Just a few short years ago, Brad J. Ward was finishing up his BA at the University of Illinois-Springfield and working in Residential Life. He was playing around with the web, and as an internal communications tool, started a website that featured photos, videos, events, and ongoings of the dorm wing he supervised. When admissions marketing saw it, they tested it as a tool to give prospective students an authentic lens into campus life. Prospects ate it up, and Ward landed himself a job in admissions marketing at UIS.
After a time running web communications at Butler University (Ind.), his visibility increased in higher ed. Through his usage of social media and conference presentations, Ward started experiencing demand to help others with their projects. He soon realized he would need to go into consulting full time. He is now the “chief explosion officer” at BlueFuego, a company that helps higher education institutions utilize social media and adapt to the medium of the social web to meet their goals. "The game is quickly changing, with the shift in how students communicate leading this shift. With shrinking budgets on the horizon, schools need to integrate cost-effective web tools into traditional methods to be successful and stay relevant," he says.
The demand for services such as Ward's are growing, as more and more institutions are facing up to the facts.
Engaging in social media is now a business imperative for universities. Even the skeptics are being converted because these outlets are responsible for a huge portion of the content and the traffic of the internet. According to Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research, three in four adults now use social tools on the internet to communicate. Younger audiences are simply living a good portion of their lives online. Katie Lynk Wartman, co-author of Online Social Networking on Campus: Understanding What Matters in Student Culture (Routledge, 2008), explains "students now live their lives in hybrid environments." Most of that time is on the social web and in social media, particularly in the giant Facebook. When describing student usage patterns, Wartman points out "Facebook is their directory. It's the first place they go to find social information. You can think of a student union and how it acts as the hub of student activity and connection. Well, there's a new student union, and it's online."
This dramatic growth is due in part to the dramatic improvements in the "stickiness" of websites and the experiences they provide for their users. Companies have finally learned what social psychologists probably could have told them all along: that people are primarily interested in themselves and their personal relationships, and beyond that they're largely interested in other people-especially the audience they'd like to think of as their peers. Now that designers and engineers have understood this, they've unleashed a force. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook, recently articulated a mutated version of Moore's Law—the amount of information shared on the internet roughly doubles every six months. Facebook's mission, as a part of this movement, is nothing less than to "make the world more open and connected."
"Just five years old, Facebook is barely out of its infancy, but the rapidity of its growth and evolution is staggering," notes Dan Forbush, executive director of communications at Skidmore College (N.Y.).
There are a bewildering number of social web products out there. Using the notion that the winner changes too fast to pick a tool and start is bunk. While some think Facebook will keep the gold standard brand of social web products, the reality is there will be many more but they will all follow the same principles. So, learning how to use one effectively can only better position you for the next. Rachel Reuben, director of web communication and strategic projects at SUNY New Paltz, recommends, "Just focus on a couple of tools. Focus on where your audience is. For us, that's Facebook."
Ward's favorite tool is Twitter, and that's common among professionals who continually share ideas. Twitter is quickly becoming the world's 24/7 mindshare, and Ward has over 2000 followers. Its growth rate has even shocked Facebook into trying to stamp it out through their redesign pushed in early March 2009. "I know a lot of higher level administrators that are on Twitter. I see them learning a lot from everyone else on there," says Ward. Reuben confirmed the increasing importance of Twitter amongst her peers within and across institutions. "Now that I'm hooked into the right community, it's so beneficial. You can ask for help, ideas, information, and it's instant," she says.
