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Blogging on the College Campus

I visited my alma mater (Case Western Reserve University) last week to show my wife my old stomping grounds. There were a lot of physical changes to the campus, which were cool to see. But I also found out they recently started up a campus wide blogging system that hosts blogs for any student, faculty, staff and alumni. I think this is a great way for colleges to foster a sense of community and encourage discussion and interaction between students. I'm excited that the university *I* attended is at the forefront of promoting the use of blogs.

When I got back home, I did some basic google searching to see if other universities are doing similar things with blogs. I noticed some schools like Oklahoma Christian University and the University of Waterloo seem to use blogs as a promotional tool for prospective students. They only have links to a handful of student blogs to "give you an inside look" at the lives of "real students". I don't think this use of blogging is helpful because most prospective students will probably be skeptical and think these students are being paid to post and/or are restricted in what they can post, especially if it's criticism of the universtiy.

Schools 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.

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. For example, if students start talking more about how there isn't good Indian food available within walking distance, a local Indian restaurant might respond by offering delivery service to the campus.

Posted by Peter S. Kim on August 31, 2005 at 12:10 PM | Email this post Permalink

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