Don’t compete with Facebook. Complement it.

College alumni magazines struggle to compete with Facebook

What colleges and universities need to realize is that social networking sites aren’t necessarily competitive. They’re complementary. Penelope Trunk had a great post about this last week, which you can read here. The take-home message is that different electronic tools have different purposes. Just like you wouldn’t use a saw to hammer a nail, I’d never use Facebook to blog. It’s not the right tool. We in higher ed just need to figure out what Facebook can’t do and build a social media tool that can do it. My proposal: build a tool that facilitates cross-generational alumni networking.

I went to a great school, but one with a lousy alumni network. That’s not to say the alumni are lousy–I know they’re successful and out doing great things in the world. That’s just to say that I have no way of easily finding them. An online social network of just my school’s alumni would be an immense help for schools like the one I went to with overworked alumni offices and weak (or nonexistent) alumni associations.

Higher ed social networking sites don’t need to be Facebook. Like Ms. Trunk, I believe I only need one place on the Internet where I can receive electronic eggs that hatch dogs. I don’t want another site for that. I want a place where I can search my school’s alumni network for other writers and editors, find a way to contact them, and ask them questions and get career advice. Ideally, this should be a joint venture between a college’s career services department and its alumni department. We in higher ed can’t build social networks to compete with Facebook; we’ll lose. Instead, we need to find what Facebook can’t do—like let young alumni easily find and get in touch with older alumni—and fill that niche.