Facebook strategists

This blog is rapidly turning into a set of statistics on the use of social technologies… so I think this will be the last post on that theme for a while. The graph below comes from an eMarketer article but I was pointed in that direction during a fruitless search for something else (below) which landed me at the US Students Affairs Blog

Graph

The object of my search was more information on an article read (but not available online) in this week’s Times Higher Education. A university of York sociology researcher has written a paper suggesting the university should appoint “facebook strategists” to keep up-to-date in the development of social technologies such as Facebook & YouTube. The strategists should also be involved in writing guidelines for staff and students on how they should interact with each via these sites.

Guidelines maybe, as long as that is all they are, nothing too prescriptive: “Thou shalt not request friendship with your students”! I would say this, but more staff development sessions are needed as well of course. The first hurdle is that the majority of staff and many students still don’t know what all this stuff is.

Reader Comments

  1. I keep hearing conflicting reports about what students are doing online, or maybe it’s more that I hear conflicting reports as to what is the most effective communication channel for students. I’ve read (sorry no reference) that students use, in order > TXT, CELL, IM, SNS, EMAIL, and lastly INSTITUTION EMAIL. Have you seen anything like this?

  2. I can completely see having someone paying attention to social media and being up to date with changes. That could be a good chunk of someone’s day – especially if part of their job was disseminating this information in an effective manner to the various silos of the institution.

    What strikes me as ridiculous is writing guidelines on on how people should behave.

    Makes so much more sense to have a wiki somewhere with top 10 things to think about on x platform so that the fearful folk (and there are lots) can read the “travel guide” and this knowledge will give them the confidence they need to give it a go.

    It would be great to have someone connect these new tools to current pain at the school, to reduce the abstraction of it and to increase adoption. That position would be tremendously useful.

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