SOC8: BFF <3: How Social Networking Made the Class of 2013

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of podcasts from the 2009 HighEdWeb Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Speaker: Hi everybody. Thanks for coming. So, I’m going to talk a little bit about the social network that we installed as part of our prospective student and admitted student portal. And talk a little bit about how that went, how we set it up. It’s got some technical aspects to it as well as some marketing slash admission slash design. So hopefully there’s a little bit for everybody, but not too general.

So, really quickly, if you haven’t heard of Ithaca College before. Oh, I have to aim it this way, sorry. I aimed it up here.

It’s a private school. It’s about 6,400 students. It’s Upstate New York. Same place where Cornell is which you probably have heard of.

This is just the overview of what I’m going to talk about. Just a quick introduction to the myIthaca portal. So, you have a sense for what that is. The technologies that that particular application uses. And then IC Peers which is the brand name that we gave for the social network that we added to the portal.

A little bit about how we went about integrating social features, how we involve the campus community which was as formidable as building this thing. And some of the outcomes and some stats about how that worked. And then finally I wrap it up just to talk about how we’re transitioning those students from the social network that’s part of the prospective student portal into the social network that we just released that’s part of our campus portal.

So, oh gosh I got to aim it down here. That’s so counterintuitive. All right. So, about myIthaca, just really quickly, myIthaca follows the admission funnel. So, we have a different visual or feature wide state for each of these different parts of the system.

So, as a student progresses through the admission funnel, myIthaca changes the feature set, changes etc. So, this is pretty standard. I think the accept page metric part is where the social network comes into play.

There are some features related to user accounts for inquiries of people before they actually apply but those are much more limited.

All right. So, really quickly. myIthaca, it’s more like a website than it is a portal, for the most part. But it does have user accounts. And there’s some articles that are targeted at this specific audiences etc, frequently asked questions and store the ones you cared about the most, myFAQs etc.

The most important things with the application checklist targeted announcements. And then once the student obviously becomes accepted, we introduce the IC Peers social network which is a much more attractive feature and keeps people involved.

Really quick, this is just a quick look at what it looks like if you just signed up for a brand new account. So, you become an inquirer. This is the first non-accepted view. There’s some information about the major that you’re interested in. That actually goes into banner, as well as some dates to things that are upcoming that might be of interest.

I had mentioned a couple features that were available to people all throughout this cycle. And we have student produced magazine that’s primarily used for enrollment. And we have integrate it so that students who register with the portal can come in and interact with current students on stories that are in this site, which is also a print magazine.

So, I’m going to talk a little bit about the technologies that underlie the portal. myIthaca has actually been around since 2000 and they used to go against our legacy, student information system and then we upgrade it to go against banner when we installed that at the school.

And basically the way that it’s set up from a technical perspective is that, my group works in ITS but we’re sort of the Web development group. There’s a system, a program analyst and dba's as well. So, we don’t store any institutional FAS data in any of our databases. That’s just a given rule.

So, the way we set up myIthaca is that there’s some SOAP Web based services and we control the whole presentation there. And do all of the interaction, the login and updating information in banner directly through the SOAP Web Services. And that worked really, really well. It’s been fast and flexible. And it puts things where they belong so everybody is happy.

There is some mySQL plane rolling here because we do some logging and some things that are not obviously storing SIS data but just helpful, sort of side information. And our directory at the college or someone at the directory who plays a role for authentication of people who aren’t banner students or prospects.

Cool. All right. So, this is what the presentation is about. IC Peers, as I mentioned is the brand name for our accepted student, social network. And we had some sort of vendor solution that was an externally hosted thing that we tried to integrate with for a couple of years.

And it was moderately successful even though it was super clunky and kind of poorly written. And it didn’t give us the data that we really wanted from it. So, it was like, “Oh, well it seemed like it went well but we couldn’t get any data from them that was useful. But the potential is in there that we thought, if we could have data we could really justify that this is something worthwhile.”

Once a student logs in after being accepted, the interface obviously changes. And we’re using the social network. Obviously it has its own value but we’re also using it as a way to drive students back into the portal. And so, we focus this dashboard which is the first screen they see on really having like a key information.

