Category: branding

Blogging about organizational change

missouri_sandt_bw_thumb.jpgToday — New Year’s Day 2008 — the university that has employed me for almost 17 years officially became Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T).

This name change comes after some 15 months of challenging communications work. Part of the challenge was trying to communicate to such a broad array of stakeholders in a relatively short time period. (Chris Brown of Branding & Marketing picked up on this in her Too many stakeholders post last March. “I think that rebranding a university is much harder than rebranding a company,” she wrote. “With a university the stakeholders feel much more ownership of the branding than the stakeholders in a company.” True that, Chris.)

One of the ways we attempted to communicate was through our Name Change Conversations blog, which we launched on Jan. 30, 2007. Over the past 11 months, that blog has been both a sounding board and a lightning rod for alumni, students, faculty, staff and others interested in the name change. As I posted that blog’s first post of the new year a little while ago, I reflected on this experiment in blogging for organizational change.

Over the past 11 months, we’ve tried to use this blog as an avenue to talk about the name change with our alumni, students, faculty and staff. As we said when we launched this site last January, we wanted it to be:

  • a source for useful information about the proposed name change.
  • a forum [for] discussion about the issues being raised by the proposal.
  • an avenue for providing up-to-the-minute information about the proposal.

When this blog experiment began, the idea of a name change was still in proposal form. It is now reality. But even after moving from proposal to recommendation to unanimous endorsement from the University of Missouri Board of Curators and on through the process of picking a logo and other details of the implementation, I’d like to think that this blog has achieved its purpose.

I hope you agree. But if you don’t, well, that’s fine. It’s not like we haven’t had our disagreements in the past. But I hope you can at least agree that this forum has allowed you to freely express your opinions about the name change and to participate in a process that we have tried to make as open as possible.

In my opinion, “transparency” and “conversation” were two of the most overused buzzwords of 2007. But those two terms best express what we have tried to do with this blog. We have used this blog to make the process more transparent than it would have been otherwise, and we have used it to try to engage you in a meaningful conversation about this change in your university’s identity.

It will be interesting where this experiment goes in 2008.

Update: this FC Now post today seems particularly relevant.

—————-
Now playing: Thom Yorke – Analyse
via FoxyTunes

Friday Five (more or less): end-of-07 edition

Before the year gets away from us, let me link you up with a final Friday Five — now with even more bloggable marketing/branding/tech/PR goodness than usual.

  • LogoLounge looks at the Logo trends of 2007 and notes that “logo design has become a public sport.” Boy, don’t I know it. Via BoingBoing.
  • 11 ways to get new RSS subscribers. Great ideas. I don’t think I do any of them. Then again, I don’t have a lot of RSS subscribers.
  • Blog it but don’t flog it. Insight into how traditional ad/PR agencies try to co-opt true viral marketing with their own versions. “Viral campaigns are multiplying for the same reason as branded entertainment: the urgency among advertisers to find alternative ways to reach jaded, distracted consumers as technologies such as DVRs and iPods make it easier to avoid conventional pitches.” Via Anne Elizabeth Moore.
  • Media 2008 is a mix – get mixing, in which Chris Brogan deconstructs iEllie.

    iEllie has pictures and podcasts and Flickr and tons and tons of production just packed into this page. She’s creating all the time, and using the various formats interchangeably. This gives you a sense of the mix culture. It’s not a blog. It’s not a podcast. She’s making something and it doesn’t NEED a name because there’s a payload.

  • Teens and Social Media, another insightful report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “The survey found that content creation is not just about sharing creative output; it is also about participating in conversations fueled by that content.” Hat tip: SquaredPeg.
  • 10 marketing resolutions for 2008, from Church of the Customer.
  • B.L. Ochman shares Time magazine’s top 10 viral videos of 2007, as reported by MSNBC’s Countdown.
  • Attention, trendspotters: Here are 80 trends to watch in 2008. They include Facebook suicide (dropping out of Facebook, not actual suicide), eco-fatigue, the Gphone (Google’s answer to Apple’s iPhone) and higher education online. Alas, one of those listed, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated shortly after the list came out. Link via Clickz News Blog.
  • Top 10 “tangible” (maybe) PR ideas, from The|Intangibles.

    • Happy New Year.

    —————-
    Now playing: Angelique Kidjo – Ae Ae
    via FoxyTunes