APS1: Social Networking: The Web Game Changer

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference in Springfield, Missouri.

Lance Merker: Again, my name is Lance Merker, I’m CEO of OmniUpdate. But I’m not here to talk to you as a vendor this morning; I’m here just as you are, to share in the discussion. And the discussion this morning is social networking. And how social networking is truly a game changer for your institution, and possibly a game changer to your career at your institution. And I thought we’d start with a story. Once upon a time, about ten thousand years BC, social networking was born. And it was born around a campfire. If you think about it, a campfire created the first environment, the first platform for social networking. You had people that would come sit around the campfire, share their stories of the day, perhaps illustrate some pictures memorializing some important and fun events in their lives, meet other people, perhaps coming from other fires, and other clans, maybe to make a new mate. Social networks were born ten thousand years ago, ten thousand years BC I should say, around a campfire.

Now the problem with a campfire is of course that warmth of the glow only goes so far, and ultimately there needed to be a lot more technical innovations to get where we are today. The first of course that allowed social networks to spread further and interconnect was probably the invention of the wheel. Right? It allowed people to travel much further, connect with other social networks in places that were perhaps further away than they could walk. Well of course other technical innovations followed. Maritime innovations allowed social networks to cross continents for the first time, and connected more and more people. Then of course in more modern days we had various different forms of transportation that allowed social networks to connect even further and interconnect amongst one another. And then we had what I call the tele-innovations. We had the telegraph, the telephone, the television, followed by the teletubbies. Well, maybe not the teletubbies. But a lot of communications innovation allowed for a lot more things. And then it all broke loose with the digital age. And the digital innovations of the 20^th century allowed for even greater connectivity between social networks, and it was a pretty revolutionary thing. In fact, by the middle of the 20th century we had the internet. And the internet for the first time connected people all over the world digitally with the computer network, and this was pretty profound. In fact by the end of the 20^th century of course we had the internet as we know it today connecting virtually anyone who wanted to be connected on the entire planet. And the internet was the greatest single platform ever invented that allowed social networking to flourish. The internet as a platform is huge. In fact if you think about it, there’ve only been three killer apps on the internet. And if you think about what a killer app is, it’s really an application of a platform that allows for huge adoption of that platform. So, three killer apps on the internet, only three. The first of course was email. Right? Email was the first thing that got everybody interested in the internet, and using the internet in a much bigger way than it ever was before. The second killer app, undeniably the Web. One of the main reasons we’re all here this week. One of the main reasons we all have jobs. The web was certainly the second big killer app on the internet, no doubt. The third killer app on the internet, of course, is social networking. Social networks are indeed a killer app on the internet. And notice I’m not saying it’s a killer app on the web, because it goes much further than that. Social networks are a killer app on the internet. And that’s how you have to think about it. You have to put this into perspective, you have to think big picture. Don’t keep thinking about the web.

Alright, so with the internet and with these three killer apps, and most importantly as we’re talking about today, social networks, the game has changed. It’s changed forever, and social networks are going to be a larger and larger part of your job responsibilities as we go forward, if they’re not already today. How many of you here in this room can say that you’re responsible for the social networking at your institution? Good. Good, there’s a few of you. Well look out, because a lot more is coming, and you’re going to be involved with those who are truly responsible for managing the social networking activities at your institution. Now, I know many of you use Facebook, I know many of you are on various different social networks including the U Web D social network, probably most if not all of you have used Facebook or MySpace or have these accounts and use the regularly. However, it still probably makes you wonder, how it is… you know did you blink, and the world changed? How is it that your students and your perspective students have become so ingrained in this social networking experience that’s just taking up all of their time suddenly? They’re just going to the social network more than they’re going to class. They’re going to the social network more than they’re doing other things on campus that are indeed face to face type social networks in some cases. And I know many of you are wondering, how did this happen? How did we get here? Well, I ask you this, is it really any wonder? Think about what’s going on, think about what’s happened, think about the generation of students that are enrolled in your college and think about the generation of students that are about. In fact, meet Amy.