Just really focusing on utility. It kind of get rid of the marketing spiel. What was interesting and a lot of people might find this interesting as well. Let me just skip to the next slide to show a little bit bigger. No, aim it here. There we go, sorry.

Each of these different blocks, especially the news and notices. What we did this year, which was really, really successful is that we have a content management system that we use to power the public website and it allows us to create different instances of a news module. And what we did is we created specific instances that were targeted just at this accepted student population and gave them to different offices. So, admission had one, Reslife had one, new student programs have one.

And so, that they could use this as a way to funnel this news directly at the students. And because they were using it all the time, it was a great way to get that information in front of them but distribute it. So, there wasn’t any kind of extra. We need to let them in or give them special access etc.

We also had some important dates that was managed by admission. And then the right column here is sort of like the social network activity and notifications.

So, as I mentioned, we had used the vendor product for a couple years. And it was really, really limited but people used it anyway which was kind of surprising. But when, today’s different obviously than two years ago. We know that. And we were convinced that it was worth doing something a little bit more robust.

We wanted to take it a step further. The college was pretty supportive of that. But they said, “Do not build something.” There’s got to be something out there that does this already, which I’m sure people have heard before.

And understandably, we wanted it to be really integrated. So, that was one of the, we did look at Ning and decided that integration wasn’t something that was a strong point there. And also the data that we’re able to extract wasn’t quite what we wanted. And also the people who were responsible for the banner system were like, “What? You want to upload this to some third party site? No.”

So that wasn’t a popular option. So, we did look for some software that we could host ourselves and ended up choosing the software called social engine. I don’t know if anybody’s heard of it before, socialengine.net. It’s like really, really inexpensive kind of a thing where you, “Well, we found this really great software. It’s $300. Do you think we can buy it?” And they’re like, “What? It’s $300. Can it possibly be good?”

But it is good. And it’s written in PHP mySQL. And so, as a result of this choice, the primary project was about integration from a design perspective and also integrating it with banner and the rest of the information that comes from the student information system.

So, one of the questions that kept coming up was, why are we doing this? People are going to be on FaceBook. They want to use FaceBook. This is a stupid waste of time and money because nobody is going to use it anyways. And this question came up over and over again. Like we’d convince people that it was a good idea and then like a couple of months later, they’d be like, “It’s really a good idea. Why are we doing this?”

And we had a little bit of data, like I said from before but not quite as much as we would have liked. But we ended up making the argument and we ended up being right. Thank goodness. But there was a reason for having a community that was separate from the other outside world community in FaceBook and things.

One is that, it was just accepted students to Ithaca College for the class of 2013 which is not possible to isolate that group on FaceBook. But at the stage where we first enter people into this, they didn’t have their Ithaca College email addresses. So, there was no way to really say, “I definitely know you’re an Ithaca College person.” It was sort of like go on trust, create a group called the class of 2013. And anybody in the world can join it.

That’s not quite that. It doesn’t give you quite the sense of security and safety. Whereas, by having application that the college runs and owns, people come in with the trust that they see other people, may know that they’ve been accepted for the class. So, that creates a certain kind of trusted environment.

And from our perspective institutionally, the idea of saying, “Hey 50 faculty, go sign up for a FaceBook account and let’s teach you how to use it to interact with this incoming students.” That didn’t really seem like it was going to be too viable. But by having a tool that we controlled made it so that they could just log in with their existing email using the password. And sort of simplified it then made it much more attractive and as a result we were able to get a lot of involvement from campus constituencies.

The other thing is that we had people in there that could answer questions and they were obviously authoritative. So, they knew there students who could give real applicable answers or their own experiences about things. And that became a really powerful tool.

And the other thing was is that because we link it to, integrate it with banner data, if you were accepted into the biology major or a specific major. Just like on any other standard social networking profile, if you click on that major, it brings up a result of everybody who’s on that major.

And because we have some of that information that we could present absolutely consistently about different students, it made it really easy for people to find others with the same major, same interest, same school, same hometown, whatever the case maybe or any combination of those.

