UW Social Software SIG meeting notes 2/21 - UW Alumni Association: Husky Connect
Attendees:
John Burkhardt
Tony Chang
Ryan Becker
Scott Macklin
Melinda Van Wingen
Zach Hale
Rita Johnson
Jeremiah Jester
HuskyConnect.com
John Burkhardt, Manager of UWAA (UW Alumni Associations) Online Services, presented the UWAA’s HuskyConnect (www.huskyconnect.com) social networking site to the SIG. HuskyConnect is provided by UWAA thru Affinity Circles, a company that specializes in developing and hosting private social networking sites for universities.
UWAA introduced HuskyConnect in order to help keep alums engaged with the alumni association. Several years ago, UWAA started hearing about social networking sites and many universities and vendors started work on building this new online engagement model. A couple vendors showed up at the time to help provide solutions. One was zuniversity.com who started building portals for universities and then Affinity Circles showed up as a real social networking site that was started by Stanford University grads. What Affinity Circles developed was an exclusive social networking site for specific Universities vs the consumer oriented MySpace and Facebook. So it was more of a private, closed, and safe social networking environment.
The original vision of HuskyConnect was Huskies helping Huskies, and ensuring we continue to develop loyalty and connection back to the University. That HuskyConnect vision has now evolved to focus more on careers, networking and job searching among UW alums which seems to have helped increase HuskyConnect participation.
Affinity Circles is definitely placing less emphasis on social networking and more on career development for University alums.
Data on HuskyConnect.com:
Of the 4,000 people who have registered (10-20% are active)
Launched June of 2007 (it’s new)
Site is hosted at AffinityCircles and not at the UW
Some questions we discussed as a group:
How to measure success of social networks?
- tie it to the business need such as increased UWAA membership
Do social networks fit the culture of the university?
- only time will tell; however, if Facebook is any indication, where we have 60,000+ UW users, then it seems like we all do like social networks - it’s just how well does it work when there are no Sheep or Cows to throw at each other?
Tags: sig, social networking