Amy is a sixteen year old high school junior who will soon be enrolling in college. Hopefully one of yours. Now Amy was born long after the invention of the internet. Long after the invention of the cell phone, long after email. These are things that are as commonplace to her life as the automobile or air travel is to our lives. These are nothing new to Amy. In fact Amy was born just after Tim Berners-Lee put up the first web page and told the rest of the world how to make more. This is nothing new to Amy. This is just a tool; this is just part of her everyday life. Now when Amy was growing up, of course her parents had email and this extended their social network, and she was communicating with friends and family through her parents email with email, and everything was good. By the time she was about 5 years old, her parents had cell phones, and she learned to be a pretty good texter on her phone, as she would call and text her imaginary friends and she grew up playing around with the cell phone. This is nothing new in her life either. In fact by the time she went to middle school, her parents gave her a cell phone for safety reasons, and by the end of the first day she had every one of her friends in her contact list and she was texting away to all of them.

By the time she entered high school, she got her first real personal computer, as a laptop, and that laptop has now become, and probably will be for a long time, the last thing she does before she goes to bed and the first thing she does in the morning as she checks her friend’s status, updates her own and does other things. She’s also become probably, as the rest of her generation, the world’s best texter. And why? Well she’s not allowed to use the phone for voice calls during class, but she got to be really good at doing it under her desk. And her entire generation of friends are the same way. Is it any wonder that she’s the world’s faster texter blind? Now of course today she uses Facebook. She actually used MySpace for awhile as well, but now she’s got over 400 friends on Facebook, and these are people that she really knows. These are people she’s met, these are her friends from school, friends from social activities, sports. Parties and whatnot, these are people that she knows. And she communicates with them through this amazing social network which to her is just (unintelligible). It’s just something she’s got, that she uses; it’s something that all her friends use too. There’s nothing new about this. And is it really any wonder that we’ve created this whole generation of teenagers that are using social networks in ways that go way beyond perhaps what you and I can even imagine, even if we consider ourselves to be heavy Facebook users or heavy social network users?

Now I’m sure that you’ve seen this and if you haven’t you have to. This was done late last year; they’ll probably update it soon, but the Pew Teen and Social Media study that came out in December of last year is very very powerful. If you haven’t seen this – I’m not a statistician, and I’m not here as a consultant to tell you all the great things about the numbers, but I want to encourage you to look at this, and if you come up afterwards and give me your card, I’ll mail you my slides because I’ve got a url for it and a bunch of others that you might want. So just ask me and I’ll give it to you. Anyway some amazing things came out of this study on teens and social media.

So, first amazing thing perhaps is that teens who use social media use it 91% of the time to communicate with their friends. This is how they communicate with their friends, not just one or two but hundreds of their friends. Think about Amy’s 400 friends. 49% use social networks, social media to make new friends. Think about the campfire and how it all began. This is very very real and it’s happening at lightning speed. Now, many of you might be thinking ok, well what about email? We hear a lot of discussion about email, what did Pew say about Email? Email, my old friend, please don’t go away! We use email! Of course email is not going away, of course it’s not. It’s still a killer app on the internet, and it still will be a killer app on the internet for a long time. But what about the use by your audience and your perspective audience, what about teen’s use of email? Well, as they say, reports of the death of email are greatly exaggerated! Pew estimates that a whopping 14% of teens who use social media use email on a regular basis. And 22% for multichannel teems – multi channel teens is another category they describe as teens who use lots of media simultaneously, lots of channels simultaneously. So, 14%, or should I say only 14% are using email on a regular basis, if they’re using social network. That’s kind of a scary number.

Ok, so let’s talk for a moment about what social are, and what social networks replace. First of all, social networks are clearly the new killer app, no question. They’re not just web based, and you have to think about what’s going on out there if you think about the social networking activities and the possibilities. And you have to realize that they’re not just web based. With products like Twitter and Looped and iPhone that have Facebook apps now which you can download in a split second, and use without ever touching the web, you’ve got a lot of powerful ways on the internet to do social networking without ever going to a www or a uri.

They are also both private and public. And if you think about the possibilities as you’re generating social networking activities on campus, you really have to think about both. It’s not just about Facebook… I know our keynote at tomorrow’s lunch is Kyle Ford from Ning, and that’s going to be very interesting, to hear how Ning views the world right now, because I know it’s impacting yours in a big way. Or at least it could be, depending on the direction in which you choose to go.

