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Social Networking
[Your College Here] Wants to Be Your 'Friend'
9/6/2007
![[Your College Here] Wants to Be Your 'Friend'](http://download.101com.com/pub/cam/images/0907_ct_feat_your_college_here.gif)
Resourceful college administrators, marketers,
and technologists are discovering that the best
way to reach their students—and prospective
students—is to speak to them in their
own social networking space.
In the past five years, social networking has rocketed from a leisure activity to a "phenomenon that engages tens of millions of internet users," according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit that follows the impact of the internet in differing social environments. In a recent national survey on teenagers and social networking conducted by Pew, more than half of all online American youth ages 12 to 17— 55 percent to be precise—are heading to online social networking sites. What does this mean for higher ed? Simply this: Your incoming students are now expecting a presence of your college or university on social networking sites.
New Generation of Community Tools
"Since students are adopting these social technologies anyway, schools will be better served by delivering to students tools that are just as engaging as mainstream social networking tools, and that are connected to other campus systems, like student event calendars," says CEO Dave Hersh of Jive Software, a collaboration software provider. Jive recently launched Clearspace enterprise software for collaboration, which allows students and faculty to blog, wiki, share files, and instant message (IM) within one interface. "Students will be able to connect with each other in a much smarter and easier way," says Hersh.
Even eBook technology providers such as VitalSource Technologies (maker of Bookshelf) are integrating community 2.0 elements into their product lines. Says VitalSource CEO Frank Daniels III: "[Our] technology is somewhat analogous to social networks like MySpace, only the communities and interaction take place around books." Users/members have the ability to not only collaborate, but to communicate comments, as well. Bookshelf, for instance, enables students to load onto their laptops any number of texts (from hundreds to thousands), annotate them whether the students are on the network or not and, on a central server (as users connect via the web), send the notes to friends in their network. It's basically a Web 2.0 application that can be used from the desktop.
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