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We're going to wade in slowly, starting with a review of what online social networking has to offer and a primer of the big three sites that you've most likely already heard about from your neighbors or the news.
To wit, online social networking is exactly what it sounds like: There's a vast online world out there, and these social networking tools were designed to help you stake your place in it. Although they were generated by computer geeks, they were all created to be highly user-friendly, even for the computer novice. The cool thing is that all offer free membership, so which one(s) you choose to use will depend, quite simply, on what you a to do online.
First, there's MySpace, the veritable granddaddy of them all. MySpace was launched in August 2003 in a format that allowed members to post personal profiles, blogs, photos, music, and videos. By June 2006, MySpace was the most visited domain on the Internet in the United States. Part of the reason for this popularity was that MySpace was one of the first sites to allow members to personalize their pages with mood updates, a list of interests, photos, songs, and videos, and to "friend" each other and interact through status updates. Today, MySpace also allows friends and family to talk online, provides a friend-finder for people you haven't talked to in years, offers chances for singles to meet, and gives networking opportunities for your business or career.
However, the more successful you are, the more eager your replacement--enter Facebook. Founded by three Harvard University students in February 2004, the site originally allowed only Harvard students to join. Facebook was later expanded to all university and then high-school students. In September 2006, the site extended membership to anyone age 13 and older, and less than two years later, Facebook snatched the crown of most popular social networking site from MySpace. Facebook shares most of the interactive features of MySpace, including the options to chat with friends and family and to post videos and photo albums. The network also offers interactive applications, from joining various Facebook groups to taking meaningless but entertaining quizzes, such as "What is your Hippie name?" and "Which 'Grease' character are you?" Perhaps the most-used feature, however, is the status update, where users answer the question "What's on your mind?" and friends add their feedback, which can range from supportive to downright humorous.
It was the simplicity of this latter feature that launched the idea for the comparatively new kid on the block: Twitter. Compared to its media-heavy, application-dense older siblings, Twitter is extremely streamlined, based solely on the concept of users answering the question, "What are you doing?" in 140 words or less. Since its launch in August 2006, Twitter has quickly gained popularity, both spawning its own verb, "tweet," and becoming a highly used medium for sports figures, musicians, actors, and politicians. In April 2009, for example, actor Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN.com to a "Twitter-off" to see who could achieve 1 million followers first. Kutcher won--mostly because he bought billboard ads along highways to promote his cause. In addition to following and replying to other Twitter users, including your favorite athlete or actor, you can encourage friends and colleagues to follow your posts, providing personal or professional updates in a quicker, more concise way than through MySpace or Facebook. A large number of Twitter users employ their accounts strictly as business networking tools, whether to advertise their businesses or promote their charitable interests.
Finally, there is another social marketing site that is geared strictly toward career networking. LinkedIn allows users to post information about current and past positions, education, and links to websites that might promote themselves or their businesses. Once you have joined and filled out your profile, LinkedIn will suggest individuals or groups that you might be interested in based on your personal information, from current and past colleagues to university contacts. You can search for and add contacts, and LinkedIn also shows you whom your contacts know; should you learn that a colleague knows someone to whom you wanted to pitch your business, simply use the site to request an introduction.
Still, even after reviewing what these sites have to offer, you might wonder, "Why bother?" The simple answer is that it's a great way to keep in touch with your long-distance family, to find your long-lost college roommate a decade or two after you graduated, or to learn what your former officemate is doing today. These friends and family will find you online--it's only a matter of when. According to a poll released in late April by Harris Interactive, which provides Internet-based marketing research, 48 percent of all adults have a Facebook or MySpace account, with 16 percent of them checking into their accounts "at least once a day." Unsurprisingly, perhaps, 74 percent of those adults fall into the 18-34 age group. Still, 47 percent of those ages 35-44 have at least one account, as do 41 percent of those in the 45-54 range and 24 percent age 55 or older.
In contrast, only 5 percent of those surveyed use Twitter, which is young--but it is growing. According to Compete, a Web analytics company, in March 2009, facebook.com saw a monthly change of +23.4 percent, myspace.com grew by 4.76 percent, and twitter.com grew by 76.83 percent. Even more telling is that in looking at yearly growth rates, facebook.com showed a +196.06 percent growth, myspace.com dropped by 11.40 percent, and twitter.com grew by a whopping 1,202.18 percent. Equally interesting are the user demographics. As of mid-April, for instance, there were about 1.5 million women older than 55 with Facebook accounts, an increase of nearly 550 percent during the previous six months.