Ok, and what do they replace? What do social networks replace? Well, yes, they do replace email. Yes, they can indeed replace email. And I know many of you use Facebook, and I know many of you who use Facebook probably don’t use the messaging system as your students and prospective students are using the messaging within Facebook. But believe me they do. And that’s why that 14% was such an amazing number. They’re using the messaging within Facebook and their own social network to communicate with their friends. They’re not using email as much. They replaced chat. We used to think about all the different types of chat applications and chat networks, and should we set up one of these, and so forth. Well, chat is built into most social networking products, and Facebook is a prime example of that, with the ability to chat and communicate now directly with all of your friends in a pretty powerful way. It’s a good chat system. They replaced blogs. Blogs aren’t going away; blogs still have a great purpose, but think about what people do on Facebook. They write on their wall, they write on their friend’s wall. They update information in a very narrative storytelling fashion. They’re effectively blogging as we might have called it in the past, on their Facebook, in their social network, whatever that might be. And finally, yes indeed, they can replace photo and video sharing. You know, if you think about it, why do you need a flicker account? Why do you need to even upload stuff to YouTube if your purpose is to share amongst your friends, and you know where your friends are, you can share with your friends right there. You don’t need to open yourself up to the whole world; you don’t need to think about it, you just upload it. And you’ve got the easiest way perhaps ever known to share photos suddenly; digitally and videos as well of course.

Ok, so let’s talk for a moment about the concepts of social networks as public versus private. We all know about some of the public social networks, like Facebook and MySpace. Let me ask right now, how many of you have a personal, not for your institution, but a personal Facebook or MySpace account? About what I expected, just about everyone put their hand up. Now, you guys know what these are, they’re very public in a way, because everyone’s together and you can open yourself up to the world, of course you can create private groups. You can create private pages even if you want to, and you can create public pages. So, these are very public, managed social networks that are widespread in wide use, and I’m glad that all of you are using them today because your students certainly are. Here’s my Facebook page, and I’m going to go online in just a minute and show you a few tricks and things that you can do. But here I am, and friend me if you want.

Here is a public use of Facebook, or your institution. This is a page, I guess they used to call it a fan page but now it’s just a page. How many of your institutions already have a page on Facebook. Ok, not as many, in fact only about half of you. So that’s a first, a first ah-ha moment. If you didn’t know and if you don’t know how to get there I’ll show you in just a minute, we’ll create a page, it’ll take about 60 seconds and we’ll have a page for our university up online.

Now the great thing about pages is that they do act in a way a communication for various different aspects of what’s going on on campus through a social network that’s very public, that all of your students are probably a part of. You can do things like have “fans” effectively you don’t have friends on pages like you do for personal Facebook accounts; you have “fans” of a page. So again a page is for an institution, and a fan is a friend effectively of that institution. Here’s, from Dartmouth, their school of engineering, just another example, you can have events. So something that you can do maybe a little bit beyond what you’d do with a personal account on Facebook, you can have events that signify activities that students can then join and be aware of and so forth as they’re living and breathing this stuff every day. University of Chicago, just one more example here, you can have RSS feeds on your pages, on your social network in Facebook. So you can connect what’s going on on the outside of the social network, perhaps what’s going on on your campus directly into this social network.

Alright, so now let’s talk about private social networks for a moment. And the big one here, the big story is Ning, because Ning is growing huge, you’ve got Kyle Ford coming tomorrow to tell us more about this, but I know that many of you are already using this. How many of you are members of, and let’s start with the easy one, the HighEdWeb2008 conference Ning site? Great, almost all of you, well at least 75% of you. Good. If you’re not already, I’ll show you that in just a second, but please sign up for that, because not only will you learn about what’s going on in the conference in real time, but you’ll be able to participate in that in real time as well, by uploading pictures and commenting, ah, commenting on presentations and whatnot. So it’s a great way, maybe it’s only going to last three days, but it’s a really fun social network that already has over 200 people subscribed.

