The world is in danger: Institute websites just speak, do not listen!!

I’m developing the website of an MBA college, SSIMS. When I went on to set up an website strategy for this institute, we took a serious study on user behavior on different educational websites. We first started out seeing different educational institute websites. We started with Harvard. What we saw? The Harvard speak out a lot to the public, about their events, about different research projects, about their campus life. They even want people to share it on different social networking websites. But they do not have a comment section on their blogs. What else? They allow you to connect with different professor by providing their twitter id. That’s pretty good. But I want to discuss on the particular blog post. But I’m no way know where to go! That’s rubbish.

The experience with most of the other websites were the same, Terrific! The professionals are there, students across the world are there, teachers, companies are there and eager to discuss with you and also to share you some of their real life experience. All those sites I visited were good at look and feel. But was missing this simple ear to put there.

As I say often, your website should behave like your marketing executive, not like your salesman. When educational institutes have deaf executive the world comes to an death stage.

You are a big institute. You produce a lot of knowledge. You show it to the people. People came up with questions or suggestions in their mind like a student in your classroom. But you don’t listen. Hence you are leaving a lot of question in the air unsolved. I got your knowledge, but don’t know what to do. And any way I don’t think you are the God. I want to listen to others around there. Then I’ll decide how I’m going to use it.

That shows how a piece of information, quite valuable, left on your dinning table, then directly goes to dustbin, simply being unused. My father often says me: a classroom teaching without a 30% of time being spent on discussion is neither useful for student nor for the teacher itself, b’coz the teacher didn’t learn anything from his student. He might be wrong???? I have questions. left for you to answer.

This happens with every failed startups. They don’t listen to the market.

So I built a world class website for a business school just by adding a comment section to it. have a look at it.

Tags: educational website, information drainage, website analysis

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.