I’m pleased to report I’ll have help lifting those digital bales and toting that virtual barge this summer. Say hello to Lauren. She’s completing her junior year at the University of Missouri where she is pursuing a double major in Journalism and Graphic Design (and she’s on the Dean’s List). It would be inaccurate to say I haven’t had help feeding and caring for the 20+ websites for which I’m responsible. Andy and Phil are The Wizard and Glenda the Good Witch of the North (we’re not sure which is which) to my Dorothy. And our reporters generate the good content. But for 10 years I’ve been scurrying around, trying to keep up with the day-to-day stuff and Laruen is arriving just in the nick of time.
Category Archives: Learfield
Learfield Blog
Last month we set up a blog for company news (new hires, expansion, etc.). An experiment as much as anything. And our CEO said he might post from time to time. His latest deals with doing the right thing. At one level it’s shop talk but he’s basically saying that in the early days of our company we did something that wasn’t in the best interest of our customers (affiliates and advertisers). He uses the example to illustrate a core value of our company. Do the right thing, even if it costs you some money.
In previous posts, I’ve expressed some doubts about whether corporations can blog. It’s just hard to find someone with the courage to speak with the honesty and openess that characterizes blogs. Okay, it’s a little easier to say what you think if you own the company. But I believe this post says a lot about our company and the people leading it.
You could take all of our brochures and news releases and stack them to the ceiling…and they don’t say as much about who we are and what we believe as Clyde’s simple blog post. Our employees can read that. Our business partners can read it. Our customers can read it. The world can read it. And they will “hear” the honesty and sincerety in Clyde’s words. This is corporate blogging at its best.
Shop Talk: International Sports Properties
The company I work for (22 years in June) competes with –and partners with– a company called International Sports Properties (aka ISP). ISP has the rights to UCLA who plays in the second game of the Final Four semi-finals tonight. Which brings me to a story I found on the Winston-Salem Journal website. A well-done profile on ISP and the “elite-college multimedia-rights niche.” (Alternate link) I learned some things about collegiate sports marketing which is now, far and away, the largest part of our business. For example, corporate spending on college-athletics programs is expected to reach $458 million this year, up from $415 in 2005.
When I joined Learfield in 1984 we had the rights the Missouri and had just acquired the rights to Iowa State and…Kansas? Anyway, sports was a small piece of what we do. No longer.
Posted by Clyde
It’s a little too early to say that our company is blogging (corporately). But there’s a teensy, weensy spark that could become a flame. Clyde Lear –our CEO/President/Founder and All Around Good Guy– has dipped his toe in the blog pond. Several us always thought he’d be a natural and today’s post would seem to confirm that. For reasons known only to him, he asked a few employees at random what they were reading and posted the results. Why do I think this is worth a mention?
No news release. Nothing about our company’s growth. Just a little nugget about the people that make up our company. He didn’t ask the senior management staff what they were reading. He walked down the hall and asked the folks in the cubes. Clyde was once a journalist and has always been a good writer. I hope he becomes a regular blogger. He’ll have interesting and important things to say.
RSS for network websites
For sometime now, I’ve been embarrassed that our news network websites were not RSS enabled. Very lame. Big Andy worked a little magic so we could add this essential feature. If you’re interested in news about Missouri, Iowa or Wisconsin…you can now subscribe to our news and/or sports feeds. A necessary step to get some podcasts going, too.
I spent a good chunk of the past week trying to convince some of the Grownups at our company that a well executed blog might be a better way to communicate with employees than an eight-page memo that comes out three times a year (as an email attachment). Take some rusy pliars…get a good grip on one of my molars…twist slowly back and forth until the tooth comes free. But god bless ’em, they paid me for every minute I worked. Whoo wah!
Nice lunch with Chuck who is doing nothing less than redefining the agriculture marketing space. His company is two years old and is doing everything right (IMHO). Chuck’s a Viet Cong sapper running quietly through the jungle in a pair of rubber shower thongs…while big media and marketing companies are sipping mai tai’s in a Saigon bar.