With membership now over 150 million, Facebook has established itself as the social network of preference for Generation Y. The twentysomethings who completed university on a diet of text messaging and MySpace have graduated to sharing their daily lives through status updates, photographs and links with friends that sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, the online address book, make visible to a wider audience. Groups to show political support, to share sports team rumours or to express electronic bereavement can quickly attract tens or even hundreds of thousands of members.

Business schools have been strangely slow to participate in some of these new media, despite, or perhaps because of, their own efforts to provide a networking base for their students. At the latest Graduate Management Admission Council business schools conference, the information sessions on Web 2.0 and social networks prompted sighs and confusion from many participants. They expressed concern about losing control of the institutional message in a social forum or through student blogs.

Not so ESADE Business School in Barcelona, which has incorporated elements of the Facebook format into its new website. “Many students are connected to one another through sites such as Facebook before they arrive in Barcelona to start the programme,” explains Nuria Guilera, the school's marketing director. “It is natural for future applicants to want to connect with them as part of their MBA research, and we wanted to facilitate that process.” Blogs by current students have proved popular, she says.

The power of open connection has not been lost on one of Italy's leading business schools, SDA Bocconi in Milan. Francesca Roveda handles the school's international outreach, and is pleased to combine physical presence at MBA fairs and information sessions with online exchange. “As a school we need to participate and contribute to social networks to which our students want to belong.

“We can address applicants' questions about the admissions process, while sharing people's views about the MBA experience. Milan is a great city to spend a year, and Facebook is a fun way to get everyone's input on the best ice cream in town, places to visit, or where to go skiing.”

Recognising that Generation Y is inundated with marketing messages, business professors see social media as part of a trend that emphasises authenticity - talking with consumers, not at them. They applaud attempts to open a dialogue with “digital natives”.

Matty Smith, former senior development fellow at Henley Business School, says: “The convergence of communication and internet technology is driving changes in the ways we do business. More business schools are turning to sites such as Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Second Life, primarily as a mechanism for marketing through their alumni.”

Teachers at Warwick Business School have also embraced tools such as Apple's iTunes U, which enables presentations and lectures to be downloaded to an iPod or iPhone and watched anywhere, any time. Dr Juliane Schwarz, a research fellow at the school's Research Unit for Innovation, Knowledge and Organisational Networks (Ikon) uses iTunes to publish her work on the changing roles of networks and their impact.

Social networking is also proving invaluable for alumni fundraising and job search. Dave Celone, director of annual giving and alumni services at Tuck Business School in New Hampshire, sees the sites as tools for ensuring that alumni have easy access to one another. “Tuck has, for the past ten years, had its own proprietary online tool that empowered its alumni to search for jobs, engage easily with each other, do research and communicate seamlessly with the school.”

But many schools continue to watch the social media phenomena from the sidelines, as their students set up their own Facebook groups and post YouTube clips to accompany their MBA experience. Are they missing the boat?