Is Facebook the competition?

I don’t know about your campus, but at our campus, three words can describe the hottest thing in student media use: Xanga, MySpace, and Facebook.

You may be familiar with another name for these software titles: Social Networking systems. Xanga and MySpace allow users to create blogs, share photos, and find people of similar interests within the “community” of the system. Facebook doesn’t do blogs, but it links up people within a school campus/community.

I mention these as examples of “student media” use, because students are using these software titles to create their own narratives, to engage their fellow students in conversation, and to make themselves known.

And they are doing this outside the sphere of what we consider traditional student media.

Some in the college media profession might view Xanga, MySpace and Facebook as competitors. Facebook has started offering ad space for students to notify other people within the network about events. Can anyone say “classified advertising?” Does the name craigslist mean anything?

But I’m not so concerned about these social networks as competition. I’m curious to know if anyone else sees them as a potential tool for collaboration and community building between students and campus media?

• Has anyone thought about having a reporter whose beat is the Xanga/MySpace beat?
• Or has anyone tried to set up a space in Facebook for the campus newspaper staff?
• Has anyone thought about putting an ad on Facebook promoting a newspaper feature or special edition?
• Or promoting sales of the yearbook?

I ask these questions because this is the kind of thinking we are going to need if we really are going to “reinvent college media” for the future. We are past the age when we can view these types of developments as “threats” or “competition.” The students who join these networks don’t see them as competition for the campus media. These students may not even interact with campus media on a regular basis.

Our goal should be to see how best to use new developments in new media to build interaction with campus media, to encourage student journalists to think of new ways to reach their communities. Will such efforts work? Who knows. But we will never know if someone doesn’t try.

One of my favorite hockey quotes is from Wayne Gretzky, who said “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” How many shots are you taking at using these systems to your benefit?

Got something to say: E-mail the author at scmurley -at- gmail.com, or put something in the comments. Let us know if you have any experiments in these areas.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite