Tuesday, July 31, 2007

'Web 2.0 University' Has Lessons for Marketers

Candace Lombardi over at CNet has a great article today about how universities are incorporating web 2.0 tech such as wikis, podcasts, RSS, discussion groups and even Second Life in getting students to engage in content. These new applications (I completed grad school less than 3 years ago, before nearly all of these things were popular) all make sense, and as I was reading I was thinking about how marketers could use the ideas to improve workflow and foster creativity.

For example, a wiki distributes the workload across several employees, and can be used to show the progress of a marketing initiative, tech rollout, or white paper in development. This allows management and all participants to see what is happening and comment on ways to modify the direction.

Not everyone likes to speak publicly at meetings, and sometimes the most vociferous workers steal the floor at group meetings, preventing the less assertive from contributing. But a wiki and discussion board format allows the meek to contribute ideas in a safe manner. Marketing ideas will be much richer if everyone can contribute, and discussing the wiki at periodic meetings forces people to update their part ahead of time. This also makes sense for distributed projects.

Second Life is interesting in that having a place for workers to virtually collaborate and chill out can show the corporate culture and be used as a recruiting tool.

By John Gartner at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)

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