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"Vadim Lavrusik is a new media student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is @lavrusik on Twitter and blogs at Lavrusik.com.\nIn the current economy, job security has become somewhat of an oxymoron. Which is one reason why maintaining connections with your old university classmates, especially when you find yourself looking for a new job, can be crucial. Now universities across the country are beginning to use social media tools to engage alumni and build a network of graduates with a shared affinity for the institution.\nOf course, helping former students stay connected is just one reason universities are turning to social media; fundraising is another, and there are many more. Below is a look at 10 ways higher education is harnessing the power of social media to engage alumni. Let us know of any other ways you have used social media to connect with graduates or your former classmates in the comments below.\n1. Helping Alumni Find Jobs\nThough a lot of schools offer their own database of jobs online, many universities are finding LinkedIn to be an effective tool to provide alumni with career resources. And in fact, using LinkedIn means the process is often very hands-off for the schools. In many cases universities create the group and allow the networking magic to take place, with alumni sharing job opportunities by posting information to the group and creating subgroups that are focused to specific career or regional alumni chapters.\nKeidra Chaney, an emerging media specialist at DePaul University (@depaulalumni), said LinkedIn is by far the school\u2019s biggest success with 5,500 members currently in their alumni network on the site, and about 100 new members joining weekly. Chaney said the community has active job postings for alumni on the hunt for work, and that most jobs are posted by other alumni. The most recent issue of the school's alumni magazine actually focused on how alumni are using social media.\n\n\n\n\nMichigan State University uses both LinkedIn and Twitter to share job leads with alumni, said Dave Isbell, alumni career services coordinator at the school. Isbell said recruiters often contact him with quick advice or job information that he shares with his followers. The school\u2019s Career Resources Network also uses YouTube to give students and recently graduated alumni advice on their job search. Schools like Emory University (@EmoryAlumni), meanwhile, host what they call a \"Coach Chat,\" where alumni can phone in and share ideas, tools and career resources. Alumni can also e-mail in questions and those that miss out on a chat can download it as a podcast.\n2. Collaboration and Connecting With Students\nUniversities are using social media to smooth the transition from being a student to becoming an alumni by helping the two groups connect and collaborate with each other.\nStanford University law school created its own Facebook-like social network for alumni and students that includes legal wikis that they can collaborate on for specific practices, said Lisa Farris, associate director of web communications and identity at the Stanford law school. The wikis include overviews of different practices, key skill sets and more information that students and alums can share together. Though there is a lot of alumni-to-alumni conversation that takes place on the network, the collaboration between students and alumni is key in positioning the students for their careers, Farris said.\nM.I.T. (@MIT_alumni) has had similar results with its LinkedIn alumni group, which it allows students to join before they graduate so that they can network with alumni, said Christine Tempesta, director of strategic initiatives at M.I.T. \nCaltech (@caltechalumni) offers its students similar access to its LinkedIn group. Andrew Shaindlin, who is executive director at the Caltech Alumni Association and also writes a blog on trends in alumni relations, said allowing students and alumni to connect blurs the transition from student to alumni, which makes the transition more fluid.\n\n\n\n\nFurthermore, using social media tools to engage students can create a lasting relationship between student and school into their alumni years, said Dave Baker, web communications director at Oregon State University (@poweredbyorange), which built an entire site that is interconnected with social media called \"Powered By Orange.\"\n3. Fundraising: From E-mails to Tweets\nThough most universities are using social media to connect alumni, getting a tweet from your alma mater\u2019s alumni association asking for a gift to the school may not be far off.\n\u201CIt\u2019s a hot topic right now,\u201D said Shaindlin. \u201CIf we are using social media to get our messages out, we have to figure out how to incorporate a need for fundraising and support and build that into the stream of information.\u201D Instead of sending out generic mass e-mails, the challenge is moving to personal, one-to-one forms of communication to make it more effective. Shaindlin thinks that social media can achieve that, but alumni who are the recipients of the message have to be ready to accept it through such a new medium.