Blogs

December 29, 2011

Top Ten Reasons You Need More Than a LinkedIn Group for Your Alumni Association?

I have called and spoken to a couple of hundred Alumni Association Directors coordinators to get their feedback on having a private social network for their Alumni. Almost eighty percent of them tell me that they have a LinkedIn Group or Facebook Group and that was sufficient for them at this point. Here are ten reasons why a LinkedIn Group is not a good solution for a secure and private social network for your Alumni. LinkedIn provides groups and subgroup discussion boards however it is not easy to find a mentor or any specific person you need within a huge alumni network using these groups.¬† Building mentor-mentee relationships and networks is what a private Alumni network can do better by providing mentoring networks. 2. Organizing paid events can be done with something like event organization software like EventBrite which can be integrated into your website. This is impossible to do with […]
November 29, 2011

Private Social Network is the Solution to Avoid Email Spam

A French tech firm instituted a “Zero-Email” policy, banning employees from sending any email. This had been detailed in the following article here. Every day we are bombarded by spam mail from unknown sources. Our emails become part of several lists and it is increasingly difficult to cleanse out the email of all the spam. We tend to create new email addresses to cope with the mess, put in filters, use spam cleaning software and more. A private social network with Instant Messaging and Quick messaging to specific recipients or groups, as well as resource sharing tools, solves this problem to a great extent. Attachments have long been the bane of email storage and sharing files and resources on a shared repository or storage has always been the practice in enterprises. Email has become an overused and abused tool. In the next decade, we will see more such drastic measures […]
November 29, 2011

Why do Alumni Need a Private Social Network?

Each time I talk to an Alumni Association for Colleges, High Schools or a department in a University, they tell me that they have a Facebook page or a LinkedIn Group for their network and that suffices for them.  A group on LinkedIn or a Facebook page is enough for a superficial presence and for Alumni Association to simply check mark “availability of a social network” for their alumni. Here are the top reasons to have a private web page for your Alumni: Create a virtual community who can create specific groups for themselves while reaching out to the larger community Provide direct connections for alumni to employers and businesses Provide enlisted communities  that would help alumni to get back in touch with each other Promote  business connections and interactions amongst the alumni Most important of all, alumni associations can easily collect membership dues online and organize fund raising events. Alumni can […]
November 17, 2011

Niche Networks for hospitals

When my Father was sick and dying of a serious illness twenty years ago, my family spent long hours waiting in hospitals and clinics, waiting for the doctors, test results or some procedure to be performed. We floundered our way through the maze of doctors, trying to understand the doctor’s lingo and decide on a treatment without much knowledge or background in medical science. In those days there was no Wikipedia to consult on any matter. In these days of the internet, caregivers can find a lot of help on the internet, to understand the patient’s diagnosis. The relatives of the patients spend long hours in the hospital with not much of a support system for themselves. The care givers of all the patients in a cardiac unit experience similar issues and would benefit a lot from reaching out to each other. Have you ever seen people socializing or talking […]