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August 24th, 2009 - by Dan AllenbyIn the beginning, there were print alumni directories.
Then, internally hosted online communities emerged supported by companies like Harris, Kintera, and Convio, where alumni could read news, update their information, and reconnect with old classmates online.
Enter Facebook with over 250 million users and growing. Why should organizations rely on self-hosted online communities when free tools are available elsewhere?
Social media changes quickly, and rapid change can be very difficult to manage. Once you get the hang of one platform, a new one pops up. The trick is not how fast you can change media platforms it’s how well you can integrate the old and the new. As new social networking tools like Twitter and LinkedIn gain momentum, development programs should be looking for new and effective ways to engage their constituents on multiple platforms. New technologies can be exciting, but the most effective programs embrace these new tools and find ways to make them fit into their existing systems.
Click here to learn more about how Colgate University is integrating a Facebook application with their internally managed alumni community.
Whatever this “connect” garners is a mere pittance compared to what FB will make off of all this connects. what schools need to do is to make their own portals more open and use appropriate e-Commerce solutions to generate sustainable revenue. FB is worth billions but yet they do not give anything back to the marketplace that made them those billions. What you need is a free portal environment that can be customized for each school and generates revenue for those schools. I am an academic and I have seen and felt the ups and downs of academia. The problem is that there is no sustainable model. It relies on tuition and endowments ( read financial crisis) and fund raising. Each time these initiatives are utilized it takes almost as much financing to generate the income. So ROI is lost. Back to square one. Check out my website and see how this can be sustained without any cost to these institutions.
http://www.theCampusCenter.com