Online Communities & Affinity Groups Building Productive Social Networks in a Law School Mike McCamon

Start by asking, “Why?”

The purposes of networking Purely social Career networking Informational Transactional Affinity building.

Purely social

Career networking

Informational

Transactional

Affinity building.

Institutional Needs Data Integrity Reporting Demographic coverage Administrative Context and Branding Definition of “Success”.

Data Integrity

Reporting

Demographic coverage

Administrative

Context and Branding

Definition of “Success”.

Limitations of a social graph … it has to be worth my time.

Online Engagement Curve Engagement Visits Site Visits Frequently Subscribes to Feeds Subscribes to content (Email, Newsletters) Registers for Community Contributes Content Invites Friends Anonymous Authenticated Visitor Lifecycle Member-to-Member Volume

The Cautionary Tale ... 1999 2009

The internet generation The Class of 2010 has never not known an interconnected web-enabled life Snail Mail Telephony E-Mail Web Social Networks 1980 Accepted Wired Compuserve Research Wine tasting 1990 Tolerated Car phones AOL Gated Cigar bars 2000 Transactional Mobile Outlook Pre-Google AOL GeoCities 2010 Offensive Text, web and voice iPhone Pervasive Facebook

Do some digging

Gender Differences Source: http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/11/13/statistics-on-googles-opensocial-platform-end-users-and-facebook-users 36% 36% 61% 41% 37% 39% 63% 63% 38% 59% 62% 60% Facebook MySpace LinkedIn Friendster Plaxo Hi5

Age Differences % of Users Age Source: http://blog.rapleaf.com/2007/11/13/statistics-on-googles-opensocial-platform-end-users-and-facebook-users LinkedIn

Donor Dilemma Source: iModules community research and others Donors Facebook Users

Network Metrics Alumni Facebook Social Ad Actual Facebook LinkedIn Impressions Clicks University 1 160,200 13,300 500+ 58,605 28 University 2 159,000 10,280 500+ 57,811 46 College 1 49,500 4,300 241 21,748 21 College 2 69,175 2,280 500+ 11,370 35 College 3 31,500 2,060 324 9,656 10

Boring E-mail .. uh, works May 2008 Activity Addresses Recipients Opens Clicks University 1 30,855 80,195 10,714 3,217 University 2 40,525 47,710 12,292 11,239 College 1 2,222 1,983 683 480 College 2 16,891 52,438 12,417 20,253 College 3 14,479 53,168 13,564 24,629

Test drive some ideas

Facebook Strategy Institutional Page Be present where they search Facebook Connect Become part of the conversation

Facebook Pages

Facebook Connect “ Inject activities into the conversation and allows you to “fish where the fish are.”

Linkedin Groups

Experiment continuously

Try everything... ... and track the click-back traffic Groups Channels Albums Followers

Facebook Social Ads

[email_address] Start by asking “Why?” Dig through the data Test drive Pages & Groups Experiment continuously