Carefully-Monitored Community for Students and Their Parents

I’ve spent most of my adult life on college campuses and an innovative approach to communicating with a college community always interests me. So I was interested in the Auburn Family site when a colleague sent me the link—thanks, Nancy!

First, let’s be clear about what the problem is. Colleges and universities don’t want parents and alumni to hear or see the raw, unfiltered accounts of what their students are doing; you know, the kinds of things that all-too-frequently show up on MySpace and Facebook. Students have the same problem; they don’t want their parents to know all of what they are doing at school. This problem led to the unceremonious closing of some of the early social networks that schools set up. This is well known in the higher education community, and schools have struggling with a way to give voice to their students—in a way that will not alienate their parents and the alumni of the school, the latter being donors, of course.

Auburn University has come up with a model that has promise. The concept comes from public relations professor Robert French and 30 of his design and management students designed and built it and currently do most of the posting. The site was launched on or about September 20 and at this moment it has 1,386 members. Take a look at the pictures; it appears to be a nice mix of students and parents. While you’re on the site you can hear the Auburn War Eagle fight song and, oh yes, there’s a link to the admissions office.


No secret is made of the fact that the site is under the total control of the students, their professor, and the University. Here is a quote from their site guidelines:

Because Auburn prides itself on its friendliness and thinks of itself as a family, and because this site will attract prospective students and visitors who want to know more about Auburn, photos, comments, and other postings must not be offensive or suggestive in any way. Since the space being utilized is part of the Auburn.edu domain, the university reserves the right to remove any postings and content at any time. (this phrase is underlined in the original)
All posts and comments are moderated on stories and videos posted here. Your posts will be moderated as soon as possible. The site is monitored throughout the day. (underline and bold theirs, not mine!)

They’ve got clear guidelines and people to do the community monitoring. According to the local newspaper, Prof. French:

wants to make sure the site is safe and clean for anyone to join, meaning anytime someone requests approval, there's a vetting process.

As you can see from the site guidelines, that applies to all content, not just to people who wish to sign up for the site. The goal is clearly to keep this a nice, clean site that no alumni donor can reasonably object to! Same goes for parents, especially parents of prospective students!!

Will this site be too controlled, too sanitized, for some Auburn students? Absolutely, it will. They have other places to post their commentary, pictures and videos. They may just be hoping that their parents don’t see those!

This is perhaps an extreme example of community monitoring and control, but I submit that it’s necessary for what Auburn wants to accomplish. What do you think?

A Community Manager Dishes

I’ve written about community monitoring several times because it’s key to successful online community. I was interested a couple of weeks ago in a Matt Rhodes Tweet about interviews Fresh Networks had conducted with Shirley Bradley, the community manager at Business Week. The first part of the interview has a lot to say about community management in general; the second is about community management in a publisher setting.

She describes her role as “efforts to include readers and incorporate user-generated content (comments, suggestions, longer form opinion pieces) in BW’s journalism, elevating our readers’ participation on the same level as our journalism.” Some of her specific duties are:
• Managing customer engagement; see the links in part 1 for the many activities involved. One important activity is to solicit reader involvement. In part 2 she talks more about the “crowdsourcing” techniques they use.
• Included in customer engagement is the monitoring of reader comments. Each editor also monitors his/her own blog. Monitoring is one way of gauging reader sentiment. It also includes removing comments that do not meet community guidelines.

Crowdsourcing is not my favorite term; it seems to smack of an unruly mob running amok. In spite of that, I wanted to see what they were doing, so I went to the CrowdSourcing page. You may have to go there yourself to read the explanation at the top of the page; the relevant phrase is “using large, distributed and minimally directed groups to accomplish tasks.” Ok. While you are there, note that there’s a Featured User—nice pr—and a block of Tweets on this topic (the main filter appears to be the term “crowdsourcing”). Well done!
















When you look further you find that Crowdsourcing is a page on their Business Exchange site (a community site powered by Ning, as far as I can tell). According to the site, “Business Exchange is a Web site that allows users to create business topics, collaboratively aggregate content from the entire Web and connect with other business focused users around these topics.” It has a mind-blowing number of topics (I checked on “Social Marketing,” surprise, surprise!). I registered using my LinkedIn profile. I’m not sure what that adds; it would have been just as easy to fill out the form. However, I may find that I signed up for something else on LinkedIn! Registered users can save content, create a network, and suggest topics as well as simply adding content.

The main take-away is that there’s a lot going on in Business Week’s social space. It’s probably not a luxury, it’s a necessity for a media vehicle that wants to survive in the changing media world. (On that subject, check out the website for Gourmet magazine before it goes away. The home page clearly focuses on content from their writers and editors. There are discussion forums, but there seems to be no serious effort to bring readers into the editorial process.)

Social media is undoubtedly not the silver bullet for survival for magazines, or any other media, for that matter. The more interesting question is whether a given vehicle can survive without enthusiastic reader participation.

While you’re mulling that question, you can learn a lot about community management (note it’s more than monitoring; see a great post by Dion Hinchcliffe) by reading the interviews with Shirley Bradley. Then stay tuned for my next post. I’ve discovered an interesting new community where content creation and monitoring takes on a whole new meaning—and potentially a whole new series of challenges!