Using the Concept of Diffusion at Cornell’s Tatkon Center to Help the Freshmen Class Connect
The pandemic has caused major shifts in our world and has presented a lot of unprecedent challenges to how we socialize and stay connected with others. We’ve encountered and observed this challenge first-hand here at Cornell as many clubs and organization try to maintain some sense of community connection through virtual and online spaces. Despite the major efforts that many orgs on campus are putting in to create fun and engaging digital socialization opportunities, attendance levels have been discouragingly low. The Tatkon Center, a resource center on campus specifically designed to help freshmen and first-year students acclimate to life at Cornell and aid in the college transition, is one of the organizations facing this issue. As a Tatkon student employee, I’ve been using principles that I’ve learned in this Networks course, namely the principle of Diffusion of Innovation, in my job to develop a strategy that will hopefully boost attendance levels for the Tatkon’s virtual programming using social media.
To elaborate, the Diffusion of Innovation is a principle that we’ve discussed in class that can be used to describe and predict how an innovation, whether it be a new technology, a new product, or a new behavior, can be adopted and spread by individuals in a network, but is often dependent on early adopters. In this case with the Tatkon Center, the innovation that we want people to adopt is the behavior of attending Tatkon’s virtual programming, particularly amongst Cornell freshmen students. In order to promote this behavior amongst the Cornell freshmen network, I proposed the Tatkon Ambassador Program, a program that recruits current Cornell freshmen students to essentially be social media influencers that promote Tatkon Center events amongst their networks, which would likely consist of other Cornell freshmen, and attend these events themselves. To get freshmen to become Tatkon Ambassadors, we’ve marketed this program as a unique professional development opportunity that is exclusively open for first-year students during a time when other professional development opportunities on campus are scarce due to the pandemic. In theory, the Tatkon Ambassadors would act as early adopters that then go on and spread the word through their networks., hopefully encouraging higher attendance rates at Tatkon virtual events.
One of the trickiest parts of planning this program was deciding who would be the initial Tatkon Ambassadors that jumpstart everything. We had to strategically choose a set of early adopters who would hopefully cause the most cascading effect in the network. My manager at the Tatkon proposed the idea of recruiting Cornell Class Council members for the Class of 2024 as our early adopters because they play a pretty influential role in their class as elected representatives and their role in Class Councils primarily focuses on building a sense of community amongst their class already.
I’ve found several articles about the effectiveness of electronic word-of-mouth, which is the main medium through which this program would spread the news via social media platforms, especially Instagram. Many of the articles touch on the foundational role of Diffusion in explaining why electronic word-of-mouth is so successful. Additionally, an article from the Arts Management & Technology Laboratory discusses the Network Effect, which describes how one user adopting a technology or behavior increases the value of that technology for other users. This is true of the Tatkon’s virtual events because unlike previous semesters, where a benefit of coming to events in person was getting free physical items such as food, the virtual events main appeal is that it is an opportunity to meet other students and socialize in this socially distanced semester. However, if people do not attend, then our events are less valuable.
Although some of these articles praise the power of electronic word-of-mouth and the Tatkon staff have thought extensively about the most effective way to create a cascade of the behavior we want to promote, there is one big hesitation I have about the success of the Tatkon Ambassador Program: How isolated are the individual friend group clusters amongst the freshmen class in a semester when making new connections was extremely difficult. If there are many tight, dense clusters of friends or single nodes with few or no connections to the rest of the freshmen network, the strategy that the Tatkon Ambassador Program is relying on may fall short. One research article from PLOS One that compared Swiss undergraduate students’ networks before and during the pandemic found that students’ social interactions within their networks significantly decreased and also found that friendship networks remained relatively stable, meaning that most students’ did not make new friends. I could imagine that these findings would apply to Cornell undergrads as well, therefore implying that freshmen students most likely did not grow their networks very much this semester and that existing ties may have weakened due to lack of interaction with each other. In a way, this is a bit of Catch-22 because the whole reason the Tatkon holds virtual programming events is primarily to help freshmen find each other and make friends during this unusual semester. However, in order to promote our events through this strategy, we need to assume that the freshmen network exists and is at least decently connected already. Despite this, I still have high hopes that this program will have a decent reach, encourage more people to attend Tatkon’s events, and above all, help create a sense of community and build more connections amongst the freshmen class who are navigating not only the challenges of the pandemic, but also of beginning their college journey.
In conclusion, the development of the Tatkon Ambassador Program amongst Cornell freshmen students is an example of the Diffusion of Innovation. I think it’s really cool that I’ve been able to directly apply the concepts I’ve learned in this course to my real life in a tangible way. Hopefully, the Tatkon Ambassador Program succeeds in its goal to promote higher attendance at Tatkon’s virtual programming events and ultimately helps the Cornell freshmen class connect in novel ways despite the unprecedented circumstances.
***Note: If you are a freshmen or know any freshmen that may be interested in becoming a Tatkon Ambassador, applications will be going live in January. Be sure to check out the Tatkon Center website for more info! 🙂
Sources and Links to things mentioned:
- WatchPro, the power of word of mouth
https://www.watchpro.com/ask-the-expert-how-to-harness-the-power-of-word-of-mouth/ - A Literature Review of Word of Mouth and Electronic Word of Mouth: Implications for Consumer Behavior
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01256/full - How Online Word of Mouth Marketing Has Evolved in 2020
https://blog.hubspot.com/agency/how-online-word-of-mouth-marketing-is-changing - Arts Management & Technology Laboratory, network effect
https://amt-lab.org/blog/2020/4/reid-manning-framework-post-draft - Comparison of undergrad students’ social networks before and during the pandemic in Switzerland
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0236337https:// - Cornell University’s Tatkon Center
https://tatkoncenter.cornell.edu