Category: LinkedIn

Friday Five: higher ed odds and sods

Important stuff about Twitter, LinkedIn, Unigo, rankings and geeks

While I slack, other higher ed bloggers and news outlets have been cranking out some good stuff. Here are five recent posts you should check out:

  1. 10 reasons to monitor Twitter. Fellow Twitter junkie Brad J. Ward‘s list is solid. And he offers examples, straight from the tweeters.
  2. A case study on setting up a LinkedIn alumni group. Last spring I posted about Caltech’s use of LinkedIn to connect with alumni. Kyle James picked up and ran with the idea. Here, he details how Wofford College set up their own LinkedIn group.
  3. Creating the college anti-rankings. Inside Higher Ed reports on the Education Conservancy‘s creation of College Speaks, “an explicitly anti-rankings system for the college search.” A prototype was presented Thursday at the National Association for College Admissions Counseling Conference in Seattle. (The Education Conservancy is best known for campaigning against the “reputational” surveys used by U.S. News & World Report for its rankings.)
  4. Sam Jackson extols the virtues of Unigo. Unigo is the latest player in the college search game but it leverages the power of social networking by involving students. It launched last week with 225 colleges and universities and 30,000-plus reviews. Jackson was involved in its creation so he has an insider’s perspective.
  5. MIT: We’re not all geeks. Really. This MIThBusters video protesting the MIT nerd stereotype may have had the opposite effect. According to the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, “the video frustrated one of MIT’s most-famous geeks, Henry Jenkins, a co-director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program.” He ranted on his blog: “Most of the folks they depict still come across looking like geeks, not that there’s anything wrong with that!”

#CASECMT: social networking for alumni groups

The original post contained some incorrect information about Caltech’s alumni base. This updated post reflects the correct numbers. The offending blogger has been duly reprimanded.

Once again I’ve fallen behind on my plans to summarize last week’s CASE Conference on Communications, Marketing and Technology. But you know how it is, once you get back to the office and get sucked in. So it goes.

Anyway…

Elizabeth Allen of the Caltech Alumni Association (and recent guest blogger in this space) put together a nice presentation on how alumni groups can use social networks to connect with alumni. She focused on three social networks Caltech Alumni Association is using– LinkedIn, Facebook and the photo- and video-sharing network Flickr. I was most interested in the LinkedIn angle, since that’s the network many people tap for connecting professionally.

Caltech Alumni started the LinkedIn group in 2005 without a lot of fanfare. According to Liz, Caltech sent two email newsletters to some 20,000 13,000 alumni with known email addresses, and also worked with LinkedIn to send a note to LinkedIn members who indicated they were Caltech alumni. (There’s also a link to and description of the LinkedIn group from the alumni association website.) From those low-cost efforts, Caltech Alumni has a LinkedIn group of 2,017, or 10 15.5 percent of the emailable alumni. (Update: Caltech has about 20,000 alumni in total, not 20,000 emailable, as I originally stated in this post. Caltech has email for about 13,000 of those alumni. Thanks, Liz, for setting the record straight.)

Why does this work for Caltech? In one sense, it makes the association more relevant, because through LinkedIn the association is facilitating global connections. Alumni from across the globe are part of the Caltech organization even if they live in regions where no alumni chapter exist. Also, using LinkedIn leverages that site’s mission of helping people build business and employment networks — something that’s important for a technological university like Caltech. (This is a model that could work for our campus, since many of our graduates also are in the science and engineering fields.)

Caltech also uses Facebook (with an alumni group and an alumni page, where Liz can send RSS feeds of events) and Flickr for sharing photos of events, etc. Caltech made a conscious decision to use third-party social networks instead of creating a separate, exclusive network hosted by the alumni association. The reasons: third-party validation (especially from LinkedIn, I would assume), and most alumni who are into social networks are already online in those venues, so why make them create yet another password and log in yet another time?

If anyone has questions about Caltech’s use of social networking, I’m sure Liz would be happy to respond. You may email her at elizabeth AT alumni.caltech.edu.