How many of you are members of the UWebD social network on Ning? Ok maybe about 25% of you. So this is another one, and I’ll show you in a moment, if you consider yourself a part of the University Web Developers of the world, then you definitely want to sign up for this as well. This is another great social network; it was set up by Mark Greenfield, university of Buffalo, less than a year ago, already 13, almost 14,000 university web developers that have signed up. This is a very powerful, private social network for your peer group to communicate amongst each other and share and help and spread ideas. It’s a really terrific site.

Ok so let’s take a look at a couple of these Ning sites, these private social networks for colleges. And I should ask that too, how many of your institutions have a private social network of some kind? Ok the smallest number so far, maybe 10%. Ok, so here’s one, again you can create a social network on Ning, and I’ll do it in just a moment so you can see how easy it is for an institution. It’s going to be free if you have Google ads on it, so completely free – we’ll do it in 60 seconds and it’ll be free. So there’s almost no excuse at least from that perspective to even try this, to pilot this. You can take the Google adds off, and that costs you, I think a whopping $20 a year. So this is a very powerful private social network that can be used for various different purposes, for instance, alumni associations. Here’s [unintelligible] alumni association social network on Ning. Now you might ask yourself, well ok, I mean there’s a lot of philosophical debate over whether or not this makes any sense, if they’re already on Facebook. Well maybe your alumni are not on Facebook yet. Any maybe your alumni really don’t want the world to know all about them, but they wouldn’t mind letting their peer s or their friends that are already among the alumni of your institution know all about them. So they can make themselves very public in a very private way, or a very private space. So think about it that way. You can have interactive forums on these networks as well, and allow members to share and communicate amongst one another.

Aright, so here is the one that almost everyone said they were a part of, you know this, I won’t spend any more time on this, this is the High Ed Web Ning site. Here’s the UWebD Ning Site. Now if you’re not already a member of this, it’s simply cuwebd.ning.com… I want to say .org. cuwebd. Mark said that uwebd was taken, so he put a c in front of it and it worked. Not sure what the c stands for, but cuwebd.ning.com is the university web developer’s web site. And it’s a very powerful web site, or social network, because there is so much going on here, it’s a very very active, it’s so active that I don’t even go there but once a day or twice a day, I subscribe to the RSS feed and just let it update me with relevant information that I’m looking for, there’s a lot going on. It’s growing, there’s more and more channels of groups and information that are going to come out of this over the next year, particularly because of this event, I believe.

Alright, so private versus public social networks. Now, I know that you’re probably still wondering ok, this is all great, but this is a crazy huge problem for me, and what can I do about it? Obviously there’s a lot of discussion at this conference about how you can be heard, how you can have your students engage with your institution more. The question you might ask yourself if you work in marketing is why can’t you hear me? I’m broadcasting on all channels here. I’m doing things the way we’ve always done it. I’m advertising like crazy and I can’t connect. Why can’t you hear me? How many of you work for marketing, in some way shape or form? Ok, about half or more. So the question might be what can you do about this. What can you do today, how can you connect better if they can’t here you under the normal broadcast channels that you’re putting out, including the website, I’m talking about everything. From print, radio, television, mailings, email, the web. Why can’t they hear you if you’re broadcasting on all channels. Well the question really is what can you do, and what can you do right now.

So the first thing you can do right now is you can assign responsibility. And, this is easier said than done, but it’s got to happen. There’s got to be a social networking manager of some sort. Someone has to own up to this and take responsibility. Assign that responsibility, if it’s not within your group, but somebody’s got to do it. The problem is, and we saw from a show of hands, very few of you are doing this yet. So it’s probably not about the available tools, it’s not about the ease of use, its things you’re doing every day. You raised your hands and said that you’re on a social network like Facebook, and yet no one’s responsible for managing what’s going on on these public and private social networks at you’re institutions. Or at least very few of you, 10%. Second thing you can do is participate. Now I know, you already raised your hand. You’re on Facebook, and MySpace, and you participate in these social networks. These are not new concepts, but believe me, you’re not participating at the level you need to be. You’re not participating with your students; you’re not even participating maybe amongst each other enough to understand the incredible power that is at your fingertips. You know the biggest marketing opportunities in your lives, in your careers, just landed on your doorstep, and you really need to figure out how to take advantage of this. You need to assign responsibility, you need to participate, there’s probably no magic bullet here, but there’s a lot of clues, and you’re going to find them if you participate. And finally, perhaps here’s one of the little magic gems that you’ll take away from this conference, I hope, is that you need to connect everything. And I’m going to show you how to do a couple things that’s going to make that possible for you. And if I’m correct in my thinking here we have about 15 minutes left, which is perfect.

