The Office of Public Relations and Communications is moving to a new platform for posting and distributing stories that appear on www.colgate.edu.
Starting today, the office is using a blogging software called Movable Type, which is used by several large companies such as The Washington Post, Boeing, and American Express. (A Colgate alumnus, Michael Sippey ’90, is an executive with Six Apart, the parent firm of Movable Type).
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By moving to Movable Type we will:
— Raise the profile of our stories. The blog platform provides a strong way to “tag” our stories. This means we will increase the likelihood of our stories being picked up by search engines, blogs, and other news aggregators. This tagging feature will help us promote Colgate, our faculty members, students, new initiatives, etc.
— Categorize our stories in more ways which, when used with a feature called RSS, will allow us to distribute stories more easily to the university’s portal, campaign site, alumni site, and others.
— Become more interactive. Readers of our stories will be able to offer comments. We hope to create a dialogue among those interested in Colgate and who have something to share. All comments will be reviewed for relevance and must adhere to general guidelines.
— Make our News Headlines page more user friendly and more engaging. We can better promote our photos, which appear in the photo-community site flickr. We are highlighting our videos with a new logo, which is prominently placed on the page.
— Help staff members quickly react to situations and post more stories more often, adding another layer to our public relations efforts.