\nSome schools are experimenting in this area. Brown University used a Facebook Page to engage its alumni as part of its annual fund drive. The school posted to the wall of the Page encouraging alumni to make a gift to the Brown Annual Fund, announcing dollar-for-dollar matches and the end results of the drive.\n\n\n\n\nEmory University started the Blue Pig campaign to encourage its undergraduate students to give to the school by using a Facebook profile, a Twitter account (@thebluepig) and other media. The hope is that when the students graduate, the practice of giving back to the school will continue, said Cassie Young, program coordinator for alumni programs. The campaign seems to have been very successful too, resulting in a 157% growth in number of gifts from undergrads, according to Michael Stoner, who owns the mStoner communications firm, which specializes in web development for higher education institutions.\nStoner said the campaign is a good example of how to integrate various technologies and demonstrates the increasing importance of social media in fundraising. Stoner also noted, however, that there is not much focused work among universities using social media to fundraise. \u201CA lot of people [are] saying this could be big for us, but not knowing how to take advantage of it,\u201D he said.\n\n\n\n\nSome universities are still taking steps toward integrating social media into their fundraising practices. Colgate University (@colgatealumni) in New York, for example, integrated Facebook Connect into its donation process, allowing donors to post that they made a gift to the school in their Facebook status. Because of the virality of Facebook and the visibility of status updates, the idea is that friends of the donor, who may be alumni of the school as well, would see news of the donation in their news feed and be encouraged or reminded to donate as well, explains Charlie Melichar, vice president for public relations and communications at the school.\n4. Training Alumni To Use Social Media\nOf course, for many alumni social media is still brand new. To help its alumni learn how to use social media tools, MSU\u2019s Alumni Career Services office gives tutorials and presentations about how to use social media for a plethora of purposes. Isbell from MSU said the office has done some 25 presentations, engaging 25,000 people \u2013 usually piggybacking at events for alumni groups.\n5. Meeting Alumni Where They're At\nSome universities are playing a balancing act between using mainstream social sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) and building their own private networks. Should the resources be focused on creating a private social network for alumni or using big networks already available? And which is more effective? The results are mixed, but it all depends on the goal at hand.\nFor example, Texas A&amp;M University  has its own Facebook-like social site, MyAggieNetwork, but usage of the network has been on the decline \u2013 only 344 logins last month, in comparison to the 4,000 in September 2008. \u201CIt has not done what we wanted it to do,\u201D said Kathryn Greenwade, vice president of communications for the Texas A&amp;M alumni association. Despite having a lot of similar features to other social networking sites, Greenwade said she thinks it didn\u2019t catch on because it is another account for alumni to have to remember. She said they are going to continue to let people use the site, but have turned their focus to their presence on established social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, which has grown without a lot of promotion. \u201CWe decided to go where the people are rather than creating our own network,\u201D Greenwade said.\n\n\n\n\nAs mainstream social sites continue to grow, niche sites created by universities may become irrelevant and burdensome for alumni to use. Plus, building the sites take resources from the universities that could be applied more effectively elsewhere.\nStanford law school\u2019s own private network for its students and alumni has done well, said Farris from the school. She said this is largely because the content on the network is valuable and exclusive to those that register to use it, such as students sharing class notes. Furthermore, the school hopes to integrate other features, like a curriculum guide that could be synced with the wikis.\n6. Providing Tools To Spread Information\nThe University of California at Irvine (@UCIFuture) was looking for a way to share information with its alumni and at the same time give themselves more visibility. The result they came up with is a publically available widget that pulls content from the school\u2019s website and is part of a broader campaign to raise $1 billion. Mark Aydelotte, assistant vice chancellor of marketing, said there have been more than 1,000 installs of the widget since March, and that it gives the school much more exposure by spreading to other places on the web.\n\n\n\n\nAydelotte said he has seen donors embed the widget to their sites and Facebook profiles because it features a story about their large donation to the school.