So, how about if we, rather than doing any Q and A right now, I just jump right into it, and show you a few things. First of all, if you’re going to connect things, use your easiest possible available tools first. Now, the magic of RSS is probably the greatest tool that you’ve got at your disposal. Because I know that many of you let me just see a show of hands again, how many of you are in control of your RSS feeds on your college website? OK, maybe half, and a few shaky hands. Ok, well you need to make sure that somebody is aware of what’s going on with your RSS feeds, because this is one of your magic tools you can use to connect things together, and it’s easy. RSS is a part of a lot of systems these days, it’s included in content management systems, and it’s a very very powerful simple system to help you connect stuff together. So, the magic of RSS will allow you to connect into social networks in big ways. For instance, just as an example, here’s your website. You’ve got an RSS feed. You publish a page, an update to the page, which publishes an update to the RSS feed, which means without lifting a finger you suddenly get to publish to all these different things. Your social networks automatically, portals, blog aggregators and the media, maybe send a sms text message out to subscribers of your – whatever it might be that you’ve asked them to subscribe to, and even elevate important information that might be deeply nested down in some page that you hope people are going – but they’re really not and – elevated right up to the top. So you can do all those with RSS. RSS is an incredibly powerful way to connect stuff together.

Alright, so let’s just take a couple minutes, and I want to leave time for questions and discussion, but let me show you a few things that I think might help. And with a little luck we’ll get on the internet here… If I don’t unplug anything with my knees, we’ll be in good shape. Ok, so here, let’s paint a picture. This is not a real university, but it’s great because we can play with it as if it were. This is Galina University. Imagine where you will, could be anywhere in the world. We’re going to do some things, we’re going to create a named site for alumni. We’re going to create a Facebook page, if you’ve never seen this done before, it’ll only take a minute. And then we’re going to try to connect things together, and we’re going to make what happens on the Galina’s site  happen automatically on our social networks, so we don’t have to double our workload suddenly. And we’re going to make what happens on our social network update things automatically on our public website if we want to as well. So, excuse me that I have to look at the screen to do this, because I don’t have a monitor, I just realized, but I’m not avoiding you, I’m just paying attention.

Ok, so the first thing I want to do is I want to show you the Facebook creations. So let’s create a page on Facebook. I’m going to go into my Facebook… Ok, stop downloading those really big files right now… how’s the network connection in this room for everybody else?

So here we are on my Facebook page, now, as a Facebook user, you can be in control of pages. So, that’s why I’m logging into my Facebook account first. I’m going to go to my home, and I’m going to create a new page… by clicking on the page manager. I’m going to go to pages…and I’m going to create a new page, which is a link right here on the top right. So real easy, I can go in now and decide what type of page it should be, or what category it should be, let’s see it’s in education… Galina University, and I’ve just created a page. Now, just like in your Facebook account, you can populate that with all kinds of information. You can upload pictures, you can edit the personal information or in this case the public information about the institution. You can create a thumbnail image, you can create events, you can do all of this, and let’s just go to that page now and take a look. So by default, without doing hardly anything, all I need to do is publish this page and we’ve got it. This page is now a public page on Facebook. So it took us about a minute. We can of course, advertise it and hope to get more fans of this, but of course your best way to advertise it is to make it useful, and make the Facebook page something that people want to go to. Make sure the information from your website perhaps, that might be deeply nested somewhere in the bowels of the website that you really do want to elevate in importance, shows up right here, and you can do that by adding an RSS feed, right on your Facebook page. In fact rather than doing it here, because I wanted to do a couple different things, let’s go real quickly… and create a Ning site for the Galina web site, or the Galina University, and add a few more things.

