community as the beginning of their life-long Yearbook Proﬁle Page. By doing this, students will be reminded that their photos and information will be available as a scrap book for them to enjoy the rest of their lives and for others to enjoy, too. While Facebook is pretty much an online directory/yearbook, I’m suggesting that you reclaim your right to provide your students with their own online yearbook. Some of the beneﬁts you gain by introducing an OO Community include: • •

You have an early opportunity to shape their behavior. You’ll retain more students by giving them a stronger sense of interconnectedness because they know more about each other—because of the community you give them!

Did you ever hear of a Freshman Directory? Many colleges have adopted freshman directories as a way to help students widen their circle of friends. A natural next step for printed freshman directories is to post them online and include social networking tools. Residence Hall and Student Online Community I’ve spoken to hundreds of residence hall advisors who are excited about the prospects of using technology to provide a virtual online “housing” environment to complement the physical one they provide students. Most of the advisors I talk to understand their students take for granted the physical surroundings provided to them, but are awed and “impressed” with social networking online communities. The time their students spend online at these sites is certainly proof of that. An important way you can impress your students is to give them their own, collegesponsored online community—a Residence Hall and Student Online Community. Technology today is such that you can give each ﬂoor in your residence hall its own online community. Students will think of it as their own portal—while some information available to the public so that prospective students “sneak a peek” into what’s happening in a speciﬁc residence hall.

Expand this concept to include fraternities and sororities. We’ve even had some discussions with colleges who are contemplating applying this to large “commercial” apartments where students live, too. And don’t forget to give your commuting students their own space to connect with each other and to feel connected to the rest of the campus. IAC’s program provides the following tools for each residence hall ﬂoor/wing: • • • • • •

news postings birthdays this week opinion poll photos calendar of events listing of ofﬁcers

With Residence Hall and Student Online Communities, your floor advisors will be in charge of what content and photos go on their portal page. Their goal will be to provide a weekly snapshot of life on that floor. Only authorized individuals can post news stories and approve photos students want to post. There are benefits for everyone using this concept: •

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Admissions will be able to show the rest of the world that their residence halls are filled with fun people who celebrate birthdays and the successes of those who live on that floor. They will see photos of smiling, well-adjusted students kicking back, having fun. Multilevel security techniques will allow prospective students to see the portal “home” page, but keep them from digging any deeper. Alumni and advancement will benefit because all photos and information will be available for the life of the alum. If they wanted to hold a reunion of all individuals who were in a residence hall or even on a particular floor they could do so. Think about the power to create a nostalgic feeling when the alumni office sends an alum photos that were posted in the alum’s Residence Hall Online Community 10 years prior. Students will benefit, too! A Residence Hall Online Community will not only provide them their own daily/weekly newspaper of what’s happening with the people around them, but it will also give them the tools to expand their own circle of friends. For example, a student will be able to search for someone who lives in his/her hall who plays piano, chess, doesn’t smoke and is interested in photography. Search tools could show this person lives only two doors down or in a different residence hall. It’s a perfect tool to help them find a compatible roommate. Add in a classified ad tool, and students will be able to sell CD’s and other items to each other on campus. Parents will love being able to catch a glimpse of what’s happening in their son’s life on campus. Knowing the photos and news stories can only be added by your floor advisors, parents will be able read stories about what their daughter and her new friends are doing and see approved photos of students having fun. Residence hall administrators benefit, too. Not only will they be able to post calendar events and have each floor’s events populate their residence hall “happenings’ calendar, but they will also be able to send targeted emails effortlessly, survey students and hold elections online. Most importantly, adopting

this concept will enable students to do searches to ﬁnd more compatible roommates. While some administrators I’ve spoken to have, or are considering, six-ﬁgure packages to accomplish this, tools like the one IAC provides are extremely reasonable. Your Residence Hall and Student Online community should have tools and services your students can’t get from Facebook.com. Pull your team together and think about the “academic” and “organizational” tools and services that could be built into your community to draw students to the site.

Summary Whatever you decide to do, DO IT NOW! While some administrators have known about the stunning rate adoption of social networking tools for some time, many have not. Now is the time to “circle the wagons” and look for ways your organization can create policy, procedures and online communities to take back your brand and ensure that your organization—not some commercial networking website—is the one to collect the valuable information you need to foster a mutually beneﬁcial relationship with your alumni. Now isn’t the time to debate. You will serve your institution and your students better by immediately putting together a team to address the current situation and create your policies and procedures to control it in your favor. Don’t assume that because your students are all using Facebook, they won’t use the online community system you offer. •

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You have to Face UP to the kind of Internet experience your students are looking for. While you probably don’t want to try to prevent students from using commercial social networking sites, you can learn from their success and create your own social networking communities around themes and concepts speciﬁc to your organization. You’ve got too much to lose by not moving forward with your own social networking communities. You already have to set policies to handle issues that arise because of your students’ use of commercial sites, so why not launch your own version that will capture important information, engage students and build participation in campus activities. Prospective Student Online Community Orientation Online Community and Residence Hall and Student Online Community

will each provide unique applications, content and tools that interest students. Take this opportunity to establish your campus-wide social networking communities today!

About IAC IAC helps admissions, orientation, student affairs, residence halls, alumni and advancement engage and involve their students & alumni with Internet technologies. There is a void in your campus strategies. Adopt Campus Wide Online Communities to ďŹ ll that void. To ďŹ nd out how IAC can help, call 800-968-6004 x 220 520 South Main Akron, Ohio 44311 info@iaccorp.com Copyright @ 2006 Internet Association Corporation

520 South Main Street, Suite 2454 Akron, Ohio 44311-1010