the Sam Jackson College Experience

Karine Joly, who writes the must-read CollegeWebEditor blog about higher education marketing and PR, interviewed me a few months ago about my experience with Facebook and other social networking sites for an April 2007 piece she wrote in University Business titled “Facebook, MySpace, and Co.” Karine and I were talking about my experience using social networking tools to socialize online with the other 2011 prefrosh early actions kids and that led into the interview where I formally answered some of her questions on the topic.

An excerpt from the e-mail interview:

1) As an early admit of the class of 2011 at Yale, you got a chance to interact with your peers as early as December. Why is it something important to you?

Some Yalies who had dabbled with online networking when they were pre-frosh stopped by the online groups and pointed out that they ended up awkwardly removing a lot of their mysterious online friends once they got to school and started to make connections in the flesh; all the same, everyone seemed to agree that communicating online was a worthwhile use of time. The allure here is not so much the possibility of making friends before the start of the school year as it is the opportunity to get a taste of your future classmates. These messages back and forth offer illuminating glimpses, however brief, into the character and composition of the future class.

If you want to see the rest, you’re going to have to click through to read the full interview on her site! Although the bulk of my response got left on the cutting room floor, don’t miss the article in UB and check out the other interviews on her site, where she has full responses from the other interviewees, all very interesting.

I hear she’s also got a neat new social networking site of her own, Higher Ed Experts, for higher education professionals. Not being one, I can’t report much on it, but check it out–sounded neat.

Morgan Davis is the Web Director at Warren Wilson, a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. He has a blog called erelevant which purports to be his “off-the-cuff blog about electronic marketing and working within higher education.” It seems to more or less fit that bill. I found it while snooping around on Technorati, and it has proved very interesting. On August 8th, Davis wrote a post titled Are Student Blogs Really A Good Idea? which is question which I answered earlier by saying “sorta depends, but yeah.”

Davis cites polls which have shown teens–namely prospective students–are not very hip to the blogging jive.

I continued my research and found similar results on a national poll. The National Research Center for Colleges and Universities (NRCCUA) conducted a survey of 1000 members of the high school class of 2006 from all over the US. Their survey found that 24% of students said they read blogs and 19% said they wrote them. They compared their results from statistics from the PEW Internet & American Life Project and commented that less teens in their survey read blogs than the PEW-reported adult readership of 27%. This seemed to suggest that blog interest was possibly more prevalent among adults, which made perfect sense if you made a clear separation between “blog” and “social network.” PEW’s numbers were much higher–38% of teens polled read blogs, but PEW also made no distinction in their questions between blogs and social networking sites, which could explain the disparity.

This got me thinking about my own peers, and how many of them were familiar with the blogosphere, how much of them read anything from it, etc. It’s completely true that we as young people are far more concerned with social networking (read: Facebook, MySpace) than with the blogs so highly touted in the 2004 election. I’m not entirely representative of my age group.

It pays to know and understand the difference between blogs and social networks. You can harness a blog for recruitment purposes, but it is much harder to do anything with the social networking sites.

Right you are sir. Then again, it’s certainly easier to find student-collegiate resources on Facebook when one can simply navigate to the “Friends” list, find some senior you knew last year who goes to whichever school you might be looking to find anything out about, and drop them a line. If student blogs were as easy to find and access as that, I’m sure they’d have better market penetration.

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