Oh boy, it’s been a looooooooooong time…
Let’s just pretend that this huge break didn’t happen 
What I would like to talk about today is a bit of a show and tell of our faculty (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney) effort to start a Facebook group. Please bear in mind that a faculty is a much smaller unit than a university, in our case chronically underfunded, and subject to all sorts of political pressures. This is my way of saying “If we find any corners to cut - man, do we cut them!”. If you are already running a Facebook group for your institution, well, read through this post and chuckle a little. If you aren’t running one, I am sure that you will find our current experience quite helpful.
Reasons for creating a Facebook group
We made many attempts in the past to create any sense of online community for this, and I have to admit: they were all terrible failures. It usually started with a lot of work in preparation of an online presence, like a discussion forum, a web gallery, and so on. Then there was usually a launch party… 2 months later the pictures of that party got loaded up… and then it died…
MySpace and Facebook offered something that we were looking for: an audience of people who were ALREADY online, spending hours per week or even per day surfing around for something that might catch their eye. Quick searches revealed that a healthy number of our students was already inhabiting these spaces! That was at the end of 2006. By then, we could already see how the tide had started to turn against MySpace in the USA, usually a very good indicator that this development would hit Australia around 6-12 months later. We were also not at all impressed by the MySpace search, or the loading time. Therefore we decided to go for Facebook.
We wanted to create a community that we could monitor from the background, to see what our students were really thinking. We also wanted to create a space where we could put out messages on a more informal level than our web site. And last but certainly not least, we wanted to entice POTENTIAL students to join our group to see what the HSS student community was like, and then of course sign up to study with us!
Attempt 1: Let’s create a fake entity - bad idea
Let’s just pretend that I never did that It’s illegal! Facebook states quite clearly in their terms of use that entities and units are not allowed to sign up pretending that they were a person. All they are allowed to do is to have an employee of that entity or unit create a group for others to join. Although this made it a bit harder for us, I really do appreciate this line, as it doesn’t dilute the overall concept of Facebook.
Attempt 2: Alright, here is my group! Join, please?
I had signed up to Facebook months before, but never really used it. Unexperienced as I was, I went forth and created a group called “UTS Humanities and Social Sciences”. The bait was out. Nothing happened. And after a few weeks, still nothing had happened! Weren’t our students jumping at the chance to be with us? Apparently not… after 4 weeks, we had 6 members in this group, and 5 of them were HSS employees who I kind of forced to create an account. I tried to create a few good discussion threads, created a logo, put something on the wall, but all to no avail. What was I doing wrong?
Enlightenment!
Then it struck me: I was a fake! Here I was, in a space mainly inhabited by high school or university students, and I wasn’t one of them, I was a graduate! And not even from that faculty! When I realised that, I scoured through some of the more successful groups, and I realised that they smelled real. The community really had something to talk about, there was a common purpose, there was light-weight fun conversation. AUTHENTICITY was the key!
Attempt 3: Get real students to do it for you - success!
Once this realization had hit me, it was clear that I needed a few “real” students to get this community going. I sifted through the “interest” fields in the UTS network, and quickly narrowed my search down to three students. My supervisor was really happy about the idea, and also coined our much-loved term “Cyper-SPROUTS” (SPROUTS stands for Student rePResentatives Of UTS… please don’t judge them by the awkward acronym!). We met up with these students and discussed a code of conduct. Our mission for them was basically to use their already established Facebook presence to invite all their friends who studied at our Faculty, and then convince them to invite all THEIR friends, and so on…
We also discussed topics to discuss on the discussion boards with them, and how they were supposed to entice their fellow students to share their experiences on “The Wall” (if you don’t know what “The Wall” means, it’s time for you to join Facebook!). Then we let them loose - and within 4 weeks we had over 100 students in the group! Mind you, that was in a time when Facebook was still in its infancy in Australia, so we were ecstatic Ever since, our group has experienced steady growth, and is now at over 210 members at the time of writing.
In my next post I will be writing about how we keep this group alive and growing.
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