This document discusses using social media to connect with students, prospects, and alumni. It recommends having a clear strategy and using tools like Facebook, blogs, discussion boards, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn. Specific strategies are outlined, such as responding quickly to discussion boards to engage students and using LinkedIn to help students build careers and the institution find alumni mentors. It emphasizes having a strategy for each tool and respecting users' time to build an engaged online community.
Creating a Virtual Community: Using Social Media to Connect With Students, Prospects and Alumni
1. Creating a Virtual Community Using Social Media to Connect With Students, Prospects and Alumni District 3 Conference October 7, 2010 Anthony Juliano
6. “As more people have come online, the more online communication has become the norm. So it isn't thought of as a separate realm anymore, but as one that merges and overlaps with our daily activities.” - Caroline Haythornthwaite, Ph.D. University of Illinois
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8. The key: use social media to serve as a resource to students, prospects and alumni
9. “You can buy attention (advertising). You can beg for attention from the media (public relations). You can bug people one at a time to get attention (sales). Or you can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free: a YouTube video, a blog, a research report, photos, a Twitter stream, an ebook, a Facebook page.” - David Meerman Scott
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12. 10 sites and tools to connect with students, prospects and alumni
23. Engaging alumni?It’s up to you—what’s right for your audience, and what can you support with resources.
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25. “You may not have thought about Blackboard as a social media tool, but it offers all the interactivity you can desire…”- The Web 2.0 in Education blog
32. Connects posters to peersThe result: efficiencies, thousands of questions answered and students satisfied
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34. Potential blog topics Faculty authors – subject matter expertise Staff authors – giving the institution a name/face, answering FAQs Student authors – conversations about what they’re learning, giving prospects the chance to hear from peers Leadership authors
59. [F]orget about the Next Big Thing. What you want to be looking out for are the Awesome Little Things—networks with specialized functions, unique features and cool underlying technology that may not have the mass appeal that Facebook does but still have the capacity to push the social-media sphere to a new level. - Jesse Stanchak,SmartBlog on Social Media
68. “Imagine a social networking site geared specifically toward connecting college students with their on-campus academic and social communities. Sound familiar? Those are Facebook's roots [and] they're also the roots of Scoop, a forthcoming mobile social app.” - “The Next Facebook: Scoop?” PC World, Aug. 24, 2010