We’re soft-launching Keene and After — the new alumni social networking site. We started today by sending out 113 invites to the Class of 1988 and watching closely what happened. So far we have a signup rate of about three percent — which is a little depressing. Since these emails represent alumni that for the most part have volunteered their addresses I was hoping for a higher initial rate — somewhere around 5 or 6%. We’re going to try to vary the message, the delivery, and other factors and see if we can get the rate up. We get higher click-throughs on things like Newsline (12-15%) off that same list, and I think a lot of the differential is trust — when people are asked to “Sign up” for something they leave — whereas reading something like Newsline is low-commitment.

If anybody is reading this post who is an alumnus who hasn’t got an invite, there’s no need to fret. Just shoot us an email at webmaster@keene.edu and we’ll send out an invite right away. The slow-launch is so we can watch the site carefully as it grows and make course corrections, but if you want on *now* we’re glad to have you…

More as our saga as it continues over the next couple of weeks.

Update (May 14): We hit 5% this morning (6 signups). More interestingly, we had two signups through friend invites, which is indicative of how important that viral invite element is: 25% of the users who signed up yesterday were not on the email list. This is one reason why the invite lets people know we won’t use the information to solicit them, or the people they invite. That’s just so incredibly important.

As you may know, we’re gearing up to launch an Alumni site using Ning, a “personal Facebook” type of software. The first email invites are going out today.

Well, not exactly the first invites. And therein lies a story.

See, before I launched this, I tried a little experiment and invited a few of my alumni friends to a prototype site. The site grew by leaps and bounds until it reached 31 members, most of them not invited by me. Many invited by people not invited by me.

There were postings, reconnections, forums. For that period of time people were addicted, clearly stopping by the site obsessively. From February 13 to March 20, it was *the* place to be.

Then suddenly — not so much. I mean *really* not so much. Everybody disappeared, almost overnight.

There’s a number of reasons, I think. One being that initial activity was heavily about reconnecting and once new people stopped coming in, the site died. Another being that at thirty-one members, the site was just too small. The people that post the majority of content in things like these seem to number about one or two in a hundred — at 31 people, the flow of content was too unstable. (At Blue Hampshire we got well over a thousand members, and 600 readers a day, but the site is still dependent on 12 or so regulars who post).

I also think that a lot of times you set it up to have this explosive activity, but after the dust settles if you did it on a large scale you’re left with your regulars. So some amount of contraction is expected.

Still, I can’t help thinking of that Annie Hall quote about the shark (first 10 seconds of this trailer):

Do online social networks have to keep on moving forward or they die? It’s definitely something we’ll be looking at as we launch the alumni site.

To try to mitigate it we’ll be experimenting with how fast we send out the invites, and we’ll be trying to encourage participation by setting up forums and prodding people we know to contribute. I’m sending out 131 emails today to the class of 1988 — and watching closely what happens. Depending on the response we could add people more slowly of quickly than planned…