If you\u2019re a school that wants to start a blog for reasons of recruitment, communication, academic voice, strategic planning, or community-buiding, but you\u2019ve been hesitant to, I feel your pain.\u00a0 I used to work for a \u201cmarketing communications consulting firm in higher education\u201d where they once recommended an admissions-focused blog for a client with a $30,000 price tag for implementation.\u00a0 No wonder the client ran for the door.<\/p>\n
Consider the context.\u00a0 With today\u2019s influx of blog sites and inexpensive blog and self-publishing software, it\u2019s ludicrous to think a school needs to spend $30,000 to custom create a blog from a proprietary content management system (CMS) which already carries a yearly license of over five, possibly, six figures.<\/p>\n
Both ExpressionEngine<\/a> and Movable Type<\/a> offer a low-cost one-time license fee ($149 – $1300) with full-featured options for managing multiple school-wide blogs for a variety of purposes.\u00a0 In fact, at Stanford University<\/a>, Movable Type facilitates communication throughout the IT department, and around the entire university for campus-wide blogging.\u00a0 The benefits to these web-based publishing systems are numerous, but among them are built-in blog functions (commenting, trackback, pinging, RSS, search, archiving, categories, bookmarklets, moblogging, post by email, member management) and the efficiency of light-weight and web-based software.\u00a0 Plus, the fact that you have access to all the source code (written in common scripting languages like PHP, ASP, CGI) doesn\u2019t hurt either.\u00a0 If you\u2019re still not convinced, why not try out the free, award-winning WordPress<\/a> publishing system?<\/p>\n While blogging has been accepted and advanced in industry by major technology movers several years ago, (Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time<\/a> in 2002), traditional media (NY Times Cannes Film Fesitval blog<\/a>) and numerous other industries, higher education has been slow to adopt the paradigm of publishing daily, timely personal voices for marketing reasons.\u00a0 Bloated price quotes from consultants don\u2019t help the situation.<\/p>\n Consider the usual audience.\u00a0 Blogs used in higher education for undergraduate or graduate recruitment are targeting a web-savvy market of high schoolers and undergraduates.\u00a0 From thirteen-year olds to thirty-somethings, blogs are as normal as IM.\u00a0 The popular blog community Livejournal<\/a> has more than 7 million users with over 10,000 posts per hour.\u00a0 Another social blog space, MySpace<\/a>, has over 12 million users.\u00a0 Blogs used for recruitment need to allow freedom for students to tell their own stories beyond the usual \u201cI love this school\u201d or \u201corientation was fun\u201d rhetoric.\u00a0 I\u2019m certainly not advocating unmediated blogging on a public site, but there needs to be freedom to the writer\u2019s voice.\u00a0 Schools that don\u2019t take the conceptual leap are simply creating diary-versions of testimonials and not really exploring the full potential of blogs.<\/p>\n From an academic perspective, blogs are being explored in e-learning settings as well as in real classrooms.\u00a0 While some in higher education are still learning about blogs, the offspring of the self-publishing blog movement and the iPod revolution has has already been born in the podcast<\/a>.\u00a0 At Marymount Manhattan College, Professor David Gilbert<\/a> has launched a class project called Art Mobs<\/a> in which his Organizational Communication students to produce (unofficial) audio guides for MoMA, and make them available as podcasts.\u00a0 The site is a hosted Typepad<\/a> blog site.\u00a0 Cost?\u00a0 $14.95 a month.<\/p>\n For a current project of ours, a K-12 client has decided to go with a publishing system not only to run active news, events, and document management for students, parents and faculty, but also to function as a full content management system (CMS) for the new website.\u00a0 Again, the licensing cost here is in the thousands, rather than tens of thousands.<\/p>\n Maybe if we demystify the price of implementing the \u201clatest\u201d technology, we\u2019ll give our communications teams, administrators, marketing directors, IT department, admissions directors, and faculty the chance to strategically think through the implications and to explore what\u2019s already possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you\u2019re a school that wants to start a blog for reasons of recruitment, communication, academic voice, strategic planning, or community-buiding, but you\u2019ve been hesitant to, I feel your pain.\u00a0 I used to work for a \u201cmarketing communications consulting 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