social media – Page 27 – Andrew Careaga

By now, you’ve heard about LinkedIn’s announcement that it was inviting colleges and universities to create official university pages in that space.

The social network known for helping prospective employees find the right job now wants to get in the business of helping prospective students find the right college.

Will it work?

Is this move a smart expansion of the LinkedIn brand or will it lead to a possible dilution or lack of focus for one of the more distinctive social networks out there?

Christina Allen, LinkedIn’s director of product management, writes in the university pages announcement that these sites “will be especially valuable for students making their first, big decision about where to attend college” and added that in September, LinkedIn will open up to high school students “who can use LinkedIn to explore schools worldwide, greatly expand their understanding of the careers available, and get a head start on building a network of family and friends to help guide them at every milestone.”

I guess soon we’ll see adolescents posting their resumes on LinkedIn, right alongside job-seekers. Maybe even competing for positions.

But some on the business side — which is LinkedIn’s niche — think the move could lead to a loss in credibility for the service. They like LinkedIn’s focus on talent recruitment, not student recruitment.

“When thinking about LinkedIn, numerous adjectives come to mind: professional, business-oriented, networking,” writes Victoria Derrick in a recent Business2Community article. ‘A few of the top reasons businesses use LinkedIn are: to gain exposure to professionals and consumers, recruit new talent, and increase credibility.”

But maybe those same adjectives come to mind when describing certain students looking for a college degree. As we’ve read in countless reports over the past few years, the demographics of college-bound students are changing. From my own experience, working at a university where the vast majority of students are engineering and science majors, I know that many of them are focused, serious-minded students who are looking at the college experience as a pathway to great careers. Many of these students also had this mindset while in high school. We also must consider older students who are re-entering college after losing jobs to downsizing, or military veterans returning to campus, and many other non-traditional audiences for whom LinkedIn may hold more appeal than other social media venues.

That’s more or less how the Wall Street Journal sees the move. “Focusing more on higher education is a natural extension for LinkedIn, and one that opens up the company to a whole new territory of users–young people,” writes the WSJ’s Brian L. Fitzgerald. “LinkedIn says ‘smart, ambitious students are already thinking about their futures when they step foot into high school.'”

But Fitzgerald adds something that gives me pause:

For LinkedIn, it’s less about trying to grab a group of savvy social-media kids allegedly growing bored with Facebook, and more about plying that old General Motors concept: Start out the customers young and stay with them through different stages of their lives. A college prospect with a LinkedIn account is likely to become a professional employee with a LinkedIn account a few years later. (Crossing fingers for a good economy.)

It’s that “plying that old General Motors concept” that bugs me. GM became known for extending its brand too far, trying to build all kinds of cars for all kinds of customers. And we saw the outcome of that brand extension in the form of a bailout.

“Reinvention,” Business2Community’s Derrick notes, “is sometimes a necessary aspect of business that can result in success and increased brand awareness. For other companies, it spells disaster.”

Let’s hope LinkedIn is making the right move — for its core business and for higher education.

P.S. – If you want to jump on the LinkedIn bandwagon and apply for one of the university pages, Karine Joly’s recent blog post provides a good step-by-step approach. (I’ve already submitted a request on behalf of my university. Might as well join the herd, right?)

Also, just for fun, view LinkedIn’s video targeting thecollege crowd:

Last spring, it was Education Dive’s list of the top university Twitter accounts, as determined by Klout score, number of followers and some kind of secret “subjective appraisal.” (I groused enough about that shoddy methodology last spring, so no need to rehash it here and now. The links are there if you want to revisit it.)

Now comes something via the Huffington Post called The Top 100 Best and Most Collaborative U.S. Colleges. And, just like Ed Dive’s approach with Twitter, this ranking’s methodology does not pass muster on many levels.

Once again, there’s a heavy reliance on an institution’s social media Klout score. As if that weren’t enough to raise skepticism, it relies on another ranking — one that is well-established but that comes under fire year in and year out: the U.S. News & World Report listing of the best colleges and universities.

HuffPo contributor Vala Afshar, who compiled the ranking, used this formula:
Pick the top 100 colleges and universities listed in the U.S. News & World Report ranking of national universities.
Look at their Klout and Kred scores.
Rerank the U.S. News & World Report top 100 by those social media influence scores.
Create an infographic that claims: “The very best schools are the most social schools.”

So. Where to begin the critique?

Let’s start with Klout and Kred. These tools are supposed to measure the influence of a social media user. And it may be true that individuals with high Klout and Kred scores may be more influential than those with lower scores, as this more or less balanced article suggests, I’m not too familiar with Kred, but I think Klout is designed for the individual, because it offers rewards from brands to those who attain certain scores and levels of activity. Chris Syme calls the Klout score an “ego metric” (see her comment on this post from a couple of years ago), and I agree. Aliza Sherman, in the article I cite earlier in this paragraph, says:

A high Klout score is like a Maserati or whatever the cool car of the day might be. It’s fun to flash around, but at the end of the day, it isn’t practical.

So I don’t think these vanity metric tools carry much clout or cred.

And what about the U.S. News & World Report rankings?

First of all, Afshar only looked at the top 100 national universities. U.S. News ranks many other types of schools — regional colleges, liberal arts schools, specialty schools, etc. So by limiting only to national universities — all Ph.D.-granting — Afshar excludes many from his list. For example, Williams College was ranked the top liberal arts institution by U.S. News, and it has a pretty impressive Klout score of 85. Meanwhile, one of U.S. News‘ top national universities, the Colorado School of Mines, was ranked No. 100 on Afshar’s “most social” list with a Klout score of 57.

So if you’re going to use Klout as a metric, don’t penalize ostensibly social media-savvy schools just because they’re not in the “national” category.

Finally, Afshar’s ranking suggests that an institution’s high rank in social media equates to high levels of collaboration. I don’t buy it — for the same reasons I didn’t buy Ed Dive’s list of the best higher ed Twitter accounts last spring. Look at several of the schools on either list, and you’ll see that much of the communication is one-way. That doesn’t sound very collaborative to me.

One commenter on the HuffPo site wrote, “[I]f you calculate the correlation between U.S. News ranking and your social rank, you get a coefficient of around .32, which indicates a weak to middling relationship. In other words, it is difficult to make the claim that ‘the very best schools are also the most collaborative.'”

Difficult, yes. But as we tend to see more often these days, not impossible.