\n7. Alumni-Generated Content\nAnother way schools are engaging alumni is by allowing them to produce their own content, which includes things like the wikis at Stanford and photo sharing with the alumni network at other schools.\nThe University of Texas at Austin built its own photo sharing site that allows alumni to share photos of themselves showing the school's well-known \u201Chook \u2018em, horns\u201D hand gesture, along with a brief bio. \n\n\n\n\n\u201CIt\u2019s sort of a Flickr for alumni, but hosted on our website,\u201D said Nyleva Corley, web and social media manager at the school. The idea, she said, is to allow people to get reconnected to the school and their fellow classmates by sharing where they are now and what they are doing.\nOregon State University uses Flickr and encourages alumni to post photos of a cutout of Benny, the school\u2019s mascot, taken in various locales. Colgate University uploads photos to its Flickr account and lets people interact with them, including this set from an alumni reunion. Melichar from Colgate said the content is what is important, not the container. \u201CIf we post our photos to Flickr, they have their own social life,\u201D he said. \u201CPeople can interact with them and one another.\u201D\n8.  Promoting Alumni Networks\nThough a lot of the networks are viral and many universities do very little to promote their networks, some do look at social media itself as a promotional tool. Some schools have multiple alumni groups on the same social site because in addition to officially sanctioned channels, there are others that were started by alumni themselves. So alumni associations try to promote their official network (Facebook page, Twitter account, LinkedIn group) as the central hub for alumni to connect.\nAndrew Gossen, senior associate director for class affairs and social media at Princeton University\u2019s Alumni Association, said that if schools don\u2019t take advantage and aren\u2019t quick to provide tools for alums to connect to one another, they will do it themselves. \u201CAnd if that happens, we become irrelevant and the tools replace a lot of the functions of our (alumni) offices,\u201D Gossen said. There are about 45 alumni Princeton groups on LinkedIn, according to Gossen, and the aim is going to be to consolidate them into one group, working with those who started the others.\nMost sites promote the social media groups on their alumni websites \u2013 because often that is the landing point for many alumni. M.I.T. and other schools have experimented with using targeted Facebook ads to try to attract alumni to their social networks. Christina Tempesta, director of strategic initiatives, said the experiment wasn\u2019t too successful \u2013 at least not in the amount of click-throughs the ads got.\n9. Mobile Reunions\nAs a way to save on printing costs and be environmentally friendly, Princeton University built a mobile website for its alumni reunion in late May to supplement the printed program. At the height of the reunion, the school had about 21,000 people on campus, said Gossen, who works with the school\u2019s alumni association. The mobile site included the same information offered in the printed version and in many cases the mobile application was much more usable, Gossen said.\nFor example, instead of just having the shuttle schedule times printed out, the mobile application allowed users to type in their destination and get much more specific information about which shuttle to take and when and where it was arriving. The goal is to continue to expand the mobile app and eventually replace the printed program, which is about 52 pages in length. The application got 1,000 unique visits and 1,600 total visits.\n10. Connecting The Dots: Google Maps\nClass reunions are all about reconnecting to old classmates and the school. To achieve that goal, Nazareth College created a website for its 2009 reunion that used some neat social media tools. The college sent \u201CGolden Flyer\u201D mascots to alumni who were in the reunion class and encouraged them to forward the birds to other alumni attending the reunion. Alumni who received a flyer could check it in on a Google map on the website. They could also take a photo of it and post it onto the Google map and track which alumni had the bird and look at the locations of where it had traveled.\n\n\n\n\nOregon State University uses Google Maps on its Powered By Orange site, as well. The site includes a map at the center of the page and lets alums post their current location and career along with their graduation year and degree. Baker from OSU said that the site hasn\u2019t been promoted and isn\u2019t set for its official launch until the end of September and already has been getting good traffic. The map already has a good number of orange dots on it.\nMore social media resources from Mashable:\n- 10 Ways to Use Social Media to Pick a College- 10 Ways Universities Share Information Using Social Media- 10 Must-Try Social Media Sites for College Students- The Top 10 Social Networks for Gen-Y\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, LawrenceSawyer"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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