But that was something that we couldn’t do. We didn’t include gender in the search but it ends up being sort of a dating site anyways.

[Laughter]

Yeah. You know we tried.

Audience: All of a sudden then.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah.

So, just really quick. This is some things that, for those of you who are more in enrollment services, kind of divisions, it definitely help to facilitate an action between the students and the staff especially the admission counselors. And needless to say, because of the relationships that were built using this tool, this transition and the cohesiveness of the incoming class was a pretty strong advantage over any previous year that we’ve had.

So, here’s a list of the features that we ended up implementing as part of our social network software. There were others that we did not. I made them bigger if they were more popular and smaller if they weren’t quite so popular. Really people use it as a way to meet other people. That was the primary function, which was really the reason that we did it in the first place.

But we did have some discussion forums. We have groups and it was open. Anybody could create a group. Anybody could create discussion. There was no sort of like, “Oh, if you’re an Ithaca College person, you can start this discussion.” It was really open for everybody.

And some private messaging which was used more for questions. People I think knew that they wanted to ask a question about financial aid, but didn’t necessarily want to ask it in front of everybody. So, that was a feature that ended up being helpful to have.

So, one thing that was unfortunate is that there’s so many amazing screenshots that I have, of things that happen on people’s profile and the way they customize them. And I’m not really at liberty to show you a lot of those because I don’t have photo releases from all those students so I apologize because they weren’t officially at the college yet.

So, I’ll show you my profile. I’m not nearly as exciting. But just so you get a sense for what the profile looked like. The green thing is choice that I made. There’s a couple different colors we allowed them to pull from. But you have your wall and then this is activity feed. Talks about stuff that I’ve been doing in my groups and photo etc.

I have a bunch of other screenshots, just to give you a sense of what it looked like. This is a student ambassador which was we had. That’s what we call the students that were current that were in there interacting and so I can show her.

And I’ll talk a little bit more about how that was all set up later. There’s a faculty member. And so, this was my photo album. This is my dog, Josie. She’s very cute. Groups, this was the house group which was the most popular group. I started it, woo!

And this isn’t social network related except sort of. We had this whole slew of articles that were very targeted at this specific audience and they were written by sort of a combination of marked-on admission, writers, editors. And these all had comments on them so that students could comment on the articles or ask questions to clarify things which was nice.

This is what the discussion forum area looked like, the bookmarks. I just want to point out one thing. I think this is probably obvious but if there was any feature that didn’t have some sort of callback where they would get email notified of every single thing that happened, it didn’t work. It was a total dead feature.

So, really the only ones that worked well were where you said, “Oh, I started discussion,” and then when you get a reply. You get an email about it because they just keeps bringing people back. And where there things like groups were that wasn’t a feature of every, part of the group’s module. Those parts just didn’t have anything happen. Somebody would go in and maybe start something and then it died. So, we ended up going in after the fact and adding that where it was missing because it was pretty important.

So integration, this was one of the trickiest things. So, as I mentioned, we had their major and things like that came from the banner student information system. And yet we also wanted people to be able to put in other information about themselves. So, what we ended up doing was we set up a system where on a given user profile, there were certain fields that were essentially pre-populated or could not be edited as part of their profile. And those are the ones that came from banner.

And what we would do is we set it up so that as a student logged in, it would do reconciliation against that data to make sure that if their major had changed or some other information that’s on the profile, that we would update that right then. And then we also ran a nightly job that was just went through and compared everybody to make sure that, because obviously your presence in the social network is real even if you don’t log in for four weeks. So, we wanted to make sure that that profile was accurate, even if the student wasn’t logging in.

So, we had fields that were not from banner and those were stored in mySQL and nobody had a problem with that. So, but what we were doing is essentially updating the mySQL tables that came with the social engine software that we were using and use our ID number from banner as their ID number, which happen to work because the field was long enough in the database. We didn’t even have to change that. So, that was kind of handy.

Another aspect of it was that we actually were really running two separate applications. We had our PHP front-end application and then there was a social engine application. It had its own session management. It had its own login etc.

