Cymfony's Marketing Insight: Blogging on the College CampusSchools like Case Western Reserve University, University of Minnesota, Seton Hill University, and the University of South Florida are using blogging in the right way by promoting openness and community. These schools' blog systems allow anyone to create blogs and also aggregate blog entries so that users can see what was recently posted and what the most popular discussions are.
As the drive-by blogging marathons start, I just thought I'd take a moment to note that the blogging we do here at SHU is noticed, from time to time, in places far from our stately tree-lined driveway. Here's a page that lists Seton Hill University's blogging along with similar sites at Harvard and Stanford. Scholars and educators have mentioned SHU in presentations given at Stanford and Princeton, Oregon State, and as part of the assigned readings for a course on rhetoric and technology. The term I invented for one of the criteria of the blogging portfolio, xenoblogging, appears about 175 times on websites other than SHU's.
Yes, academic blogging can be hard work -- and particularly frustrating if you're plugging away at the last minute to fill gaps in your portfolio. But people outside of SHU recognize that the work that we've been doing here is experimental, innovative, and worth emulating.
One of the best things about blogging is I get to show off great work done by dedicated students. If you haven't checked out the work done by first-time SHU bloggers Lorin Schumacher, Nancy Gregg, and Ashley Holtzer, please take a moment and have a peek. These are students who are putting in steady, solid effort into their blogging, and who are, in return, getting quite a lot out of the activity. For them, putting together a blog portfolio will simply be a matter of assembling and linking, rather than frantically plugging huge gaps.
I have also blogged about an MA thesis that features SHU's blogs fairly prominently.
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/nmj/013020.html
When you click through the article and read on...
"How can this be useful to marketers? Especially for the retailers and service providers local to those campuses, they can use these university blog systems to get a great sense of what the needs of those students are and thus, be more responsive and relevant to them."
I won't comment on this, but I'm surprised no one else caught it or responded.