I had a meeting a couple of weeks ago that I was supposed to do something about … until now, I haven’t acted on it at all. Things have been nuts, so I don’t feel too bad. But, the time is right and I thought instead of just typing up a proposal in Word, I’d post some of the thoughts here and see where it takes me.

The meeting in question was a get together that the Dean of our School pushed us to have. Quick background … he received an email (more of a spam) from a Dean at another University’s I School. The email contained a video introduction to the Dean, to the University, and the I School at that University. I said ho-hum, he said, “cool, let’s do the same thing.” He ended up asking our Marketing Manager, Director of Development, and myself to make it be so. The three of us met to discuss this idea and luckily I wasn’t the only one who didn’t think it would be appropriate to spam prospective donors, students, and faculty with multi-megabyte movie files of talking heads. That just doesn’t speak to me as being something a School like ours should be considering.

I started showing the others in the room blogs and blogging software, started discussing the power of RSS, and we talked about how this could be a very powerful publishing engine to drive traffic to the School. We discussed a scenario in which the Development folks would contact key members of our Advisory Board (these are heavy hitters in the IT world) so that they could contribute a post once a week or so … the Dean would have two tasks, one would be to moderate some of the postings from Advisory Board members and the second would be to post original thoughts about the School, the state of IST, and other things that make sense to our stakeholders. Guess what? They loved that! So the IST Leadership Blog Space may be coming soon. We’ll couple it with a bit of marketing materials and see where we end up.

I don’t pretend to think this will be a perfect solution … its been said before, but content is king and without content who is going to read? That will be a big test of this … I’ve been involved in so many “must haves” at the School only to see the huge effort to create them be wasted by inactivity and a lack of content. We’ll see … but what a better approach than sending our audiences spam. Makes me happy.