So, one of the things we had to do was tie this together so that when you log to myIthaca, you were automatically logged into social engine and vice versa, if you log out. So, we made it so that there was some session sharing there. Obviously not just the log in and log out but all the identity information because there were things on both that were sort of cross. So, there was social network stuff that was pulled out to our application pages and vice versa. And it made it relatively straightforward once we got that figured out.

From a design perspective, it really wasn’t that tough. Social engine uses smarty and I assume most people probably at least have heard of smarty. This was my first experience with it as a developer, designer. And it extracts sort of the presentation layer, HTML out from the PHP code. And that made it really easy to comfortably go in and kind of tear it apart and make it look like it blended in with everything else.

And we definitely pulled that off. And we added this thing that we call the user buyer and this was at the top of every page. This is at the bottom here. So that it had your status and then links to sort of like my friends, my groups, my profile, etc. So, that was persistent, everywhere in the site.

So, seed users was the name that we gave or we just used internally to describe campus community people that we wanted to get involved with the social network. And it’s kind of a weird name. I’m glad we didn’t use it publicly. It sounds kind of creepy.

[Laughter]

So, the way that we handled this is similar to the way that we use banner as sort of a secondary source. For the case of current students, faculty and staff, they logged in against their email username and password. And we did a similar account reconciliation with them, except against our college directory as opposed to against banner.

So, there was actually two different login interfaces happening and two different backend, sort of data sources happening. But the way that it was set up, it was seamless. And that was nice about the fact it was all going into mySQL at the end. So, from any given moment it was the same code. We didn’t have to write anything different for the social engine in order to accommodate that.

So, we have faculty, staff and students. We debated for a little while as to whether or not because we knew the social network was coming for the current faculty, staff and students who are like, should it be the same profile for faculty member or for student, that they’re interacting with this audience or we should we keep them separate somehow? And I guess it didn’t take that long to decide that we should keep them separate, just because these people that are interacting with incoming students have a very specific role in there.

And the kind of information or things that they might put on their profile might not be suitable or perfectly chosen for this audience. Also we had to deal with the fact that somebody commented on their profile that was current student, that was on the other system, like how does that show and reconcile.

So, we ended up doing a distinct user account for all of the seed users. And so, we gave them this IC underscore username. That way, they were still distinct because our usernames are distinct obviously. But it also helped to because that username shows in the system as you can see up on the bar there. And it helps to identify people who were Ithaca College as opposed to incoming students.

Another thing I want to point out is this badge, up next to Erin’s name. This is IC student ambassadors. This was something that we added to social engine. It wasn’t a huge customization, it was a little one. But we wanted to make sure that wherever there was a comment or a forum post or anything that was made by an Ithaca College person, that that badge showed very clearly. So that there wasn’t kind of a confusion because there are obviously current students if you weren’t reading their profile carefully, you could think that they were incoming students. There were actually a couple of people who thought that I was an incoming student and I’m clearly not. So, it was helpful.

Just in terms of activity and the numbers of people that we got involved, we had some seed users that were involved in previous years. Just basically available to answer questions via email and things. And so, we know some people who are interested in being involved. And we targeted them at first and made sure that we had sort of the key players from the different offices to interact with incoming students involved.

So that ended up being 45 faculty and staff. We had member of the Web team who works in marketing communications. Sit down with all of them, either in small groups or individually and show them the tool, help them get used to it. We had a QA instance where they could go in and create all kinds of weird things on their profile and play around. And it wasn’t the same as the production instance. So, that was helpful. I’ve actually enjoyed that a lot.

And we made sure that people had a specific role and responsibilities to inform there was some moderation privileges that were signed based on the topic of the forum categories. As well as some people who are just sort of charged with, “Hey, find people who are your major and reach out to them and try to answer any questions they might have or that kind of thing.”

So, this started like mid November and then in January, we added 80 students and that was the best thing. This year, we’re adding them right from the beginning. The students were amazing, could have been best or anything better.

They were super involved and really, really interacting and we chose people who are like the president’s host and some other selected. We would ask the deans to have the department choose students that they thought would be good representative with major and things like that.

