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Across the world, an increasing number of business school alumni are turning to places like Facebook to do the kind of networking that not long ago might have been conducted over lunch, by snail mail, or on the telephone. A recent visitor to the Facebook page of the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University, for example, could access a video about the school, get news updates, and look over the shoulder of students reporting casually on their study abroad experiences.
The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University has started a YouTube channel to post a variety of material. Fuqua also provides content for Apple’s iTune video channel, including recent discussions of the turmoil on Wall Street.
As yet other examples, the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California-Irvine created a Twitter feed to communicate with prospective MBA students as well as a Google Group community for admitted students.
A recent study by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research found that across academe, 26 percent of schools are using search engines to research potential students, and 21 percent are using social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. As early adopters of new media, business schools may be ahead of that curve. As new media continue to evolve, however, business schools are fast recognizing that they need strategies to make coherent business sense of the tools now available.
Stanford University, for example, consulted with Forrester Research, Inc., which focuses on the business implications of technology change, to assess its audiences and objectives in the context of new media. Forrester’s insights helped the school determine the right questions to ask, reports Ralph Rogers, director of marketing and communications at Stanford Graduate School of Business, as it framed a strategic approach for the school’s engagement with the new media. New media “is another communications mechanism,” Rogers says. “It needs to fit into an overall strategy.”
Among other experiments, Rogers says Stanford has tested different applications of Facebook, including classes that interact on a Facebook page. Stanford’s alumni association has a closed page on Facebook for which members must have a Stanford email address. Last year, new admits to Stanford’s MBA program shared information on a closed Facebook page. Stanford also created a link from its MBA program’s official page to Twitter, where participants can “microblog” brief updates on sessions, schedules, and other items of interest.
Stanford grapples with the inherent fact that the spontaneity of new media doesn’t allow control of messages as directly as did more static media. Rogers reports that while most postings are responsible, “occasionally there are some comments that are not as glowing as we might like them to be.”
Nonetheless, Rogers says, “we think these vehicles provide a more rounded sense of this place, or at least a different sense, than well-edited web copy or a brochure.” New media, he says, provide a good way to address those who want to know, “What does it feel like there?” and “What do the students think?” As Rogers says, “There may be a few pimples, but the picture is more realistic. It’s not a Photoshopped supermodel, but it’s honest, it rings like it’s honest, and people read it like it’s honest.”
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