The UWA Students fan page continues to grow steadily as more friends of fans become fans themselves (viral marketing in action!).  On the admin side I have been struggling with getting my bright ideas to work in reality.

1. Idea – To streamline the creation of Facebook photo albums I could somehow copy over the photos our staff have already uploaded to Flickr.  Staff are happy uploadign to flickr (and I only need to train them in one tool), they would only need to upload photos once (keeps workload low) and I can pick and choose from the Flickr albums which photos to show on Facebook (which means I can control the content on the Facebook page)

2. Problem – the applications that allow you to share Flickr photos on Facebook only work when you want to put the photos on your PERSONAL profile.  Whereas I want to load them onto my fan page and I just can’t make it work.

So near yet so far!  The MyFlickr and Flickr2Facebook applications are both easy to use (each have a couple of limitations such as not loading into an album or only allowing you to copy over photos one at a time) but I could cope with that if only they would link to my fan page.

And so begins an occasional series of blog posts that details my experiences as page creator and administrator of the

UWA Students on Facebook - on 3rd August 2009

newly launched (pilot stage) UWA Students Facebook fan page.

The aim of the page is the engage potential, prospective and enrolled students of The University of Western Australia in an online community, to present a unified, friendly, online presence and to refer fans to University web material as appropriate.

The Good

• it’s exciting seeing fans find the page and post content.  It’s gone from 60 to 100 to 200+ fans in a very short time.
• many staff ‘get it’ straight away.  These enthused colleagues are a gift
• students appreciate it – never mind research that says Gen Y don’t want institutions in their private Facebook ‘lives’.  Fans from far and wide want a genuine, personalised connection with their uni
• it’s technologically very easy – a Facebook fan page is as easy to run as your own profile page.
• I know I’m on to something.  More on all that later.

The Bad

• The bar is high.  Looking at princeton, Sydney and Stanford can make it seem like I have a long way to go!  I wonder if the anything like the Facebook battle between Texas A&M and Louisiana State could happen in Australia.

The Ugly

• Managing applications on a fan page can be frustrating (depsite my point earlier about the pages being very easy to set up).  There are hundreds to browse, test and use and wrangling teh tab/wall content can be tricky (I mistakenly sent a block of work-related content to all my personal friends.  As least I know better now!)

I’ve already posted a link to my Survival Guide for UWA students on using Facebook and I’m in the process of finalising a guide for staff – unsurprisingly a much longer document!

I spoke in the 6th and final presentation slot and I spoke about the Facebook trial I am running for incoming UWA students.  I covered issues of logistics, content management, evaluation, community building and promotion.

Having come out of a holiday and grant-writing couple of months I am firmly back under the social media heat-lamp.  I have been playing around with a new Fan page for UWA students which is now published at http://facebook.dj/uwastudents.  The idea is to build a link with students much earlier than we have been able to previously (ie students can join the page when they apply or get an offer – previously we didn’t typically start to engage with them until enrolement and orientation time).  The page will start to be promoted to students over the weekend and next week when activities kick into gear.  The page currently looks like this:

Preparation for this pilot into Facebook has invovled creation of a number of scaffolding documents including a Survival Guide for students on how to network effectively in Facebook, a disclaimer text to interface between offical pages and the Facebook page, a new webpage called ‘Student Services guide to Social media’ and the obligatory project plan that includes performance indicators (luckily Facebook insights does most of the work for me).  I’ve also established the ‘Student Services emerging technology advisory group’ which has representatives from the University’s Web office, Legal Services, IT Policy Unit and a Web 2.0 accessibliity researcher – we intend tobrainstorm new developments to ensure all bases are covered!

More on all this as the story unfolds!