Gone are the days when a software/technology project needs to be formally requested through proper channels and built by IT. Honestly, much of this technology can be used without the assistance of a Webmaster. Anyone can create a Facebook or Ning account and a group for admitted students. Anyone can create a document on Google and share it, or collaborate with a group of coworkers via an online spreadsheet or wiki. Anyone can upload videos to YouTube…

This is something that IT departments are struggling with. The struggle has less to do with their own relevance than with very legitimate concerns about protecting trade secrets, business intelligence and legal compliance. I worked for a major health care system where one of the physician/teachers kept a schedule on Yahoo! and shared it with his medical residents. It raises a few flags in terms of HIPAA, ACGME and tracking requirements, etc.

Why was it done, especially when there was a secure, in-house calendaring system on the health care system’s intranet? Adding permissions to view the attending’s intranet calendar to a diverse and frequently changing group of medical residents required a request through IT each time. IT could track who viewed the internal calendar, and this was necessary for privacy and legal compliance issues.

Do a Web search for “innovation without permission” and you’ll find quite a few articles and blog posts on the topic. The general discussion is about the culture within your organization. Is innovation without permission tolerated or even encouraged? Are there business intelligence, legal, or even productivity reasons it should be reined in? Are you likely to get your hand slapped or more strongly reprimanded if you use these technologies?

One could potentially argue that admissions should proactively set up the Class of 2013 Facebook group for reasons of privacy and protecting business intelligence. I won’t lay out the steps of how it could be done, but I could in theory (but DON’T in practice) check my competitors Facebook groups and proactively go after their students. (Brad could drive the point home to his superiors: competitors who know they cost less could find applicants in the Butler Class of 2012 group and steal those kids away. Maybe a competitor’s coach could even stumble upon the name of an athlete being recruited. Etc.)

If you set up the Class of Facebook group yourself, as the admin you can make it a closed group, so competitor’s can’t easily take a peek. One could also argue that you are protecting the privacy of your prospective students to some degree by keeping the group private and not viewable by non-members. (Some “official” college forums are also set up so only members can access the forum, though others are viewable by anyone.)

(I gained sole admin control of a Class of 2011 group about a month ago and grew membership 75% with one message to the group, and these groups are basically already dead when school starts. Why bother at this point? I’m thinking ahead to when they are alums…)

Ask a high school or college student and they’ve often never heard of Facebook fan pages (so far).

Beyond that, over time a fan page becomes a mix of current students, alumni, friends, and prospective students. That is much different than a discussion group for a specific incoming class where everyone is in the same boat: nervous and excited about college, looking for a roommate, etc.

There is nothing wrong with having a fan page for promotional purposes, and fan pages do allow different features, such as custom apps for RSS feeds, etc. My personal bias is that if you are looking to engage in conversation with prospective students, or looking for a home where they will help yield each other, “class of” groups simply work better.

@Brad, you’ve mentioned the apprehension others have about using Facebook for recruiting. I’m curious what reasons they give.

@Jamie, I’ve gone the forum route in the past and the Facebook group route this year, and for me Facebook yielded about 2.5 times the membership and overwhelmingly more activity in terms of discussion (with active promotion) than forums (also with active promotion) did.

Just checked: 580ish members (financial aid is out, so members are joining and leaving daily, so far with little net loss in membership), 583 wall posts, 115 topics, and oodles of posts within those topics (it would take some effort to add those up, and no benefit in doing so). My incoming class will be around 700.

Facebook groups are lacking in noteworthy ways as a forum tool, but given the greater buy-in by prospective students, I’m not going back to forums or even switching to something like Ning anytime soon.

Which do you think has been the better resource for students the BUforums or Facebook group?

I have a Bloggers Fan Page that we were going to use to connect kids from Facebook –> Bloggers on Facebook –> Bloggers on .edu, but I did not get approval to use. Seems like everyone is extremely apprehensive about using Facebook as a recruiting tool, unfortunately.

I don’t think there is any disadvantage to linking to the unofficial group if you have some sort of presence/monitoring there to make sure proper information is getting distributed.

It has been a couple months since I’ve scoured Facebook for these groups, but I only found a few out of the dozens I bookmarked that had “official” college presence on them (i.e. someone from admissions) as an officer, admin, or simply someone answering questions.

From my experience “official” college presence in a Faceook group might be a slight deterrent to conversation (tough to detect, obviously), though I’ve found this to be less true with Facebook groups than with forums/bulletin boards set up by the college. Proactive promotion by admissions (in terms of invites, discussion topics, etc.) can spur a lot of conversation and have great benefits, as well.

Kids will still talk about parties, they’ll still swear, etc. Perhaps the tone of conversation is because it is easier to get a greater number of members in a Facebook group than on a forum on the college’s own site. Perhaps it is because they are used to being in the Facebook space and are more relaxed. Perhaps it is another reason.

As for admin control, there are a lot of reasons this may be desirable. At the very least, I would suggest that if you aren’t an admin of a Facebook group, start a random Facebook group up simply to see what controls the admin has.