Social networking isn’t the next big thing. With Oprah joining Twitter and Ashton Kutcher reaching a million followers, and TV shows like Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse dropping names like Facebook and YouTube once a week (check out this past Friday’s episode if you don’t believe me), social networking is the big thing right now.
It’s obvious how celebrities and media outlets are going to benefit from this sudden social networking explosion—Kutcher’s rival on the way to a million was a CNN breaking news feed—but it might seem slightly less obvious how an academic institution like Oberlin College can take advantage of it. After all, colleges and universities are centuries old behemoths laden down with libraries full of dusty books and offices full of dusty administrators—the complete antithesis of an ultra-modern fad like social networking. Right?
Wrong.
I’m going to say this once now, and once more at the end of this post, because it’s hugely important. Oberlin College cannot afford to ignore social networking. There are a number of reasons why this is the case, but let’s start with the most basic.
The students are already there.
Students are on Facebook, but then, that was the general idea with Facebook. Students are on YouTube and Vimeo—happily, in the latter case at least, so is Oberlin—and Last.fm and Flickr and Twitter and Tumblr. And everywhere they go, Oberlin students create Oberlin groups. Oberlin can take advantage of this in two ways. First, the College can contact the students who administer such groups and work with them to further the interests of both students and College. Alternatively, the College can set up its own accounts, administered by one or more employees of the College (or separate departments) as counterparts to the student-run groups and accounts.
Regardless of the exact method, Oberlin College must find some way to make contact with these student communities, as well as the prospective students and alumni who will frequent them in increasing numbers. The internet is no longer a supplement to “real life”, it’s a part of it, and students will increasingly expect the College—in the form of administrators, instructors, and other students—to engage with them in this new world as readily as in the physical. Besides…
It’s a matter of image.
The internet is, at its heart, a way of getting information from one place or person to another very, very quickly. Social networks epitomize this, allowing people to share information about some area of shared interest in a forum where others with similar interests can later read it and also take part in the discussion. College searches are one ‘interest’ that’s particularly well suited to research based in social networks.
Before Twitter put prospective students within instant reach of current students, sites like College Confidential provided forums for prospectives to learn about their chosen schools. Times have changed. With a few searches, a prospective student can now learn what Obies are doing for the weekend, find out what music has been popular in Oberlin recently, and get a pretty good idea of what the campus looks like. Of course, what they find is going to be uncensored, and at the moment, Oberlin College has no official voice in most of these channels.
Oberlin College needs an official Flickr account that provides a campus tour and images of Oberlin events—and regular updates. It needs a Twitter account that provides news and responds appropriately and accountably to posts by prospective students, current students, alumni—in fact, anyone with an interest in Oberlin. The Source should also be an Oberlin-branded Tumblr that’s updated on a rolling basis.
Less specifically, Oberlin should have an official and consistent web presence on every possible social networking site. After all…
Oberlin should be using social networking to drive conversations and decisions.
‘Fearless’. One word that can evoke visceral hatred from a substantial portion of the Oberlin student population. The center of a campus-wide controversy. And an entirely avoidable debacle. If Oberlin had made use of social networking—either by using an existing network or creating its own—to gauge student response, a visible and persistent record would have been created. Instead, Mark Edwards insisted to a crowd of concerned students and alumni that focus groups had been enthusiastic about ‘fearless’ without ever providing a shred of evidence, increasing the already palpable ill-will regarding the slogan.
Oberlin has already learned its lesson from the ‘fearless’ disaster. The Office of Communications, in preparing a new logo for the College, created a webpage demonstrating both old and potential new logos and requesting feedback—and plenty of feedback was given. The link to the site made its way to Twitter and eventually took the hashtag #newobielogo. In the interest of full disclosure, both of those things were my doing, but they resulted in substantial discussion on Twitter (although much of that was by protected accounts) as well as the webpage itself. In the future, such discussion should be driven and encouraged by an official Oberlin College account.
To sum up:
Oberlin needs to engage with its students, whether current, prospective, or former, online as well as in the physical world. It must use official accounts to guide and encourage Oberlin-centric discussion on social networking sites. But most importantly, Oberlin College cannot afford to ignore social networking.
