Jed Liston, UM’s Associate Vice President for Enrollment Services, was convinced that a social network could help UM’s recruitment and retention efforts. The question was whether to develop a UM social network, or go where students were already gathered — Facebook.
Focus groups initially told Liston to stay out of Facebook. But things change fast in the online culture.
“We were almost to the point of launching a third-party social network,” he says. “We did one last focus group and asked students if they would jump on our site. Everybody said they wouldn’t log off Facebook to visit it. In a relatively short time, perceptions had changed. Now it was OK to have institutional pages on Facebook.”
So Enrollment Services created a “closed” Facebook group for the incoming class. They sent postcards to applicants and admitted students inviting them to join.
“We told them they would only be talking to their fellow classmates, and that we wanted this to be a place for them to converse,” Liston says. “It exploded. In the first four weeks, we had more than 600 people join. We only have about 1,900 new freshmen, so that was pretty good.”
Liston and two staff employees are group members, but they mostly just “listen.” They only enter the conversation to correct misinformation.
“The idea is to let them build a community of their own,” Liston says. “It’s nothing that isn’t going to happen the first week in study lounges and around campus-that exchange of getting to know one another.”
Liston acknowledges the risk of exposing uncommitted applicants to unfiltered dialogue. But so far the experiment appears to be successful.
“We’ve found that these students really started sealing the deal for themselves,” Liston says. One group decided to all meet at the Grizzly statue on the third day of classes. They had already developed friendships. That makes or breaks a person staying here, if they feel connected.”
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