No, I am not Nostradomus or any relative or follower of his to predict the end of the world, I am talking about this blog IIFMight which is coming to an end.
Probably this would be the last post (and a long post) on the blog and thereafter the domain http://iifm.blogspot.com will take you to the famous/infamous Blogger: 404 Page not found…. page.
When we joined IIFM in June 2004 (and had our debate discussing branding of IIFM) one of thing came out of the discussion that IIFM lacked brand visibilty out of the sector. So a guy looking for information on business school does not come across so easily to IIFM and those who know IIFM (from advertisements and admission notices in newspapers) were not exactly sure about IIFM. Searching info about IIFM on web was also not fruitful as there were very few pages (apart from official website) on IIFM (one of the more popular pages was by Shikha Kalra on http://envindia.com a website run by our alumnus Chandra Kishore) and that page was not quite well recognised by the search engines as there was no emphasis on SEO techniques.
When I started this blog, blogging was not a term in everyones vocabulary and but a mention of this by CSR in classroom regarding my new initiative made many people to join as member (its another thing that many didnot contribute more than thier name on team member list!!). Though there were some early enthusiast who contributed and but could not sustain the same level of enthusiasm later.
But with 4-5 regular contributors, it came this far. Around 150 post in two years (not bad almost 2-3 post per week) and average 8-10 new visitors per day. The search engine rating of this blog went quite high (second most popular page after iifm official website) for anyone looking any info on IIFM and it directed many info seekers to this webpage and which later resulted in our mailbox getting bombarded with all sort of queries on IIFM and going through the queries we realized how little the students were knowing about IIFM.
Many of its contributed, started their own blog and their blogs are doing quite well (most notable is Nitin’s Hindi blog). Since this was a community blog (read the tag line “blogs of IIFMight”) the idea was content generation through community participation but this idea of Community Participation was not as appealing as Class Participation so later batches did not show any keen interest in contribution. Probably we didnot make much effort to elaborate on objectives of IIFMights.
So what were the objectives we had in mind while starting the blog?
- Increasing webpresence of IIFM and letting the world know what IIFM is all about by putting up experiences and opinions of the student on the web.
- Providing one source of guidance to future students.
- Creating database of experiences of its students
- Letting the new students know more about thier alumni by thier thoughts and providing them a chance to interact with them.
- Building strong brand for IIFM while providing quality content and attracting visitors all across the world.
All the above objectives were partially fulfilled barrring the last one. I tried to request “issue centric” contribution from many of our alumnus without much luck.
On personal front, this blog gave me a lot. Invariable the enquiries about IIFM will found a place in my mail box and I made a point to answer all of them withought a fail. So I knew almost all of the new batches coming to campus or vice versa.
I think, the post is becoming too long. At the end I would like to have your comments regarding its shutdown (as it is not a personal blog though i have all the adiminstrative rights), should I go for that? For the moment, the blog is crying…
Give me contributors or Give me death…
