Whats the biggest challenge in social media for alumni relations?
Social media threw a monkey wrench into a machine that served American higher education well for a long time. Alumni used to depend on the alumni office because it had the alumni database, and no large-scale interaction was possible without it. Now, in a Web 2.0 world, alumni have the tools to organize themselves and engage each other in the name of and about their alma mater without assistance or permission from anyone. Alumni relations offices are struggling to adjust to a reality in which they’ve lost their monopoly on information, communication and control. The only way to adjust in a productive and strategic way is to completely surrender any illusion of control as a starting point. What relationship do you think a university should have with its alumni online? Many institutions think of social media as simply another channel for distributing the same content that is disseminated through more traditional means, but that misses the unique nature of the evolving social Web space. So
