At our brand management class this morning, we had the VP of Marketing of Clickability, Robert Carroll, come talk to us.

He mentioned that companies were moving from a Web 1.0 to a Web 2.0 approach in terms of how they managed their online presence.

In Web 1.0, for example, the marketing department would collect all the necessary website changes and work with IT on a project basis to get the website updated.

Using Web 2.0 and Clickability’s Content Management products, each stakeholder has access to his/her portion of the corporate website and can update it directly without the involvement of IT. For example, product management manages the product FAQs, product marketing manages the events section etc.

The Haas EWMBA Student Association is using a similar approach with the association’s web pages.

Last year, one person maintained the www.haasewmbaa.com website by manually and single-handedly updating each page using an HTML editor.

This year, we use Web 2.0 tools to create the “website”.

Instead of  maintaining a single website with static pages, the entire website itself is a collection of blogs.

Each student committee (Alumni Affairs, Social etc) has access to it own blog. Updates are the responsibility of each committee. As a result, there is no bottleneck. Also, blogging tools are so easy to use, that there is just no excuse not to update the blogs regularly.

We also created a template so that each committee blog would have the same Haas EWMBA look and feel.

As they say, great minds think alike…