Earlier this year, I conducted several email interviews to prepare my column about social networking websites for the April 2007 issue of University Business: “Facebook, MySpace, and Co.â€
Sam Jackson, a high school senior who blogged his college admission process at The Sam Jackson College Experience, was admitted to Yale last December and started to use Facebook at that time to connect with the others members of the Class of 2011.
1) As an early admit of the class of 2011 at Yale, you got a chance to interact with your peers as early as December. Why is it something important to you?
Some Yalies who had dabbled with online networking when they were pre-frosh stopped by the online groups and pointed out that they ended up awkwardly removing a lot of their mysterious online friends once they got to school and started to make connections in the flesh; all the same, everyone seemed to agree that communicating online was a worthwhile use of time. The allure here is not so much the possibility of making friends before the start of the school year as it is the opportunity to get a taste of your future classmates. These messages back and forth offer illuminating glimpses, however brief, into the character and composition of the future class.
2) You did so on the Yale special website but also on Facebook. Which one offers the most interesting experience? Why did you ever consider using Facebook for this?
I took careful note of how many users were logging in and out of the site and how many threads were being posted in the early hours and days after admissions were posted online: many. That has leveled off since, with a steady number of new questions being posed to current students and admissions officers on the site. The more informal facebook has since garnered more activity, though more new students are currently registered on the Yale site than in the facebook 2011 group.
Both sites initially served the same purpose: as places for us to express our amazement and happiness with our acceptances. The experiences have diverged significantly. The adult-free Facebook thereafter became a place to develop a more complete picture of the early admitted students, while the admitted students site became a place to mine for information about Yale. The Yale site connects us with current students and is a great place to get answers to questions. Facebook is more social. More than a few Yalies found their friend-adding abilities blocked as they attempted to friend as many of the 2011 group as they could. It was an awe-inspiring first weekend on facebook as everyone talked very early into the morning about themselves and what everyone had in common on group discussion boards and on individual profile walls.
Everyone considered Facebook for more or less the same reason—it’s our natural inclination, since social networking sites are now just another part of our social spheres and online presence. Contact information was found on facebook and on the Yale site and more than a few private AIM conversations were had, but the Yale ‘official AIM chatroom’ apparently was not very much used. Facebook was the default because it was the common ‘language.’ If everyone is already logged into Facebook because they log on frequently, it is much simpler to navigate to the Yale group and check for activity than it is to log on to the Yale admitted site, which has an admittedly less familiar (and somewhat clunkier) interface.
3) Since you’ve started the whole college selection process, you’ve been reflecting on your blog on college marketing. In your opinion, do you think institutions should use social networking websites (their own or third parties’) in their recruiting efforts?
Yale’s admitted students website is just that—for admitted students only. There are two kinds of information that applicants are looking for: information about the school—programs, dorms, restaurants and the like—and information about each other. Facebook has largely supplanted the official site for the latter function, but the development team brilliantly added something which gives it special cachet over Facebook: targeted access to current students. Through its blogs and ‘interest matchmaking’ function, the site connects admitted students with current students. With a few clicks I can find someone to contact if I have any questions about, for instance, the Yale Political Union, that may not have been specifically answered in the forum threads or blog posts. It’s this additional ‘layer’ of information that Yale has taken the trouble to add which brings value to its site.
The success of any social networking site is always determined by the activity and engagement of its community. A proprietary site established by a school is a useful niche, because it represents a private ‘walled’ area which offers social connections between a related group of people who are explicitly interested in meeting one another. At the same time it poses logistical inconveniences to its users by demanding they juggle yet another login and web presence. It’s to that end that I would like to see an integration between one of these sites and another more mainstream SNS—a concept that I understand was actually under consideration from the development staff. The APIs are not so complete yet as to make this seamless but I think it is a venue for some interesting experimentation.
To achieve the goal of increasing access and providing useful information for students, I heartily recommend social networking sites such as Yale’s. It has been met with—in my informal polling—overwhelming favor. The Yale class of 2011 has been empowered by these tools to start making social connections months ahead of time, which can only lead to an even closer-knit community when matriculation turns into freshman orientation week. All the same I think that using this as anything but a ‘value added’ service for admitted students runs the risk of introducing a lot of ‘noise.’ The efficacy of social networking as a ‘cold call’ recruitment method is, I think, another question entirely. I don’t know that I would condone using these tools for ‘marketing’ –it constitutes an unwelcome intrusion into what is a teenage social context. However, a school is well served by developing a framework for the organic growth of its community of students, a community which has an undeniable online presence.