Over break, I read an article in The Chronicle (about a company called College Prowler) that was caught creating (and administrating) Class of 2013 groups at hundreds of colleges and universities.
Brad Ward on Squared Peg wrote about this too (he is an admissions person at Butler U., and is is the one who uncovered it) noting that with admin rights to each group, the company had easy access to 1,000,000+ college students. As Brad said in the article, "That's huge."
Admissions officials are now creating their own "Official" 'Class of' pages for their incoming students, noting that this is one of the institutional growing pains presented by students' adoption of social networking sites.
Colleges and universities absolutely need to get more involved in creating an official presence within Facebook and elsewhere. It honestly shouldn't have taken this long (or for something like this) to happen.
I've spent the last three summers convening with my student interns, figuring out new ways of marketing the Libraries' Open House on Facebook. We've created a mascot who really, is only on Facebook. We created that mascot solely so that we could have a benign (read: not an over 30 person) presence in some of those 'Class of..' student groups. We create a Facebook event (and a page) for the Open House each year. We've tried Facebook ads (moderately successful) We all (including the mascot) invite as many friends as we possibly can to the event. That's about as far as it goes. Just thinking about all of it makes my head hurt.
Inevitably, each year, I am stymied by the fact that as a member of a student "Class of..." group, I still can't invite all of the members of that group to an event. Unless I am a group admin (I think.) Aha! Now, you too see the genius, or at least sheer boldness, of CollegeProwler's marketing scheme. If there was a way that we could invite, via Facebook, the entire freshman class at Penn State University Park to the Open House, the Open House would perhaps have an even bigger attendance.
If Universities create official 'Class of..." and other groups, this may at least help University-affiliated organizations and events gain some leverage within the Facebook environment. While I'm not advocating for barraging users with marketing strategies and ads (even if it is for something educationally useful), I'd like to see some advantages extended to University-affiliated groups on social networking sites. Is it time to begin creating custom environments (by school / by company / by geographic area) for Facebook users? Should the realm of student apps, like course schedules, the registrar, the Libraries, etc.. lay on top of and reside with Facebook social data? We've talked about doing this with the Facebook library app (for book recommendations), and it also holds unlimited promise for marketing. An article about iStanford, the iPhone app for Stanford students, noted:
Brad Ward on Squared Peg wrote about this too (he is an admissions person at Butler U., and is is the one who uncovered it) noting that with admin rights to each group, the company had easy access to 1,000,000+ college students. As Brad said in the article, "That's huge."
Admissions officials are now creating their own "Official" 'Class of' pages for their incoming students, noting that this is one of the institutional growing pains presented by students' adoption of social networking sites.
Colleges and universities absolutely need to get more involved in creating an official presence within Facebook and elsewhere. It honestly shouldn't have taken this long (or for something like this) to happen.
I've spent the last three summers convening with my student interns, figuring out new ways of marketing the Libraries' Open House on Facebook. We've created a mascot who really, is only on Facebook. We created that mascot solely so that we could have a benign (read: not an over 30 person) presence in some of those 'Class of..' student groups. We create a Facebook event (and a page) for the Open House each year. We've tried Facebook ads (moderately successful) We all (including the mascot) invite as many friends as we possibly can to the event. That's about as far as it goes. Just thinking about all of it makes my head hurt.
Inevitably, each year, I am stymied by the fact that as a member of a student "Class of..." group, I still can't invite all of the members of that group to an event. Unless I am a group admin (I think.) Aha! Now, you too see the genius, or at least sheer boldness, of CollegeProwler's marketing scheme. If there was a way that we could invite, via Facebook, the entire freshman class at Penn State University Park to the Open House, the Open House would perhaps have an even bigger attendance.
If Universities create official 'Class of..." and other groups, this may at least help University-affiliated organizations and events gain some leverage within the Facebook environment. While I'm not advocating for barraging users with marketing strategies and ads (even if it is for something educationally useful), I'd like to see some advantages extended to University-affiliated groups on social networking sites. Is it time to begin creating custom environments (by school / by company / by geographic area) for Facebook users? Should the realm of student apps, like course schedules, the registrar, the Libraries, etc.. lay on top of and reside with Facebook social data? We've talked about doing this with the Facebook library app (for book recommendations), and it also holds unlimited promise for marketing. An article about iStanford, the iPhone app for Stanford students, noted:
If you could create the de facto campus app for all those schools, giving college students information they need while connecting them with one other, you could create a far more useful, mobile version of Facebook. Add on an advertising network -- what college student wouldn't opt in to something that gave them free pizza coupons? -- and pretty soon you've got a colossal moneymaker.Could the social graph of Facebook offer up a data-rich backbone for accessing (and promoting) University services and events? I'll keep waiting for it to happen.
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