Robert Pearl Starks

Hi Sarah, Thanks for sharing. It seems more institutions are considering using a commercial platform like 360 Alumni. I know this particular platform appeals to institutions looking to engage alumni for crowd-sourced fundraising efforts and of course for continued brand affinity but I was wondering what your experience has been with alumni adoption. I've seen other institutions attempt to use commercial tools and have a very challenging time getting their alumni to actually use the technology because they seem to be most active on other available networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Although some institutions do data cleanses and… >>>

Hi Sarah, It's great that you are teaching students to use social media as a career marketing tool - this is absolutely necessary. I'm curious if (and how) your department uses social media for issues such as student/alumni engagement, marketing & student awareness, event participation, etc. Does your department use the same branding/online presence strategies it teaches students to brand the CS department and market the department to achieve goals such as engage in employer outreach, recruit guest speakers or PAC members, increase office visits, workshop participation, etc. etc.? Because this course is less focused on teaching students to use… >>>

Hi Katherine, What do you mean by streamline/consolidate? What is the current process and what issues are you specifically looking to solve? Maintaining a relationship with graduates can be challenging and as they say, "out of sight, out of mind." Thus, if departments choose to use the one-to-many communication capabilities of social tools while building their alumni and/or student communities, it can help you maintain affinity with your audience and can influence their perception of your department. If departments are very strategic about using their social channels to build & maintain strong relationships, when you do have "asks" such as… >>>

Hi Karina, Just to share some experience, my office used Facebook in different ways for multiple goals. We created a Career Services Profile page so we could "friend" graduates. We had to wait for students to be graduates as "friending" students was against fraternization policies. Once we friended graduates, our shared Career Services profile could be used by all career services advisors to private message graduates, see their wall posts, and get their updates in the news feed. This helped us data mine, monitor behaviors, and communicate with graduates which helped us optimize our ability to achieve employment rate goals.… >>>

Hi Karina, You may find it interesting that a report published by Devry's Career Advisory Board entitled, Career Services Use of Social Media Technologies, showed that Social media technologies were used in career centers as asynchronous communications devices, i.e., principally to transmit information in one direction (from the career center to students or employers or alumni) about events. I personally believe this is likely due to three primary reasons: 1) Unilateral communication is the simplest/most intuitive way to use social media because it's how we use all other traditional communication tools, thus career centers simply use it this way because… >>>

Hi Karina, Excited to hear your enthusiasm for this topic. One of my favorite social media experts, Jay Baer, said people need to realize that social media has transformed to a skill. We don't think about it now but the telephone, fax machine, and computer were seen as simple "tools" when they were first introduced to us and they became skills when they became an integral part of our daily work environments. Using phone communication effectively to quickly develop rapport, sell products/services, and provide customer service are examples that we see all the time. Social media is now used in… >>>