I was curious about Allegheny College’s elaborate MySpace page, so I emailed Web Services Manager Mike Richwalsky for some answers. Come to find out, their outposts on the social web are sprouting up everywhere.

There are some things in MySpace that just don’t align with the needs of an institution — like what do you indicate for an institution’s gender, birthday, or zodiacal sign? But, I can certainly understand the urge to network.

-Dan Karleen

What prompted you to launch a MySpace page for the college?

We’ve been on the leading edge of integrating new technologies here (RSS, podcasting, using APIs like Google Maps into our sites), so we’re always searching out new ways to reach people.

At first, I created Allegheny’s profile out of necessity - mostly to lock up the alleghenycollege Myspace URL and create a presence before anyone did unofficially. Even if you don’t have any plans to use Myspace, I’d highly recommend other colleges go out and grab their URL before it’s gone.

I see Myspace as a great way to reach out to multiple audiences using one tool. In less than a week of having our profile out there, we’ve got over 630 friends that are mostly current students and alumni. We can easily post bulletins and blog posts with interesting news, and we use it also to get our events calendar out there.

The big key I think will be getting our name out to prospective students and letting them get a very quick idea of what Allegheny is and what we look for in our students. I hope they add us a friend so that we can keep them posted about visit days, application deadlines, counselors in their area, etc. With 108,000,000 users in the system as I write this, it’s an audience that’s hard to ignore.

StudentPoll, a survey of 500 college-bound students that is published by the Art and Science group, found that the college website was ranked as the number four driver of college choice superseded only by the campus visit, the influence of family, and the advice of current students or graduates. That’s why having current students and alumni as our friends is important. Prospective students can network with and meet other Alleghenians and learn why those chose to come here.

What are your goals for the page?

We’d like to add as many friends as possible, obviously, but I also hope that it helps people connect back with the College, especially younger alumni who once they graduated maybe didn’t keep up their connection with us and haven’t yet joined our alumni online community. I was surprised by how many of our alumni had profiles in Myspace, and I think it’s important to use whatever technologies you can to reach out to them.

Is the college active in other online social networks? Which ones, and how?

We’ve also created a profile in Bebo, but it has nowhere near the number of users as Myspace, though it’s very popular in the UK and Europe. So perhaps that will be our international tool.

We haven’t created an official Facebook profile yet, mostly as that closed network doesn’t have same reach as Myspace.

After reading Karline Joly’s post about photos in Flickr, I was inspired to create an official Allegheny photo group in Flickr. In 1 day, we’ve gathered nearly 30 photos from Flickr users, and that’s with only emailing a couple of people to join the group. I’ll invite the Myspace friends as well as some other student groups to contribute photos to the group as well.

How do you keep the content fresh?

That’s going to be the challenge, but a fun one. There is a lot you can do, ranging from reusing existing content like news releases and sports scores to creating custom content and creating marketing campaigns aimed at the Myspace crowd, whether it be inviting them to special events or even soliciting them - in a creative and fun way, of course.

To help keep it fresh, we’re having one of our work-study students be focused on Myspace, Bebo and other social sites (Flickr, Newsvine, etc). I think that having a dedicated person will be helpful in keeping things fresh, and since he’s in the age group we’re targeting, I think he’ll offer great ideas and feedback about things we can do to keep our “friends” engaged and interested.