[Your College Here] Wants to Be Your 'Friend'

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[Your College Here] Wants to Be Your 'Friend'

9/6/2007

By Claudia Linh

Admissions Counselor Nick Venturella at Wisconsin's Edgewood College (another small liberal arts institution) has, from his own personal experience, always understood the benefits of social networking websites. Venturella is a professional musician and, like most of his musician colleagues, he has been virally marketing his music on MySpace since the site launched. He introduced the idea of similar viral marketing efforts to the higher-ups in his department, and with support he was able to marry his social networking experience to his admissions background.

[Your College Here] Wants to Be Your 'Friend'

EDGEWOOD COLLEGE IS LOOKING for 'friends'—current and prospective students who welcome up-todate, informally delivered information about the school. MySpace is the perfect place to find them.

Says Venturella: "The basic macrolevel idea of creating the Edgewood College MySpace page was to stay connected to the campus community, and build and maintain relationships with traditional-aged college students and prospective students who are utilizing this kind of technology anyway, in order to stay connected, build, and maintain relationships with their peers."

Today, many schools are starting to support the idea of students, faculty, and staff being active on social networks. Although college and university staffers are in the minority on this front, many are starting to see the value in this type of networking. In fact, many now have their own personal pages, says Mars Hill's Mrozkowski.

And according to Venturella, "We figured if we were to use a social networking site like MySpace, and approach it in an appropriate, focused way, utilizing the five Edgewood College core values as guiding principles—truth, justice, community, partnership, and compassion— the college could benefit from the relationships it builds and maintains through the online community. It would thus become more of an integrated extension of the Edgewood College offline community. Then, through users' participation on the social networking site, it could become an additional recruitment tool."

Adds Mrozkowski, "In short, we are already their friends and they are ours, so why not make it official?"

Campus social networking efforts can come to a screeching halt when the mainstream networks sense a marketing ploy.

Mars Hill continues to have its student interns access the school's MySpace profile to perform the occasional update. But Mrozkowski and Communication Director Mike Thornhill also have administrative access to the MySpace page; they help the interns oversee the sites. "The internet and web devices are becoming ubiquitous in everyone's lives, and virtually every new faculty member we've hired in the past couple of years has come with web pages of his or her own," notes Mrozkowski. He adds that if current faculty and staff join in the institutional initiative, he imagines the school's social networks will grow "at a blistering rate."