Oregon State University has an admissions blog. Dan Crouch and Blake Vawter, both from OSU, gave a session about it yesterday morning at the annual AACRAO conference. Out of probably hundreds of sessions, it was the only session in the conference that had anything to do with blogging (at least according to the program). And it almost didn’t happen. Apparently the scheduled presenters couldn’t do their presentation, and Dan and Blake stepped in and developed their session in less than eight hours.

They provided an overview of blogging and RSS, and then talked about their experience in launching and maintaining an admissions blog that serves the entire university. Blake is the blogger. They also touched on the importance of SEO and provided examples of comments that students leave on the blog. Here are a few of the audience questions they fielded.

Do you moderate blog comments? (Anwer: Yes, but essentially only for spam.)

Will search engines see blogs that are part of your content management system? (My answer: Depends.)

Should an institution with multiple schools keep separate blogs or be authors on the same blog? (Answer: Three authors at most; I would say, it depends on the blog’s audience.)

How much time do you spend blogging each day? (Answer: 10 minutes to 2 hours.)

The presentation featured WordPress prominently, as this is the platform that they use. They’ve designed the WP theme to match the rest of their website.

In short, I think they’d agree that blogging is working for them. Not only do they have an easy way to get their messages out, but the blog also provides a way for students to pose questions and get responses in a timely fashion. They’re happy with the ability to publish quickly, either with brand new content, or with content re-purposed from other portions of the website, or from the communications office.

They did mention the URL where the presentation will be available in mp3, but I didn’t catch it. If anyone knows what the URL is, feel free to leave a comment here.