As a follow on to the 2006 Edublog awards, I am pleased to announce the winner of my own award for the best use of blogging on a University marketing site.
Before announcing a winner, I wanted to just note how surprised I was at how quickly universities have embraced blogging as a marketing tool. Of the top 25 schools in US News and World report, 9 use student blogs or diaries in their marketing sites!
Some of these schools have blogs hosted on their own domain while others link out to student blogs on Wordpress or another blogging platform.
Our WInner is MIT.
The winner is no surprise... it is MIT Admissions. The site offers blogs from current students and from staff critical to the enrollment process (e.g. Director of Financial Aid, Director of Minority Recruitment). And the blogs have not only great content updated at least weekly, but a huge amount of participation in the comments. Students are regularly getting 20+ comments on each blog entry, with admissions staff getting even more. In addition, blog entries are weaved throughout the admissions site - each post gets a category and those categorized, for example, under "Student Life", are on the MIT Admissions Student Life page.
What a wonderful site - and a model for other schools to follow.
The Runners-Up are below, but no one comes close to MIT!
Johns Hopkins hosts a whole series of blogs aimed at marketing the school via a Typepad-hosted platform including:
- 13 student blogs
- This Week in Hopkins blog featuring weekly events
- The JHU Fun Blog featuring a weekly look at "fun events" at Hopkins
Tufts Fletcher School has a nice marketing blog featuring student bloggers - it does a good job highlighting life at the school.
Finally, Norwich University also has very nice blogging sites aimed at marketing the school.
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