Leveraging Web 2.0: Aggies Giggin' the Competition

As UCSB English undergoes behind-the-scenes web design, I've been tasked with setting up and strategizing our social media presence. I know there are many who are skeptical about the compatibility of facebook and the education, but I've had some successful experiments using facebook pages for my discussion sections and am in general optimistic about the recruiting, community building, and educational potentials of Web 2.0 in general. Social networks seem to me to be a natural outgrowth of any organization's web presence, educational or otherwise.

With that in mind, I've been conducting research to see how other academic institutions have been representing themselves on some of the other major networks. I expected to find some innovation here and there, maybe a few major players that have some really great ideas and would serve as raw materials for a patchwork masterpiece.

I did not expect one single university to dominate the entire field. Has anyone been watching those Aggies lately??

Texas A&M University has far and away the largest, most active, and most innovative online social network for an educational institution that I have yet encountered. They are on facebook. They are on youtube. They are on twitter. They are on itunes, flickr, vimeo, maybe myspace (but i can't confirm that), so on and so forth, and several independent departments have their own pages, as well.

Avoiding numbers for now (though they are quite impressive), what really gets me excited about the TAMU octopus is that everyone is so active. Its different branches interact with each other, its fans make comments and thumbs-up their status messages. They get random wall posts from Aggies just wanting to say hi to each other and retweet messages from opposite ends of campus. Their pages are well-designed and full of motion. Clearly there's something going on here besides sheer size. I can't help but wonder how such a wonderfully coherent monster emerged out of the jungles of social media.

Is it the students? Aggies are well known for their tight community and enthusiastic spirit, but there are equally rabid collegiate communities with large enough student populations that I would have expected at least one other comparable beast to have emerged by now.

Is it the social media administrators, who clearly put in a lot of time and coordination to keep things fresh and constantly updating? This is the number one recommendation of Web 2.0 consultants to organizations looking to establish a strong presence online.

Is it the network itself? As I mentioned before, there are an impressive number of departments and organizations from within the university that have their own social media accounts, each of which seem to feed into all the others. TAMU, it seems, has truly gone viral. (Well, on an academic scale, anyway. It's no Michael Jackson.)

Most importantly, what good is it doing them? In my cursory research into the AggieNet phenomenon, I have found school administrators reporting increased applications since their web efforts began, though they were hesitant to attribute this to facebook alone. They recently won a competition for scholarship money by racing to 100,000 facebook fans, beating LSU out by a heart-stopping 98 seconds. The money wasn't big and the competition didn't make major headlines, but all of this must be doing something for the Aggie community.

The (tiny) skeptic in me wonders, however, how long this momentum is sustainable. Managing only one department's multiple networks can be a full-time job even for a veteran. Will the Aggies get tired? Will the university keep paying employees and/or recruiting volunteers to build a community online? Stay tuned.

As a Rice alum and with the awareness that there is a sizeable UT presence on Hastac I find this a tad uncomfortable to say, but I have to tip my hat to the Aggies and their amazing social networking skills. Gig 'em!