So, it wasn’t arbitrary choices to who we selected but having gone through that process, it really paid off because the students were an amazing resource. Once they were in there, all the administrative staff and admission staff, they had to do a third amount of work or a fourth amount of work because all of a sudden, students were and then bam, bam, bam answering every question and, “Oh, they got it totally right.” And then if you had to say, “Oh, and also here’s this other little detail or something. If you have more questions, call us etc.”

Just a little stat. Top 20 seed users, which only included six students actually logged in 3,135 times. I’m not sure how exciting that status.

Anyways, so what happened? Let me start by saying that as I’ve mentioned, one of the problems we have with the vendor product was that we couldn’t the data out of it that we really wanted to be able to show that it was a success or that it was worthwhile or how it impacted our enrollment. And so, by having it on our own databases, we’ve had every piece of information you could ever imagine wanting to the point where it was absurd.

But pretty much any activity that you took as a student in the social network was logged. And we created a special interface for admission and institutional research to be able to do extracts. And those extracts could be based on time or on majors, genders, whatever. So, there was basically they could pull a lot of different datasets very easily and that proved to be incredibly useful.

The woman who’s responsible for this in IR loves us. Every time she sees us she’s like, “Oh my god.” She’s so really excited. And we’re like, “Wow. That was cool.”

So, here’s some general numbers. Just you can get a sense for how this happen. So, this was November 15 was the very early accepts through until the end of the summer essentially when they came to campus.

Overall, there was 192,000 logins. There were 84,562 wall comments made and these are just students, just students. And that seemed to be the most popular feature. People would just have these conversations right out in public and I’d be like, “Oh really? You should use private messaging for that.”

[Laughter]

“I don’t want.”

But it said something about the fact that people feel comfortable in the environment indoor. It just say something about people that are young these days. I’m not sure which. It’s probably a little bit of both.

Friendship wise, there was 52,000. That represents one for every pairing. So, it’s not like somebody added, somebody accepted. Private messages was definitely used, profile photos. That was how many there were at the close and I think that number fluctuated at times.

Album photos, groups. Group wasn’t super popular. I think it was like FaceBook groups. It was like, “Oh yes I like the TV show House. Great. It’s listed on my profile. No, I’m done.” That was about the whole scope of the group. So, there was a lot of features in the group that were not really that important. It was basically like affinity badge on my profile essentially.

There was 164 seed users in there at the end. Forum came a little bit later but there was 133 topics. Most of them were started by students although we did see that a little bit to try to get it started, get it moving.

So, this is a accumulative graph of friendships that were made overtime. So, if you look in the middle, around when the deposit was due and things that was kind of hike and frenzy to make friends. And then obviously, it sort of eased off by the end of the summer which may just be that people were already friends with everybody. So, there wasn’t a whole lot of new friendship to make.

This is a logins chart. I didn’t understand this when I first looked at it so just, in case you’re like me, the height is the total and then it’s broken down within proportionally by gender.

So, the lighter blue is males and darker blue is females. So, we had 1,800 distinct logins on one day. And this is the overall arch. The depth is we have a yearly campus wide power outage for a day. And then the spike is the first day of housing selection for our special programs. So, people were in there trying to find roommates and things, I suspect.

Discussion topics were varied but really, it was mostly about like “Hey, are you really coming? I’m really coming. Are you?” And that actually ended up being the most interesting thing.

Students were totally selling each other like they were convincing each other to come. Be like, “Oh yeah, you know that college is OK but like Ithaca be so much better. We could do this, like dadadadada.” Just really trying to sell each other. And it was hilarious to watch and really, really successful.

So, the argument being that people build relationships. They’re more likely to feel they have a relationship with the college and then they’re more likely to end up showing up on the first day.

People talked about the different programs. Lots of housing conversation. Both to Reslife and then between students. They were really interested in finding a roommate. And that, in of itself justifies this tool because pretty much everybody came in already with their roommate being somebody that they consider a great friend, which I think about my freshman year, it was like, “Oh god, who are these people I’m living with?” It was horrible experience.

