Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook

After spending a couple of weeks working on integration between Twitter and LinkedIn, I am amazed at how much can be done with a little knowledge, a lot of curiosity and some willingness to try different options and ways to integrate social networking tools. I realize that many of you reading this may not have either the time or the comfort level required to do some of this on your own but that is not an obstacle. Simply find a student or tech savvy employee on your or the advancement staff and enlist their help if you wish to improve what you are doing and how you are generating conversation and activity on your social networking sites. In any case, take a look at what you are doing and how you can amplify that conversation.

What is really important here in any case is what value are you able to derive from your presence on the sites. I know that my supervisors pay a tremendous amount of attention to the number of fans of our facebook page, how many members we have in LinkedIn and how many people are following us on Twitter. In the light of the traditional focus on numbers that we track in advancement that is the logic thought process. Unfortunately it is the wrong metric to be using.

While each of the major Social Networking platforms also provides measuring stick opportunities, those are limited to a single platform and don't really provide much in terms of meaning to you as an advancement professional. I strongly suggest that we all need to work on ways to identify what value there is for providing resources to our employer. The best of the sites for this process is Meetup.com. Meetup exists purely for the point of connecting each person to one another online with an endgame goal of meeting in real life. I realize that this is still a couple of steps short of providing resources for you to apply to your mission but it is a good transition measure - from talking online to meeting in person.

I am working on running a report that compares folks who are self identified to me as being on one or more Social Networking site and includes real time interaction and giving. At this point, the most obvious (and predicatable) outcome is that the more active the user online, the more valuable they are.

In my small sample, that has not proven to be true. In fact, the more active they are online, the less likely they are to have offline interaction with us. Does this hold true for other schools? Please feel welcome to reach out to me if you need help to identify what your results are.