It was great to read Toby's informative post about Facebook. We recently joined the wonderful world of Facebook as an instititution through the creation of a Colgate University page.
This easy-to-create and administer page was a way for us to have a presence on Facebook without imposing ourselves on students who don't want to be bothered in that space. Anyone and everyone can become a "fan" of the page. We have 107 fans as of this minute, and we've done next to nothing to promote the page since launching it about three weeks ago.
Soon we'll be running an article on our university website that will ask alumni and friends of the university to share photos of themselves wearing Colgate gear -- through the Facebook page -- on Friday the 13th, which is a big day at Colgate.
This is an easy way to generate some new fans of the page and, hey, their photo sharing application is ready-made for this kind of thing. Our designated admins can remove any photos we don't think are appropriate and for non-Facebook users, we'll invite them to e-mail us images and we'll upload those for them.
We're constantly talking here about what types of applications we should ask our IT crew to develop and what apps are already out there that we can utilize. For example, our IT staff, led by David Terrazas, built our own video console so we could brand it and keep it uniquely our own. But for this photo project we'll see how Facebook does as a way to create community for those interested in Colgate.
