Now that anyone with a network connection can get into Facebook, will it lose its cachet and become the next MySpace? Colleges and universities wanting to maintain a close-knit social network may want to look beyond Facebook and take a do-it-yourself approach. That’s what Elon University has done with its Elon Town Square.
Karine Joly describes Elon’s approach in a recent post. She interviews Dan Anderson, Elon’s assistant VP and director of university relations, who explains that the schools wanted to especially enhance “alumni and parent connections with Elon.”
I’m not sure that approach would work for everyone — it would take a strong working relationship with the IT department, for one thing — but it’s nice to see it can work in some cases. Just goes to prove that one size doesn’t fit all.
Andy writes! 
Great stuff, Andrew. I have a few thoughts about all this.
It will probably be best if alumni shops do not succumb to the “either/or” approach when contemplating the option of a “private brand” or in-house network. Alumni and students have people who are both inside and outside their college network. These networks overlap and are complementary.
I was wondering how much of a current student’s network consists of schoolmates, so I spent 15 minutes crunching some numbers on Facebook. I took a random sampling of Elon College students and checked their networks to see how many of their friends were also from Elon College. The survey is unscientific, but uses real numbers (as real as they numbers get when counting friends on Facebook). These numbers are based on members of the classes of ’07 to ’10 at Elon:
* The average Elon student has 279 Elon friends in Facebook.
* The average Elon student has 571 non-Elon (“global”) friends in Facebook.
* This means the average Elon student has 49% of his or her friends inside the Elon network.
It makes sense that the longer you’re on campus, the more friends you have there (or at least, the more people you will have been friends with at some point). So I broke down the friend patterns by class, from this year’s freshmen through seniors:
Freshman have 38% of their Facebook friends at Elon.
Sophomores have 49% at Elon.
For juniors, 50% of their Facebook friends, on average, are at Elon.
And seniors average 60% Elon schoolmates among their Facebook friends.
So the senior class has a 58% more Elon-centric network than this year’s freshmen, and about 20% more than sophomores or juniors.
As I blogged the other day on Alumni Futures, alumni connections to the school and each other decay over time. After graduation, these students’ networks will grow more global and less Eloncentric. It seems as if the E2 network that Elon has built has the potential to slow down the inevitable decay of school connections. It will be interesting to see whether Elon can capture this quantitatively over time by tracking the participation in events and giving of those who are active in the E2 network.
A few thoughts indeed, Andy. LOL. Your comment was longer than the entire post. ;)
You’re right on the idea of either/or. People’s social networks change over time — online as well as offline.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You probably ought to post them on alumni futures. Seems to go along with the whole “identity management” topic you’ll be presenting next month. Wish I could be at the conference this year — would love to meet you. But, alas, I’m in the thick of a name change, and this year has been canceled. ;) Maybe next time.