Eight days ago, Dee Rambeau, a (now-former)* contributor to the MarCom Blog, announced that he was giving up blogging. “I am convinced after 3 years of blogging,” he writes in a post aimed mainly at PR students at Auburn, “that blogging is not a positive thing for business, rather it is a negative.”
He then presents his case: that “blogs are useless and irresponsible” for public corporations, that content management systems have improved to a point where they can provide most of the value-added aspects of customer relations blogs used to offer (“Set your website up to have the ability for you to make content additions/changes right away”), that blogging is more about ego than PR, and so on. He ends with good advice to PR students (and anyone else willing to heed it).
While blogging may be bad for business, from Rambeau’s perspective, does that make it bad for colleges and universities?
* Apparently, according to Robert French, the blogger behind Marcomblog, Rambeau will continue to post there on occasion. But he’s given up his businessy blog, Adventures in Business Communications.
Andy writes! 
You could argue that blogging isn’t a good fit for corporations that need to control the message(even though I wouldn’t), but universities are about discourse. Shouldn’t marketing look different in this environment?
Hey Andrew,
Actually Dee is still a contributor to Marcomblog. It is his personal weblog that he has stopped publishing.
As for blogging by universities, I’d love to see more of it. I believe we will, too. It will take time. For university media relations departments, one opportunity I’ve been surprised that more schools don’t jump on is a blog highlighting faculty expertise. Go beyond a list of the experts and, when pertinent issues break in the news, have the experts write position papers (or short posts) and put them in the blog. Then, ping media with the information. A proactive approach will likely increase pickup and provide new media placements. This could be managed with the use of interns, actually.
That’s just one aspect. There are many possibilities. I always remind myself that all of this is still new. Ten or twenty years from now there will be aspects of public relations / marketing practice on university campuses that we won’t even recognize. It is possible that much of it will revolve around social media (or whatever it is called then). Pew suggests, in their research, that approx. 70% of teens and tweens are using search as their first form of reference. When those people are out of school and in the workforce, that’s when I think the drastic changes will begin to take hold.
Joe – I certainly agree with you that marketing in the sphere of higher ed is different than corporate marketing. That was a point I tried to make with Amanda Chapel in the comments on this post.
Robert – Glad to hear Dee will continue to contribute to the Marcomblog. I, too, would like to see more blogging at the university level, and agree with you that more blogging is on the way. It can’t come quickly enough, in my opinion.
I think online education is a great new means of earning a degree. Its the future of education both in k-12 and in higher education. For those who are not the typical classroom student, for those who dont have the time, online education is a excellent tool for learning at your own pace. Being a student at Wagner College, a campus school, I seen the shift in my four years toward using the internet as template for my courses in that I get class notes, sylabus, and other important class information posted on Moodle. This alone showes how the internet is being integrated into education as a whole. This is my rational as to why online education is becoming so popular, simply because the internet is being used at the campus schools as well.