So here I am, on the site that all of you said you’re a part of already, and I’m going to create my own social network. So, name is going to be… Galina university, picking a web address is something.ning.com, let’s just say it’s Galina U, and… since I already have a Ning account, I’m just going to sign in with my own personal information here… so again because I’m creating this from my Ning account, I’m going to be the manager of this. You do need to think about who creates these pages, and Ning sites initially. I can make it public or I can make it private. If I make it private, then I do need to not only invite people but approve people before they are added into the network.

So I’ve just created a quick title and description I can add keywords and a bunch more things, but I wanted to go in here and show you a couple things you can do to manage this and connect the dots. So the first thing I can do is control the layout, I can add new applications and widgets and features and badges and all kinds of great things to this account, I’m going to do just a couple of things, first of all… That looks good. Maybe I want to have events over here… that looks great. And let’s, maybe customize the look… of course I can go in and change that more dramatically if I want to get into the page itself, I can, but I can just pick from a style, and I’ve published Galina university. So, now I’ve got my Galina university website up, and I’m ready to go. So now what I want to do, I want to manage this just a little bit further. Because I want to connect a few things, let me open up another browser window real quick, and go back to Galina University for a moment. Now Galina is using RSS extensively, and I’ve got my little RSS icon active up here in internet explorer 7 so I can see various different RSS items that have been posted through here… I’m going to copy that, I’m going to go back, and I’m going to manage this Galina university Ning site for a moment… let me go in here to features, and I’m going to turn on some new features, including RSS. In fact I’m going to put it right here at the top. Ok, so now I’ve got RSS items for the whole world to see when they come to my site… and the next thing I want to do, is I want to tie in my Galina University feed directly.

So, let’s say what’s happening at Galina… so the alumni who come to this Ning site are going to get news and events and all kinds of great stuff that we’re posting live to the Galina website. We’ll just paste that URL in that I copied from my RSS feed, save it, and there we go. So, that’s pretty easy right? We created a Facebook page, we created a Ning site, took us a couple minutes but it was pretty easy. We were able to connect things together though, which is really cool, because we’ve got this Ning site for Galina University alumni, but we’re getting news and important information, maybe we’ve got various different channels of RSS feed at the big Galina site that might be appropriate for things going on on campus that the Alumni might be interested in, and I can subscribe just to that information here. But any time now Galina alumni come to this Ning site, they’re able to see what’s going on on Galina without having to visit the Galina website. Now let’s do one more thing, and let’s make the channel go backwards as well. Now of course, Ning outputs RSS feeds, so we can pull in an RSS feed on the Galina homepage or wherever, based upon what’s going on in the Ning site. I’m going to do something a little different just for fun to show you how easy this is as well. I’m going to go back to manage, I’m going to go to badges, and I’m going to put a little advertising up here on the Galina homepage for this network that we’ve created. Now this is the badge that’s created, of course the description that I typed in is right here, I didn’t spend a lot of time making it too exciting, but you can imagine whatever you might want to put and change it as often as you want. I’m simply going to copy this… and go back to Galina. And let’s put it right up here just as a badge right on this page. Now I’m going to switch gears for a moment and I’m going into my content management system, and I’m using OmniUpdate, cause it’s my favorite, but you can use what you want…

And since this is not an OmniUpdate demonstration, I’m not spend a lot of time showing you what’s going on here, but of course I can [unintelligibleedit this page, I’ve got various different controls locked down for editing different sections, but since I’ve got the code I know what I’m doing and I’m a high level administrator, I’m just going to make this really simple, and drop the code right here ,and call it a day. Publish that out, versioning system… and back to the site, there we go. So now, what we’ve done, in just a matter of moments, and I’m getting the “I’m almost done” signal… created social networks, we’ve created pages on public social networks, we’ve tied things together, we’ve brought RSS feeds from the live site that you’re responsible for updating ever day and pulled that right into our social networks. We’ve done the opposite, we’ve output things from the social network, in this case a simple badge to advertise the fact that this social network exists. But we can do much more than that,  we can tie in RSS feeds that go back into our social networks as well. And we can do all this really simply…

