The Michigan Business School has a very cool, innovative project course aimed at helping a small enterprise increase Internet visibility through blogging (no more calling MBAs a bunch of blaggards!). Bud Gibson at The Community Engine posts:
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 imagine that for a project that spans only a few months that the results could be overly sensitive to the amount of offline networking that the MBAs do, perhaps tending to make things a bit of a free-for-all. Perhaps to control for things on the downside, the competition should also be based on whether any backlash occurs. This is something that the MBA would have to live with if they were a permanent employee of the client company. Visibility is a nice goal, but perhaps not the only goal. In any case, Michigan sounds like it has ingredients for an awesome course. Will be great to hear how this goes.
