IT should be the hottest game in town for university communications: how to use web 2.0 technology to entice prospective students to respond to the imperative marketing demand: "Look at me." But a way of measuring its value so far eludes those who have to "sell" the university in the social networking world of MySpace, Facebook and their ilk.

"It's very much the buzz of the moment, everyone is talking about how we are positioning ourselves in the marketplace," says RMIT University's marketing director Jenny Beckman-Wong. "This space we call Web 2.0 is driven by users, so it's no longer the domain of the corporate marketers, it's driven by people."

For "people", read gen Y, the cohort born between the early 1980s and early '90s. Everyone is after them, says the University of Queensland's office of marketing and communications director, Shaun McDonagh. "The changes in trends made by gen Y are really starting to take effect and that's giving greater prominence to social networking," he says.

Queensland University of Technology's marketing and communications director Tony Wilson agrees the imperative to be noticed by gen Y took the university on to Facebook, YouTube and MySpace. "They have high expectations for the delivery of communications these days," Wilson says.

McDonagh argues it is early days, so no one should hold their breath waiting for a quick measure of what works. "Certainly any university using these sites would be following the performance of individual websites, but compared to what?" McDonagh says.

Wilson acknowledges the need for caution. "It's really much more at the communications end of marketing, rather than selling," he says.

"Too much overt marketing is counter-productive: you will generate a backlash. You must deliver what is promised and if not you will be punished with loss of trust."

Silicon Valley-based Daniel Guhr, academic consultant with the Illuminate Consulting Group, agrees the university world is on a learning curve. He warns: "External communities are home to hundreds of millions of potential recruits, but focusing in on likely recruits is a major challenge. Most (universities) are still befuddled. There is not a good sense yet of how you exploit it."

He agrees that primarily the sites present opportunities for marketing, and if universities get that right, recruiting is a secondary, although important, effect. His report, Web 2.0: Student Recruiting Strategies for New Zealand Education Providers, will be released in October.

Simply acquiring a presence on Facebook or MySpace is not enough. "It doesn't do a thing for you, you may not actually have a stake in this," he says. Those who gain a stake are the ones who are perceived as cool, credible and useful by demanding gen Y. For example, Guhr says, on Google's Orkut social networking site there is cohort of more than 1000 people which identifies itself as the "Caltech group". It comprises students who aspire to enrol at the California Institute of Technology, who swap tips and techniques to gain entry.

Another specialist in the field of social network sites is UQ's Melissa Gregg, an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellow investigating the extent to which internet and mobile technologies are blurring public and private lives.

She says universities may risk alienating students with attempts to exploit social networking sites. "At what point is it for free time, not university?" Gregg asks. "Will the students get resentful that the university is invading their space?"

For Guhr, there is no choice because it is such a potentially powerful weapon. "Harvard will always be Harvard, they don't need this, but it could make a big difference for the middle order universities, which is everyone ranked between 50 and 500."

Beckman-Wong confirms universities have to step up if they are to understand and manage the challenge. "Web 2.0 is about a way of life and if you look at the webspace in terms of university websites, they are very much a passive environment," she says. It's not enough to drop information on to a website, however well designed. "Out there people are saying 'I want to choose where and how I get information'," she says.

Students are on the sites already in numbers - as individuals, and in groups and communities - so universities have to be present across a fair spread given the gen Y proclivity for zipping between sites. RMIT, for example, along with others, has an island on the online virtual world Second Life. Its social networking portfolio also includes the video sharing website YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook, the micro-blog site Twitter and the photo-sharing site Flickr.

But it also pays to keep upgrading the institution's website in gen Y-friendly ways. "For undergraduates it has been about creating stand-alone micro-websites to meet their expectations, for example, with minimal navigation, (and) having a lot of video has been important," QUT's Wilson explains.

QUT's micro-website "makeit" has a career skills quiz enlivened by an animated dog. It has also reworked the long-time standard, "frequently asked questions", using a series of short video clips filmed on the street, of students talking about their experiences. The aim is to increase "stickiness", that is, retaining the attention of users for many minutes, as opposed to scoring only cursory visits. Another success for QUT has been its Facebook application, YOUni, which students use to research a list of the university's courses. "If their friends have it too they can see what courses their friends are in," Wilson says. "If a Townsville student is going to do pharmacy at QUT they can potentially hook up with others before they move away. We want to facilitate that exchange." The hope is that the university will become identified with useful cutting edge communications in the minds of the hard to impress gen Ys, as Guhr advises.

Another way of becoming visible is placing current students of the university in cyberspace. University of Sydney has various sites including Facebook, and videos on YouTube, but undergraduate marketing manager, Susanna Wills-Johnson talks up the success of the student blogging program it runs. "We started with student blogs in December 2005 and it's been very effective for us in terms of student recruitment and marketing," she says.

It's the new version of an age-old marketing method, she explains. "We find word of mouth is the best technique, especially at the undergraduate level, so student blogs seemed a natural extension of that."

"(Blogging) enables prospective students to log on and ask questions regarding the university, to ask about lectures, about studying for exams," she says. There were four bloggers in December 2005, now there are 12.

Differentiating between audiences is important, says UQ's McDonagh, although all social networking sites are invaluable for "people under more time pressure" who can use them as a way to get questions answered quickly, he says. "School leavers can watch a promotional clip on YouTube focusing on what you might expect at an open day, looking for what the experience of going to the university will be like." Academic staff use the university's Second Life island to conduct virtual classroom sessions with remote students; and its Facebook site is particularly popular with alumni keen to stay in touch with each other.

"Postgraduates tend to be a bit more pragmatic and want to know from people in the courses what it's like, what the reputation of the university is in their field," he says. "They are interested in chatroom discussion rather than video clips."

QUT's Tony Wilson agrees there is potential to pique the interest of those hard to get postgraduates. "They need a completely different thing: we think it's less about persuading them it's a good idea than helping them think about how to do it in a busy life," Wilson says. "Probably (we need) a lot of search engine marketing because probably the first thing they will do is 'Google'."

But there is much broader potential according to Gregg. "These sites have developed in tandem with a changed student demographic," she says. "There are students who are still living at home, who do not necessarily go on to campus very often, who work part-time jobs and so websites like Facebook become default campuses," Gregg says.

"So it's how they are reaching out to people they would see in class once a week in place of meeting them in real life." Or it can be.

But while universities tackle the challenge of using this new technology strategically and imaginatively, she urges them to be wary.

Facebook and MySpace, for example, are corporate-owned websites and once another institution, such as a university, tries to make use of them complex issues arise.

"The kinds of information students have in their profiles become the property of those corporations," she says.

"There has been some press around the possibilities of what Facebook could do with that information. Because the terms of agreement suggest they own everything you put on there."

"What happens (if anything went wrong), if the university has branded itself in that online environment? "

Guhr is sanguine, arguing no university could be held responsible for material on sites such as Facebook which they neither own nor control and that gen Y has no particular concerns about privacy and are well-used to advertisers and marketers pitching products tailored to their profiles.

The main game is sorting out measurability. Although log-ins, users and other measures of quantity are easily taken, "they don't tell you anything" he says.

"What you need is qualitative tools that tell you about relationships measurement." This includes an assessment of how many people are spreading the word through their groups and what they are saying. But he is also hopeful that efficient, cost-effective solutions to qualitative measurement will start to flow in the next two to three years.