SquaredPegBrad J Ward’s Thoughts on Higher Education Recruitment

Our mascot now has a blog, and it’s pretty good stuff. I have to say though, we missed a huge opportunity from an Admission standpoint.

The first post went up on Sunday, Jan 13th. On the 14th I got a Google Alert for ‘Butler University’, and saw that the caretakers of Butler Blue II had started a blog on the Blogger platform. I instantly thought “Wow, we need to pull this in to our site, what a great addition.” I went to the higher ups and suggested that we approach them to bring it on board to our site. I got a “Let’s wait and see how it goes”, which is a generally conservative, yet reasonable approach for a blog. Typically, blogs fade out pretty quickly. With this being run by the caretakers, I just had a feeling it was going to hit big. And it has, as you can tell by the amount of commenting going on.

3 weeks after it launched I got the go-ahead to approach the caretakers about pulling the content in to our site, and of course they were excited and willing. The only problem? The Alumni office did an email blast that very day with the Blogger link. That’s where the missed opportunity comes in. Due to the popularity of that link, we decided it’s best to just copy content over to Blue II’s blog on the Admission site, which makes it the secondary blog. Yes, it will be great for all future students to read on our site since they likely wouldn’t have found the other, but it would have been nice to have 1 primary blog for all to comment on: future students, current students, Butler fans, Alumni, and more. You win some, you lose some.

Without further ado, I present to you:

The Life and Times of Butler Blue II.

He was also over to the Admission office for a visit last week, so I flipped out the Flip and had him do a few tricks for YouTube. 200 views in 1 day. This dude is amazing.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t7Zc__vQTQ&rel=1]