Are you responsible for your institution’s social networking website?
Do you manage your university’s Facebook Page or Group?
Are you in charge of the online community targeted to your alums or students?
Keep reading.
I’m currently working on the closing keynote I’ll give on July 23 at the eduWeb conference (as well as an upcoming University Business column on the topic):
It’s the community, stupid … 7-step plan to raise and nurture any community online
Blogs, wikis, podcasts, videocasts, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more have made their ways in higher education. Whether you work in admissions, communications, marketing, PR, student services, advancement, alumni associations, web services or information technology, it’s impossible to ignore this fireworks of new technologies. It’s easy to get blindsided. It’s difficult to see that it’s really not about the technology, but the community. While we can’t predict today what the next Facebook or YouTube will be, we can get ready for the online communities of tomorrow. It might take a village to raise a child, but what does it take to jump start and nurture a thriving online community? A bit of luck, a lot of work and my 7-step plan.
I’m looking for examples of successful – in terms of participation – online communities.
If you are the lucky community manager of such a web space, send me a quick note including some facts and stats at karine@collegewebeditor.com.
I’m also interested in your personal take about what it takes to create and develop a thriving online community.
So, tell us what the secret ingredient of any good online community is, be it a community of alums, prospective students, bloggers, readers, etc. by posting a comment.
I’ll try to share as many of THIS community’s ideas (with proper credit to its members) as possible in my talk.
We created a social networking site for incoming students. Once they were accepted, we sent them an email invite to our site (it is closed, only available through invitation).
Before we launched it, though, made sure to “break it in” a little. We had all the admissions counselors, several of our staff members and current students and a handful of faculty inhabit the site before they came, so there were already several groups formed (that would be of interest to them), conversations started, and people ready to welcome them into the group.
I would consider it successful, especially for our first internal social networking site. The invited students really took the initiative to make the site their own and interact with each other. They are finding roommates and planning to meet up at their new student orientations. They’re asking questions about campus life and finding authentic answers from our current students. They’re already finding people they have similar interests with and “getting to know each other” before they arrive.
My favorite part about it, though, is that since all accepted students are invited, once they join the community and invest in that network, they have formed an attachment, even if they weren’t fully decided about coming here. It’s hard to be involved in a community like this and then choose another school.
I look forward to observing this in the upcoming year and seeing how it continues to morph.
Thanks for sharing your success story, Ann!