Wednesday, July 16, 2008

10 Tips for Belonging to an Alumni Group on LinkedIn

Over the past few years, my college alumni department of Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA) has utilized my expertise as a social media and networking expert to build a local club in Charlotte, NC and to begin to bring strategies to connect our alumni via the web using social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn. In 2006, we went through approval with the college to set up an alumni group for LinkedIn (The leading social networks for professionals). The challenge was that at the time was that social media was new including LinkedIn, so that many or our alums where not aware of it or its power to connect. Within the last few months LinkedIn has made changes to its environment including newsfeeds and a searchable directory of groups. These two changes have now made it easy for colleges and universities to create groups on LinkedIn and grow them quickly.

Here are a few tips on how and why creating and/or joining an alumni group on LinkedIn is powerful.

1. Connect with Classmates

2. Connect with Alums in your geographic area

3. Connect with Alums in your industry

4. Collective intelligence of your alums

5. Recruit alums to work on your venture/business

6. Daily Newsfeed allows them to see what you are doing

7. Connect to their netwoks

8. Resource for College Career Center and Recent Grads

9. Public relations as an expert for articles for alumni magazine or other media'

10 Promotes recognition of the college or university

We will be expanding upon these topics in future articles, podcasts and teleclasses. If you are interested in participating please contact ewarriorbizdev@gmail.com ..If you have examples of how LinkedIn or other social networks have helped you we would love to have your success stories.