So, that’s kind of huge. And I think that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t do that on FaceBook but like I said, it was a comfortable kind of a controlled environment and I think that people really used it and felt like they could trust the relationship that they were making.

Financially discussion. Thankfully, nobody was saying “Oh, what was your package?” or “Oh Ithaca totally shafted me” or whatever. So, for the most part, we were worried about that. I wasn’t but the people in financial aid were and it didn’t ended up being a problem.

And then really, there was a lot of discussion about, “Are you going to leave your boyfriend when you come?”

[Laughter]

A lot of it. This is was some of the stuff that would happen like on the walls. Probably because the boyfriend could see. There you go.

[Laughter]

That’s right. So, in terms of how it all ended up because obviously these students are here now. The targeted incoming class was 1,600 to 1,750. And this was we’re shooting a little bit high because obviously as most colleges are experiencing, this is a weird financial time.

Everybody is a little scared. Are we going to get enough students? So, maybe we’ll aim a little high and hope for the best and then we’ll get a reasonably sized class.

The actual incoming class was over 2,000 considerably and which is a really awesome thing for us and a really awful thing for a lot of other people. It was like, “Hey, did you see how great the numbers were?” And the woman from Housing was like, “I hate you,” like we have 500 people we can’t house or whatever.

So, good and bad. But at least we have a sense for how that all worked out. This stat, I’ll just be honest with you. The admission people were sort of, when they got to this part, they were, “I don’t know if we like you saying that particular thing.” I said, “This is a conference guys. It’s academic.”

But anyways, so this is a little bit misleading but basically 45% of acceptance students, meaning all the people that were admitted were active in the social network. And of those, over half of them chose Ithaca and if you know the numbers, it basically means that over 90% of the student who ended up matriculating were active in the network.

The participation rate was very, very high. We definitely exceeded our enrollment goals and everybody was really, really happy in admission. Now, I have to say that wasn’t obviously the only initiative that we took to try to increase enrollment but it was definitely a big one and a lot of effort went into it.

Just some quotes that I pulled literally off of my wall. And I don’t even know why anybody would bother to look at my profile, but they did apparently. And I had probably 35 or so that I just took the first six. But the first one probably says it the best, “The more friends I make on here, the more inclined I am to go to Ithaca.” And it really ended up being that so we’re excited. Yeah?

We’ll, I’m going to talk about how we transitioned them into the current student, faculty, staff portal. And the issue of alumni for us, we haven’t really gotten that part yet. And it’s largely because we have advanced and we’ve never really been able to get it so that we can access that data from a login perspective or from an account perspective.

Sort of stupid the way that it’s set up or something I’m not sure. But that’s our next step and if we can do it to push this class through when they graduate, that’s great because they’ve used it all the way through. But we’ll see. Wish me luck. It’s not going to be easy.

So, as I mentioned, we have this other product called myHome at Ithaca and this is newer obviously than myIthaca and we built it, launched two years ago. Yeah, one year ago in August.

And it’s our portal for faculty, staff and students. We took a very different tact on this. It’s sort of like, nothing like you’d expect in normal institutional portal to be. It was 90% Google homepage with lots of widgets that were IC related off of that. Not a lot of information. Not a lot of students self-service kind of access.

So, came it from the other end. But as of this class matriculating, we wanted to make sure that all of these wonderful friendships that we’ve had facilitated etc didn’t just go away. It could have just gone away but just to help ease the transition and also sort of I guess an experiment largely, we ended up integrating it so that we have the same social engine software integrated into our current faculty, staff and student portal.

We converted their user profile, give them a little warning that this was going to happen so that they could remove staff that they didn’t want, their current students to see. Their friend connections were all maintained. We left their wall comments and photo galleries.

And so, their username became their IC username because that’s the standard and we added a profile field that had their IC Peers username in it so that people could still search or if they’re looking at their friends lists and they ask who’s John Smith and they can say, “Oh, it’s soccer guy, 31” or whatever. Make that correlation.

Some other things that were interesting though when we started to move people over was this issue of FERPA and people understand the basic privacy. Don’t let anybody know that I’m here kind of thing. And that was interesting challenge because suddenly we had to accommodate for that, whereas in the incoming social network, we didn’t.

