Of Blogs and B Schools
Posted by Patrick on April 6th, 2006
My wife is just finishing her first year of a four year PhD program at a well known university in England. She recently met with the Associate Dean of the business school and was offhandedly asked what I was doing to keep busy. One thing led to another and the associate dean reviewed my resume and asked for me to come in for an informal interview. It all started with her asking me about my background and what I thought I might be able to contribute to the business school. I think I came at her from a different direction than she had expected.
The following is a summary of the thoughts I presented her.
I am passionate about creating cost-effective, competitive and sustainable corporate communications solutions for small to medium-sized enterprises by combining web application expertise with informed communications experience. I believe that most marketing solutions lie in the empowerment of the masses. I rely on agility and collaboration. My solutions and methodology are not for companies with a top down, traditionally conservative, command and control approach to business.
Having said that, the Business School has two fundamental problems that immediately jump out at me. The first is that it is difficult to differentiate a commoditized service and generate any excitement or awareness in the market. The second is that you have not harnessed the power of your alumni network to sell your service to prospective students and employers. With that in mind, the following are simply suggestions that will need to be fleshed out to obtain a workable solution.
Tackling the first issue – I believe that all of your professors should be blogging. Their blogs should be commentary on current news events and how those events relate to the subjects they teach. These blogs should be seen as “Alumini case studies” that encourage discussion from current students, alumni and prospective students. While there are many university professors that blog, there are no universities (to my knowledge) that sponsor and endorse such activities by providing the tools, training and space under their university website umbrella to ensure effective blogging.
Taking this idea a bit further, I also believe that all class lectures and accompanying material (PowerPoint presentations and notes) in the business school should be available to the public. This would be a great service to students saving them the trouble of taping and archiving all of the lectures. It would give your alumni a chance to refresh their knowledge and it would give prospective students an opportunity to hear what real lectures are like at a top ranked B School. If you then provided these people the tools to discuss and collaborate on what was presented, you would find more conversations centred on the University Business School than in any other time in recent memory. And markets are conversations.
Lastly, your alumni network is one of the most potentially valuable assets that the school has, but in order to realize this potential you must empower your alumni network. Give them the tools to effectively network and collaborate online and stay informed. There is some great portal/CMS software out there that has these tools built in. You need to plant the seed and then let your alumni network do the marketing for you.
I understand that these suggestions sound risky to you, but not taking risks often ends up being more risky.
The Associate Dean seemed receptive to my ideas and passed on my contact information to their internal marketing department. I’ll keep you posted.
No related posts.
on April 25th, 2006 at 10:06 am
[...] I met the marketing manager for Durham Business School (a top ranked university) yesterday to follow up with a previous meeting I had with the Associate Dean.¬? The following is from an email I sent as a a follow up to the meeting. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for your time and attention yesterday.¬? It was a real pleasure meeting you. I am also following up with your request to provide you with a one page summary of what I could bring to DBS. [...]
on May 15th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
[...] Everybody should agree that the future success of the MIBE/MBA program is also part of our success, and we can contribute to it with one easy step, since ICGS does not provide us any tool to start something like an Alumni network, we can do it by ourselves, and from my perspective and experience the best alternative is to start blogging. Blogs gives us the possibility to extend our connections and friendships in the time, the relationships that we could build here gives us a chance to empower our careers in the near future, we can left a window open for job and business opportunities in different countries. A lot of top B-schools claim that one of their biggest assets is the strong Alumni network they have, and this is also take into account for employers, for them is a plus hire someone with a good set of connections. Maybe you could understand me better if you read this post. [...]