Colleges that turn to Facebook as a creative way to reach out to students may run into a roadblock.
Officials of Ursuline College found that out when they tried to use the popular online social-networking service to create a Web page for the office of counseling and career services.
The page was up for six months before Facebook administrators took it down, says Meegan Cox, coordinator of experiential education at the Ohio college. When Ursuline officials asked why, she says, they were told that the college had violated a policy that forbids organizations from creating Web pages on the site. Facebook, the college was told, is only for individuals’ profiles.
Sure enough, buried in Facebook’s 4,600-word "terms of use" is a rule stating that people cannot "register for a User account on behalf of any group or entity."
Ms. Cox says the college was given no warning before the page was taken down. At least 60 students had used the site to look for information about internships, she says.
The college had loaded its page with photographs and other information to help students find both internships and jobs, she says. Officials also purchased advertising from Facebook so that other Ursuline students with Facebook accounts would learn about the site.
"We were getting into the swing of things in terms of using it," says Ms. Cox.
Brandee Barker, a spokeswoman for Facebook, says she is not familiar with the Ursuline case, but she confirms that the company will remove any site that represents an organization instead of an individual. Facebook often gives the organization a warning first, she adds.
The purpose of the policy, she says, is to prevent spammers and other commercial interests from using Facebook to harass users. "People must register as an individual user," she says. "It prohibits people from using the site for commercial marketing purposes."
However, many Facebook pages that represent organizations – including some created by other colleges – have not been shut down. Ms. Barker says those pages most likely have been overlooked. Company officials try to police the site as best they can, she says, but with 10 million pages up, it is hard to watch them all.
Ms. Barker says colleges can still use Facebook to reach out to students. Instead of creating a page for, say, the admissions office, administrators can ask the admissions director to create a personal page.
Ursuline will probably not do that, says Ms. Cox. It is leaning instead toward creating a presence on MySpace, a social-networking site similar to Facebook except that it allows organizations to create pages. Other colleges already use MySpace to reach students on the Web.
"We’ll be there in some capacity," she says. "It just won’t be on Facebook."
by Dan Carnevale
This article was taken from the Chronicle of Higher Education