No question--the sites and the users, they are a'changin'.
So you've established your pages and found your friends--great start. But there's still more that you might not know.
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GETTING GRITTY
So, you want to expand your presence in the online world? Here are suggestions for doing so by Melissa Richards, director of marketing and strategic communications.
Sign up for a Facebook account at www.facebook.com. When you do, be sure to:
* invite your real friends and colleagues to be your friends.
* post information about yourself that you want people to know, such as your employer and job title; do not post information such as your full date of birth (leave off the year) or your telephone number.
* set stringent privacy settings so that only your friends and networks can view your personal information and photographs.
* be mindful that applications you add to your profile and content you post are potentially visible by an exponential number of Facebook users. For example, if you comment on a friend's status update, then that friend controls the ability to allow his or her friends, friends of friends, networks, and others to see your comment.
Once you have a Facebook account, join a Facebook Group. Groups can be created by any user and about any topic as a space for users to share their opinions and interest in that subject. You can search for existing groups relevant to your academic, professional, or personal area of interest. After you request to join the group, monitor it for awhile to get a sense of its integrity.
If you consider yourself Facebook-savvy, create a Facebook Page to represent your area of interest, whether it's a charity, a hobby, a sports team, or your professional or academic area of interest. Remember that a Facebook Page:
* Can be created only to represent a real public figure, artist, brand, or organization and may only be created by an official representative of that entity.
* Can be customized with rich media and interactive applications to engage visitors.
* Is designed to allow page administrators to maintain a personal/professional distinction on Facebook, while groups are a part of the personal Facebook experience.
* Will never display the administrator's name. When you post or take other actions on a page you own, it will appear to come from the page rather than from you personally.
* Can be used to send updates to fans.
* Has no limit on the total fans it can have. Although it is possible to restrict access to a group by requiring new members to be approved, access to a page can be restricted only by certain ages and locations.
Join Twitter and find fellow "twitterers" to follow. Sign up for a free account at www.twitter.com, and then:
* Search for individuals you consider to be key influencers in your areas of interest, such as hobbies, charities, work, or research and then sign up to follow them.
* Look for opportunities to reply to their posts, and include a link to valuable and related content if possible.
* Remember that anything you post is public content--people you follow can read your posts, and people who follow people you follow can also find their way to your account and start following you to generate more interest in their own account.
"Tweet" your own news and campaign messages on Twitter. Remember that:
* It is very easy to be anonymous on Twitter, but transparency breeds more followers. You can decide to create a username on Twitter that either represents you as a person or your area(s) of interest. It is even possible to have multiple accounts; however, that will multiply the number of communication methods you will need to maintain.
* Establishing yourself as a regular tweeter can be as simple as asking every morning, “What is the number one message I want to communicate today about my academic/personal/professional area of interest?” You probably have more to say than you think, but you will need to succinctly communicate your message in 140 characters or less. Ideally you should always incorporate a link to your website, an article, a blog, or other valuable and relevant content. Also, you need to remember that you might be seen as a spokesperson for your company or any organization you are affiliated with.
* While a growing number of followers is always flattering, posting messages that people find interesting enough to "retweet" indicates true success.
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Melissa Richards, director of marketing and strategic communications at Virginia Tech, says that because online social media treads the line between personal and professional lives, you need to choose at the outset just how much information about yourself you want to make public. For example, how often will you post, who will you add as your friends--longtime friends or work colleagues--and what are your privacy settings.
"I think it is important to point out the difference between 'transparency' and 'privacy,'" Richards says. "Privacy means not disclosing personal information such as your birth date and mobile telephone number in your profile. Transparency means that you choose a username and complete sufficient profile details so that people can verify your true identity." She points out that if you are not transparent enough, however, and intentionally mask your true identity, potential friends, colleagues, and followers may find you untrustworthy. So when setting up your account or adding information, it pays to give thought to just who will be viewing your posts.
"What is happening today is similar to what happened some 10 years ago when people started using e-mail more frequently," Richards explains. "Correspondence became more casual between friends, which tended to leak over into business correspondence. Once that communication started becoming less formal, it led to potentially inappropriate work 'conversations.' This is the same thing we are seeing with social media: its informal nature encourages people to let down their guard."
