Earlier this week I had dinner with Rahul Choudaha, who is the admissions manager at Indian School of Business. We had a nice conversation about some topics that are near and dear to my heart–blogging, SEO, and social networks. ISB is just starting to build brand recognition in the US, and Rahul is leading the charge.

This morning Rahul is presenting an approach to interactive web marketing in admissions. His is an interesting perspective, as he seems to be the only presenter here from an Indian school. He’s presenting stats from GMAC and other reports to support his approach.

He is posing the question, How can we align our own communication approach to the way prospective students are engaging various communication channels–published rankings, school’s own site, etc? He is touching on a lot of areas here, SEO/SEM, web advertising, the official school website, email marketing, and interaction with admissions personnel. This model, with this specific supporting data, seems like it could be applied to just about any business school. I will be anxious to hear from Rahul about how well this model is working for him.

ISB is doing a lot of SEM for terms relating to MBAs, Indian MBAs, and combinations of terms using keywords including the name of the US schools with whom they have partnerships, e.g. Wharton and Kellogg.

They also have students who are blogging. “This is a very, very powerful channel for us.” Here is one such blog. (See that blog’s blogroll for other ISB blogs.) Rahul notes that a student’s opinion about the school can count for more than the school’s official message.