Your School's Profile: Are you keeping up?
This is something I'm pretty passionate about and something I think most schools don't fully understand yet. In a socially connected world where communities trump content schools need to continue to monitor and adjust where their community is moving to, what tools are they adopting, and what content they are creating, talking about, and using to connect to each other.
It use to be you only had to worry about your school website
Then it was the wikipedia entry
Then came videos that kids were uploading to YouTube and Myspace
Next came Facebook
Shortly after that Twitter
and now location services (Foursquare, Facebook Places, Gowalla and Google Latitude )
Your school does have a presence on all these sites right?
At the end of last school year I was the only one checking into ISB (Foursquare link) via Foursquare. The Mayorship was all mine! Then somewhere around September I get a notice that I was bumped from being the mayor of our school. A little investigation found out that it was an 11th grade girl at our school. Over the next couple of months we battled it out for the Mayorship...I leave for winter break only to come back and find that Foursquare had taken off at our school.
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Seeing that the community was building here it was time to make it official as there were a few different venues floating around for our school. So I followed the steps on Foursquare to claim the venue...a pretty easy process. After I officially claimed the venue for our school I could add information such as the correct address, link to website, link to twitter account, and even offer specials to students.
I ran a special that if students checked in 5 days in a row I would buy their lunch (attendance taker?). I gave away two lunches in January and then started thinking about other specials you could run for parents, students and the community. You really could have some fun with this. (i.e. Check-ins during sporting event give-aways. Attendance check-ins, daily give-aways.....free lunch from the school to a random person check-in.)
Of course you also need to understand that you can't control everything...especially location based services like this one. We have the school as the official venue on Foursquare. But kids have gone crazy and you can also find:
For those school leaders who think they can still control the content of the school...let this list speak for itself. You can't control where the community goes, what tools they decide to use or not use. All you can do is go with the community and engage them, or at the very least let them know you have a presence there. The worse thing you can do is put your head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist. "We didn't even know this was happening" isn't a very good stance when talking to parents or community members. Schools need to become more social-network savvy. It's time that we create a position in schools to communicate and engage the community where they are at in these growing social-networks.
The days of having full control over your content is gone! The sooner we realize that the sooner we can move on to finding ways to use these social connections to drive dialog, discussions, and even learning and engagement around our schools.
Other Blog Posts On This Topic
Taking Control of Your School's Profile: Where to Start
Schools: Take Control or Forfeit your Profile
Who's Controlling your Profile?