One distinct difference between e-mail and online social media, however, is that the Internet is not private. Yes, a poor decision to send an e-mail--or mistakenly sending it to the wrong person--can come back to haunt you, but not as much as posting an ill-advised photo on the Internet: once it's out there, it's out there. So just as much as you need to think for a minute--or a day--before hitting "send," you need to do just the same, if not more, before hitting "post."
Another distinction is that an e-mail will be read only by those to whom it has been sent, whereas with online social media, whomever you have added as friends or followers can see everything that you post, depending on your privacy settings. Also, if your friends post a potentially embarrassing comment or a photo and tag you because you're mentioned or pictured in it, all of your online friends--which can include everyone from your former college roommate to your current boss--can see it. You can remove the tag, but you have to be aware of the comment or photo in the first place before doing so.
"A good rule of thumb is to never say or post anything that you wouldn't want your mother, your pastor, or your boss to see," says Richards. Another one, she adds, is if the comment or photo isn't something that you would physically post on a wall in a busy hallway, don't post it online, either.
She also advises people to be careful about the amount of personal information they post on their account, including their year of birth, which could promote identity theft. The Virginia Tech Police Department has a Web page that gives the same advice as well as other suggestions, including that students not include specific details about where they live or where they are when they're posting
Granted, if you are new to these sites, some of these precautions might sound daunting. But if you're careful, the pros of actively participating in these sites far outweigh the cons.
Whether you're already a social networking whiz or you're quickly becoming one, there are several Virginia Tech-oriented sites to keep you connected with the old alma mater. A complete list can be found at www.unirel.vt.edu/networks.html. In the meantime, here are just a few sites for your perusal.
The Hokie Nation Network
The Virginia Tech Alumni Association recently introduced the Hokie Nation Network (HNN), a new online social networking site designed exclusively for Virginia Tech alumni and students. Specifically, HNN connects users with other alumni and students by location, business, and industry. Other network content includes contact information for classmates, student groups and clubs, friends, and alumni businesses and job openings at Fortune 500 companies and other career opportunities, including the option to post résumés. HNN is free and can be accessed by anyone with a Virginia Tech PID and password. To join, go to www.alumni.vt.edu and click on the link for Hokie Nation Network. The site also can be accessed through Facebook; simply search for "Hokie Nation Network" and click to add the HNN application to your profile.
Virginia Tech's YouTube site
Would you like to take another look at the football halftime TV spot or see what NBC host Hoda Kotb (communication '86) had to say to the Class of 2008 at Commencement? Or would you be interested in a film from the 1960s about the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets or other historical videos? All of these videos and more are available on Virginia Tech's YouTube site, which includes videos produced by the university as well as by current students and recently admitted students for such contests as "I'm a Hokie!" and "It's Official--I'm a Hokie!" The university also would like to add videos created by former students or friends of the university who want to share their Virginia Tech experience. For instructions on submitting a short video, e-mail viscom@vt.edu. If the video meets the objective of the page, it will be posted to the site.
ThisIsTheFuture.com
Another interactive, Virginia Tech-based site is www.thisisthefuture.com, where both university faculty and staff members and alumni can share the story of how they are changing the world at the local, national, or global level. The site features the altruistic efforts of individuals across the Commonwealth of Virginia and offers a peek at the breakthroughs in technology and understanding that Virginia Tech researchers are making every day. Drop by the site to see how Hokies are working, individually and collectively, toward the future and to share how you are doing the same.
Virginia Tech news on Twitter
For a more succinct means of keeping track of what's happening on and off campus, such as research achievements, faculty and student awards, and online postings of videos and publications--including Virginia Tech Magazine--become a follower of VT News on Twitter. Any updates posted to the VT News Twitter account will immediately appear on your page, usually accompanied by a link for more information. It's a great way to keep track of the fast-paced goings-on at Tech.
VT fun on Facebook
The university maintains an official Facebook page that you can join to learn the latest campus news. Or if you're looking for a little entertainment, search for "Virginia Tech" under "Groups." From groups based on student organizations and specific majors to some of the more quirky options--including "Virginia Tech Transportation/Parking Improvement Suggestions," "Virginia Tech Quidditch," and "Lefties of Virginia Tech"--there should be something that fits your fancy. And don't forget: You can create your own group, whether for fun or fraternity.
With any luck, this article has given alumni--whether those fresh to online social networking, those who virtually own the medium, or those in between--new ways of reconnecting with Virginia Tech. See you online soon.
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