Blogs and Email Go Head-to-Head at Microsoft

Kevin Briody, who manages Microsoft’s academic developer effort to reach US college students, is trying …

… an experiment. His group launched MSDN Student Flash, an e-newsletter for college student developers. They have published three issues and are ramping up to 2x/month. Overall the newsletter is getting a positive reaction. At the same time they also created the MSDN Student Flash blog and invited a couple students in to help write it. Why do both? Briody lists four reasons:

To give students a choice on selecting how they like to get news from Microsoft.
To make all the content available via RSS feeds.
To have a realtime conversation rather than a staid one-way communication.
To experiment and find out which format students prefer.

For more on Kevin’s analysis, visit his blog. (Via Scobleizer’s Link Blog)

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.