Facebook=Viewbook?

I admit it. I buckled under to peer pressure. About a year ago, I joined Facebook. Moving twice in less than a year can be unsettling and the need to feel connected surely drove my decision into the world of social media. Now I don’t go around collecting friends or posting my every move but I have been “found” by those from my past and I’ve made some wonderful reconnections since going online.

A downside, however, is that I’m actually less in touch with a few friends. I have a couple friends who now limit their communication with the world to posting on Facebook and responding to the comments therein. We don’t talk much anymore and we don’t exchange emails. I don’t like this one bit.

But this got me to thinking about how our offices use Facebook. It came to pass that traditional, stand-alone viewbooks were seen as obsolete. How can one medium convey all the targeted and differentiated messages we believe to be important? How can one book speak to both student and parent, to both Lower School and Upper School?

Have we gone and turned our viewbooks into Facebook accounts? Do we have just one Facebook account and expect that our posts (we call them posts, right?) will serve all the diverse needs of our prospective students and parents equally, speak to all their interests equally? The answer? As usual, I don’t know. Maybe our offices need one Facebook presence for parents and another for students.

But if we’re treating all our “friends” on Facebook the same by posting undifferentiated and untargeted content then doesn’t Facebook=Viewbook? Same mistake. Different medium.