SocCHAT: An Open Localized Social Network for Digital Marketing, Virtual Networking and Mentorship in Universities

Abstract

Social Networks have become the best tools for digital marketing. Careers have been developed, enabling public and private institutions to tap into the growing number of social media users. The government has also created institutional accounts in major social platforms to engage with citizens for effective service delivery and real time feedback. This study showed that universities can deploy an open social network for digital marketing, virtual networking and mentorship and have complete control over it, develop its on terms of service, statement of rights and responsibilities, as well as privacy policy. This would help disseminate information better than notice-boards, and obtain feedback in real time to save paper. The open social network discussed is the Humhub, so far deployed and tested. It offers rich features that would ensure continuous traffic to the university website which is usually low since clients rarely visit their own websites. SocChat offers mentorship features for instilling self-confidence, motivation and passion that cannot be taught in lecture rooms. It inherits security features offered by Yii Framework from which it has been developed using the PHP scripting language.