December 2005 Lawlor Focus
Blogs: A New Way to Communicate
Having been a blogger since 2000, Andy Wibbels was already a believer in 2004. Still, it was that year that he became a blogging evangelist.
It began innocently enough during the 2004 presidential election when Wibbels read another blogger's post that compared Senator John Kerry to Herman Munster, the star of the 1960s' sitcom, The Munsters. "My creativity got the best of me," says Wibbels, and the next thing he knew, he had created an animation that showed Kerry morphing into Herman Munster. Wibbels published it to his blog and word soon spread in the online community and eventually to the media. For the next few days, his blog was blitzed with traffic from all over the world. This experience substantiated Wibbel's own definition of blogs as "the largest conversation of the world."
Merriam-Webster selected "blog" as the word of the year for 2004. Short for weblog, it is defined as "a web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks provided by the writer." Typically, blogs focus on a particular topic, industry or personality.
By all accounts, weblogs are becoming more popular, with an estimated 12,000 new blogs created daily, more and more of which are business-oriented. "Blogging points to an emergent trend in technology—the rise of consumer-generated media," says Wibbels. "Just as customers trust advice from friends, readers trust recommendations from bloggers more highly than from traditional advertising."
One of the reasons for their rapid and continued growth is the ease with which they are created and maintained. Blogging software enables anyone to create and maintain a blog, regardless of technical prowess. Some blog tools are free, while others charge a small monthly fee. In either case, once the weblog is established, the steps to blog are the same: the author logs into the blog through any Internet connection, fills out a simple web form and clicks "publish." Voila! The blog will be updated. (What's really going on behind the scenes involves the blog tool taking the new entry, adding it to its database of postings, converting it to HTML, dumping it into the weblog's template and uploading the new information to the blog page.) Unless password-protected, the new post is almost instantly available for viewing by anyone anywhere on the Net.
And, that's what makes blogs so incredibly useful for businesses: Reading a blog is like tapping into someone's innermost thoughts or conversations. On one level, it's incredibly informative about pop culture—like reality television, only this time it's a virtual diary providing the entertainment—but blogs are also a new medium through which a business or institution can share its message and consumers can respond with feedback.
To best understand the phenomenon of blogging, start reading them. Some of the more popular blogging tools, which also feature lists of blogs, are Blogger.com, Blogster.com, iBlog.com and TypePad.com.
Andy Wibbels is the creator of the Easy Bake Weblogs seminar that has helped businesses all over the world leverage blogs for their success. Based on his seminar, Wibbel's "Blogwild" will be published in Spring 2006 by Penguin/Portfolio.
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Although blogs may look like web pages, they are dramatically easier and less expensive to create and update. With online blogging tools, you can create a blog and have a web site up in 10 minutes and for less than $10—without knowing a thing about web design or consulting a web designer. Blogging tools are the perfect solution to supplement your current web presentation or to create microsites.
And, while blogs may appear to be just a trendy phase for individuals to post their personal manifestos online, they are much more than that. The real power of weblogs lies in the fact that millions of people can easily publish their ideas, and millions more can comment on them. When updated regularly, blogs are fluid and dynamic—more like a conversation than a library, which is how the web has been described in the past. As such, blogs are fundamentally changing the way we use the web, and they offer colleges and universities an economical, easy and effective way to engage various constituents and target markets.
- Admission offices can give prospective students the "inside scoop" with current student blogs or keep applicants apprised of ongoing admission and financial aid-related processes.
- Athletic departments can build fan support with blogs that feature news and commentary about campus sports.
- Advancement offices can create excitement about fund raising by updating a campaign blog with details and photos of tangible results such as new construction.
- The Alumni Office can not only keep graduates informed about campus events but also about one another by offering a directory of individual alumni blogs—or even by allowing graduates to build and maintain weblogs on the campus network.
When colleges and universities host blogs, site visitors are transformed from passive readers and consumers of information to active participants and contributors in an ongoing conversation. As these few examples show, blogs can create relevancy, build interest and sustain relationships between the institution and its constituencies. In the end, blogs build community—a goal every college and university seeks to achieve.
In the News: Be Careful What You Blog
An unnamed 22-year-old dental student at Marquette University has been suspended for the rest of the academic year and ordered to repeat a semester after a committee of professors, administrators and students determined that he violated professional conduct codes when he posted negative comments about unnamed students and professors on a blog.
The focus of the offense was half a dozen postings including one describing a professor as "a [expletive] of a teacher" and another that described 20 classmates as having the "intellectual maturity of a 3-year-old."
In a letter dated December 2, the dental school's associate dean for academic affairs said the committee had found the student "guilty of professional misconduct in violation of the dental school's Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct." It contends that the student also violated a university-wide code that subjects students to disciplinary action if they participate in stalking, hazing or harassment.
The decision has drawn criticism on and off campus. Having reviewed the student's blog entries, Co-Director of Marquette's Ethics and Professionalism Curriculum Daniel D'Angelo disagreed with the ruling. "What he wrote was imprudent, immature and oftentimes distasteful … but it doesn't make these entries unethical or immoral."
Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, in Arlington, Virginia, expressed similar concerns: "The decision raises serious questions about the school's commitment to free expression. If the University has the ability to punish students for expression that occurs outside of class and school-sponsored events, they are really controlling students' lives.”
Source: "Marquette Suspends Dental Student for Blog Comments"– Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Blogs to Watch
A few colleges and universities have joined the world of blogging, also referred to as the blogosphere. This sampling shows how five schools have implemented blogs in very different ways.
- Albright College
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According to Director of Admission Chris Boehm, the Albright admission blog was created to communicate with high school students and their families. "This is one of our latest attempts to educate you about the college admission and financial aid process," he writes. Begun in September 2005, the Albright blogs include posts from six first-year students, two upper class students, and three admission officers, including Boehm himself.
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A sample post from Chris Boehm gives readers more insight into the profession: "I most struggle with what the mission of college admissions is all about. We have an ethical obligation to serve the best interests of students. However, this obligation sometimes conflicts with the obligation that we have to our institutions. What is best for an individual student may not be best for the institution…." (October 4, 2005)
- Case Western Reserve University
- Northwestern College
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This blog chronicles the "adventures of NWC Admission Counselor Jackie Sommers" and has an extremely personal flair to it, beginning with Sommers' description of herself: "I'm an admissions counselor at Northwestern College, a Christian school in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. I love Jesus and teenagers!"
Featuring lots of photos, video and audio clips, Sommers posts entries about everything from her fall travel schedule and the students she meets along the way to trivia about Northwestern College and current campus events.
"These days, the Internet and all its tools are the students' world; I needed to enter that world and meet them there in order to attract them to Northwestern," says Sommers. "I started my admissions blog to target prospective students in a medium they are familiar with.
"It seems to be working, as students often e-mail me after reading the blog. The blog is serving as a point of connection between the students and me and Northwestern College."
- University of Missouri-Columbia
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Mizzou has a student blog—with a twist. Created by the Alumni Association, this blog targets alumni and friends of the University. More than three years old, the blog features a range of perspectives, with current bloggers including two current first-year students; a "couple" blog with posts from a current senior who is engaged to a recent MU graduate; an international transfer student; a current student who is off campus interning; and young alumni who have entered the "real world" for the first time.
"The MU Alumni Association strives to provide a connection for alumni back to their alma mater," said Cathy Herren, coordinator of membership services. "Viewing the pictures and reading about people’s experiences provide that connection in a very personal way."
- University of Redlands
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Begun by Associate Dean of Admissions Mark Bottorff to focus on the Redlands experience for students from the Pacific Northwest, this blog features entries from Redlands students, which Bottorff posts.
Bottorff's advice for other admission offices that want to start a blog? Don't be afraid to edit. "I e-mailed students and had them reply. I took the reply and posted it directly to the blog because it was the easiest way to get it done," he says. "But, the replies needed some editing and I had promised not to edit. I would encourage others not to make this promise but rather tell students there may be some simple edits for grammar, length, etc., but not for content. For the blog to appear genuine, it is important to add even the 'bad' stuff."
While it's too soon to know what kind of impact the blog will have on Redlands' enrollment efforts, Bottorff's instincts tell him it's a worthwhile venture. "I did not graduate from Redlands, and I'm way too old and bald to come off with any credibility on the student life side," says Bottorff. "But, this medium really allowed me to connect prospective students with current students in a way not seen before."
Several undergraduate admission staffers contribute to Case's blog, and their first entry sums up its purpose:
"Hooray! We have our own blog!
"I thought we could use this blog to offer more insight into the college admission process, to provide information that's more spontaneous and informal than what students get from the glossy viewbooks and brochures we mail them.
"This group blog will show a more human side of the undergraduate admission staff at Case, and maybe take some of the mystery out of what it is we all do here."
As such, this blog features a running dialog between staff members, about everything from their professional reading—"So this summer, we're reading 'The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College' by Jacques Steinberg. I haven't gotten too far into it, but I've already been hooked in by some of the personalities introduced so far." (July 12, 2005)—to campus events: "Recently, Case astronomy professor Chris Mihos has been making the news for some observations he and his team have made of the roughly 2,000 galaxies in the Virgo cluster. Pretty cool to have one of your campus professors making such big-name mainstream news outlets like USA Today and The New York Times. Even cooler that Prof. Mihos is a laid-back, down-to-earth, extremely approachable guy."
Did You Know?
In October 2005, blog search engine Technorati was tracking 19.6 million blogs. They report that over the past three years, the number of weblogs has doubled every five months, which means the blogosphere has doubled in size at least five times in that period. In other words, the blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was in 2002.
If you would like to learn more about how you can implement blogs on your web site, please contact The Lawlor Group by e-mailing tlg@thelawlorgroup.com or calling 800.972.4345.
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