Ok, so, to summarize here, how did we begin? First, assign responsibility. Again, the game has changed, it’s a whole new game. You’ve got to think about this, you might not be the right person that’s responsible or should be responsible for this social networking management. Figure out who should be and assign responsibility. Even if they’re doing nothing at first, but figuring out what to do, at least you’ve got a start in the right direction. Then participate in a big way. Figure it out and make sure that you’re walking in the shoes of your students as much as possible so that you can have those ah-ha moments and start to tie things together. It’s really wonderful when it starts to all click together. And then finally connect everything. Connect leveraging the power of the existing technologies that you already have built into your website or built into your content management system, or your about to connect into your website. Make sure that they all connect together .Use badges and other Facebook apps, and widgets and gadgets that are out there available to you to make things interconnect.

Alright, and I know we’ve got just a moment left, so I open the floor to any discussion, questions, comments…

Yes?

Audience: This past year we’ve[unintelligible]Facebook page to advertise[unintelligible] started this past year, but I set up the Facebook[unintelligible] and we had about a 150, 160 people sign up for it. A student run group has over 400 members. Is there… like what do you think about that? Are we ever going to be as popular on Facebook as student groups are going to be for marketing…

Lance Merkin: Absolutely, but remember the game has changed, I mean think about it. Your students can also create blogs. Your students can create web pages about your institution if they want to. They’ve always been able to do these things. You’re just a little late to the game. You’ve got to figure out how to make your Facebook page as popular as theirs. Now it’s not that hard, this is not rocket science. We’re talking about promotions and give aways, and things that are typically done to generate traffic to a physical events, you’ve just got to take this seriously enough to realize that these virtual social networking events are as compelling and powerful as other events might be on campus. So no, I have complete faith that you can do it. The problem is you’re a little late to the game, and the students have figured out how to be more popular than you have already. There was another question…

Audience: Like can you get the badge on your Facebook?[unintelligible]

Lance Merkin: Yes absolutely, in fact you can get a Ning badge on Facebook, there’s a Facebook app for it, and vice versa…

Audience: How do you handle some of the issues associated with user generated content, basically bringing over your students [unintelligible], losing control over a lot of what gets said

Lance Merkin: You know that’s the million dollar question, everybody always asks at every conference, no matter whether you’re talking about social networking or YouTube pages or other things, blogs, you know this question has been around forever. And the answer’s not easy of course, the answer is you’ve got to monitor, you’ve got to figure out the right way to channel that energy. You’re talking about a lot of interesting parties participating, it’s causing a problem perhaps. You know, frankly  these are problems that are not unsolvable, and we’ve solved them all before. First of all, you have to have someone in charge to help out, but you can figure it out, you can get things going in your direction by channeling that positive energy.

Audience: When you have trouble [unintelligible] Ning site, Facebook site, are there any barriers to people trying to[unintelligible] saying there’s just too many, I don’t want to have a flicker, Facebook, MySpace, RSS, or is that something I’m having an issue with?

Lance Merkin: It’s something that you and I are having an issue with. It’s something Amy’s having an issue with. Frankly speaking Amy’s probably got as many friends on MySpace as she does on Facebook. And if you do a student poll, and figure out what they’re using, you might be shocked at how many things they’re using, more than what they’re using. So absolutely, it’s a shock to you and I, or a problem to you and I, but it’s not so much a problem. Now fortunately these technologies are, when we talk about technology problems, they’re solvable, because all kinds innovation happens to change the equation again. So, as you will probably learn from the folks at Ning, there’s some pretty exciting things in the works, as you can imagine, there’s some pretty exciting things in the works from Facebook, and as you probably already know, you as developers can create some pretty amazing things in all of these social networks, whether you’re talking about Facebook or Google or MySpace or other things, you can create some pretty amazing apps yourself, that can perhaps overcome these challenges of “oh my god, I’ve got too many networks in my head, I’m not sure where to go next.” Connect things together, use your own creativity to connect things together with applications.

Ok great, thank you so much for your time.

[Applause]

Announcer: For more presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference visit HighEdWeb.org/2008 or sign up for our podcast and feed at HighEdWeb.org/podcast.xml

[End of Music]