In six weeks time, I will be helping teach a course on small and medium enterprises at Michigan business school. We're going to use blogging in an innovative way, and I would like some feedback.
The course is a project course where evening MBA students (4 – 7 years experience) work with a small enterprise to help it improve its business. The business that will participate is interested in a blogging strategy to increase Internet visibibility.
In a nutshell, our plan is to divide the students up into five or six teams of five people. Then the fun starts. Each team blogs about the industry the company is in. They learn who the blog opinion leaders are for that industry. They learn how to track the company's products and competitors in the blogosphere using tools like technorati, pubsub, del.icio.us, and flickr tags. They're graded on making effective blog posts with a portion of the grade being decided based on getting themselves noticed and cited by opinion leaders. The blogging efforts will be completely open for all to see, so competition will be based on how well the team does its research, networks, and crafts its message.
I would really like feedback and ideas about this from experienced bloggers. I suspect it will be a lot of work for the students and could be hard to pull off. Think of it as sort of putting your blogging feet to the fire.
This is an awesome idea for teaching blogging and relating the experience to the real world. In my mind, a couple of things can come out of this. One, a real world example of blog best practices for small biz use. Comparing the 5 teams efforts and pointing out things that work/don't work will be extremely useful for a small biz that wants to blog. Two, this group of students will have something that most "freshouts" don't have - experience in utilizing blogs to increase the bottom line. A MBA with a "minor" in blogging will be a notable differentiator while job prospecting.
One thing that I would also like to see if the effects of blogs on the internal processes of the target businesses. In my opinion, having an external facing blog is good, but to maximize blog effectiveness, a company must also align internal processes around the blog. This would include the utilization of internal blogs. An external blog may increase revenue, but increasing internal efficiency (reduce cost) is just as important to the bottom line. An internal blog can increase internal efficiency.
If you have any questions, drop by my blog or drop me an email. Also, are you going to publish a book from this course...seems like a very natural outcome.
another thought on this....if possible, have each team work with a different biz type...for example, one team works with an established retail firm. another group works with a bootstrap startup that is a service. another group works with a non-profit org.
this may provide an understanding of blogs on various commerce types. also, would provide a larger biz population to choose from. as indicated in email to you, i have a friend with a start up services company.
Wow, great idea! Love to see what comes out of this!
Might be worth asking for "blogging mentors" to volunteer. I'd be happy to help one team.
These are really great comments.
JBR, the book idea is not bad and maybe one I should really pursue. I also think we have the companies chosen for this round, but suggestions might help for the next time.
Jeremy, a number of folks have gotten back to me on the idea of coaching teams. I have to be careful with that one as students are being graded on this (something that matters), so I am trying to come up with an even-handed approach.
i believe the use of assigned mentors would influence the teams too much.....there is enough info out there to help them with discovery. after that, their grade should be reflective of their understanding and application of their discovery/learning.
without a doubt, they will find mentors during this course and part of their discovery will be finding an effective mentor. could you imagine a team hooking up with Hugh? they would definitely get an intersting education/view.
Bud, this is an exciting project. You might also see if the students can find a way to determine whether the posts to the blogs -- their own and others' -- have any impact on media coverage the company gets. In addition to the blog monitoring tools you cite, you may also want to have them assess whether all this blogging activity is leading to elevating rankings in Google.