Education Institutions & Social Media

It’s amazing. I had a meeting this morning with some individuals from Central Campus in Des Moines, IA. They are sort of a magnet school with some really fabulous programs. The purpose of the meeting was to show them how to build a social media/network web strategy that would be low cost (duh!) and help them be the cutting edge school they are supposed to be.

To prepare for this I went to find a good school website that I could show them because surely there is at least one school out there that uses social media/blogging. So I went to my best friend Google and started my search. Guess what? They all stink. The best one I came across was……MIT. Massachusettes Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management has a blog. Keep in mind though, only the Sloan school has a blog, the others do not. So one department at MIT has a blog. Is this for real??? Aren’t they supposed to be cutting edge?

So I went to check out this blog, it looks like they’ve been doing it since about June 2007. Well, lets just say, they don’t keep it up to date and go months at a time without any posts. One of two things are happening here. Either I’m a moron and what I see as cutting edge and the “new internet” is completely misguided or all educational institutions nation wide don’t have a clue how to use the internet. Yes, I know, MIT doesn’t really need social networking to market their services. What it does mean though is that if they don’t do it what is the likelihood of any of their students doing it? Social media is the future, that’s that!

I’ve always been intrigued how our education system is behind on everything. They are rarely cutting edge and don’t know about things like Twitter, Tumblr, or StumbleUpon. Any social networking sites they know they probably heard of on the news because Pres. Obama used a bunch of them.

After seeing this I met with Central Campus and explained to them how they can have a better web strategy than MIT. They found it exciting. Of course they would, it works and for the most part a lot of it’s free! I think it’s great that some institutions are looking forward and trying to be the best, it’s about time somebody does it. I didn’t mention this to them, I don’t think, but they’ll even be ahead of most for-profit companies that are still too scared to use the organized chaos we call the internet in fear of hurting their brand. What’s worse? Doing nothing, or letting everyone, now including Central Campus in DSM, pass you by?

I’m sure a lot of this or even all of it is no new news to most of you, but how can the organizations meant to teach the future of our nation and our world not use these tools, even if they are like MIT and don’t need the extra marketing efforts. It’s not about that. It’s about helping our kids and students learn how to adapt to our constantly changing future. Like my IS professor always said, “Constantly changing technology, constantly changes organizations.” The internet is changing – deal with it or get out of the way.

Enjoy this video explaining the definition for a 5 year old of social networking.