And so, it ended up being worthwhile because now people can be judicially removed from the community and they just don’t see it. But we actually made it for FERPA students if they want it because it’s sort of a weird hybrid. It’s not the public website. So, it’s sort of, it’s login only and things. So, we made it so that they can opt into the community. Obviously we had to work with student fair and make sure that this was legally sound but we made it so that they could opt in to the community even if they were FERPA so they didn’t want to be deprived of that toolset just because they didn’t want to be exposed to the outside world.

So, this is just a picture of my profile, again in the myHome at Ithaca and it looks different but it’s the same software. And we did the same thing with faculty and staff where there certain information like my position, my department, email etc. Stuff that was pulled in and that’s reconciled automatically. And other stuff obviously I can fill out like my favorite music.

So, I wanted to leave about 10 minutes per question if there were, any. Oh right, sorry. Please use the mic. That’s there.

Audience: I’m wondering what communications do you use to drive them into this online community in the first place.

Speaker: Yeah, there was a pretty big push as part of the accepted student packet. So, we included a fair amount of information in that physical mailing that went out. There was also kind of wave of emails that were sort of pushing people to become part of the network that we sent out, not too frequently but along the first couple months I think.

And I don’t know to what extent people were pushing it from the phone because I don’t have much involvement with that. But it was definitely a broad enough initiative that people we recommending it from different angles and Reslife would say, “Oh, you should get on IC Peers, you might be able to find a roommate or whatever.”

Audience: Did you have anything to do with the moderating of things or did they have to come into effect? Most alumni administration were concerned about a comment that might get put on.

Speaker: It’s a great question. Me personally, no. We had a woman that works on the Web team. She’s admission/enrollment-focused and she was sort of this moderator. We had people as I mentioned in forum topics that were moderators in a more traditional forum kind of sense.

We didn’t remove or add it anything ever, the entire time. There was no content that we found unacceptable. There’s a report this content link, basic on everything and the only report we got the entire time was on this photo in some. It was a girl who was in musical theater major and there was a photo from the bottom of the stage and it was Can Can dancers and they were like, woo!

[Laughter]

Somebody thought that that was like offensive or something. So, that was the only complaint we got. Not to say that there wasn’t a lot of work from, keeping things moving, making sure people got their question answered. That was a gigantic undertaking but in terms of dealing with people, abusing it or saying things they shouldn’t, that didn’t just happen.

Audience: I have a question for you. So, I noticed that you decided or imagine that you made the decision to let them choose their username. And so, I imagine there was some thinking behind that and I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.

Speaker: Yeah. Actually that choice, you’re right we do let them choose. That choice actually comes from the original design of the portal before the social network ever came into play. So, when they first create an account with the college, we just let them choose a username. And we thought about maybe saying, you wanted to change it or have a different username for the social network and we just thought that that might add a layer of confusion and there was some technical stuff involved and nobody ever asked to change it. So, if that worked out, they could have asked.

Audience: So, I’m curious about the ambassadors. Was it a purely volunteer type situation or were they paid for their involvement?

Speaker: It was purely volunteer and we set a pretty clear expectation about what we were looking for from them in terms of, we had things like don’t let it a question go unanswered for more than two business days or something like that.

We actually wrote a report which told our system person that was monitoring it, what seed user had private messages on their inboxes that were more than two days old. Not we don’t know what they said because of private message but we could at least ping them to be like, “Hey, there’s some information waiting for you.”

Audience: How long did it take you to put this together and how many people did you have working on it?

Speaker: That’s a good question. Well, assuming that we’re not talking about the myIthaca portal because that part was already in place but in terms of setting up the social network and getting it integrated, I would say it was about three or four month undertaking. And there was primarily two people involved. One is a designer and one was a programmer. And the programmer did most of the data sync stuff and the session integration. And then the designer did most of the skinning just to make it blend in.

And there was a lot of, it might have stretched out a little overtime because there was a lot of waiting for decisions and things but that was about the work, effort involved.

Other questions? Cool. Well, thank you. It’s a great opportunity to talk about this too.

[Applause]