Up with Montana, boys

For three hours and 36 minutes last Saturday, the Montana football team battled with Appalachian State on ESPN, the worldwide leader in sports. That led a few people across the country to the World Wide Web to find out more about us.

Some web stats for The University of Montana on Saturday, December 12. The percentages are compared to normal Saturday web traffic:

• New visitors to UM website  up 232%
• New visitors to the Admissions website  up 131%
• Google searches for “university of montana”  up 238%
• Referrals from Google  up 190%
• Referrals from Yahoo  up 176%
• Visits to athletics landing page  up 286%

Cheap publicity stunt

Web content guru Gerry McGovern says, “managing a website is like living inside a torture chamber.”

Web managers are tortured because they go about their work with little or no meaningful feedback from people who use their website. Web managers have absolutely no idea whether they’re successful or not.

I can relate.

I’ve been managing the IT website for two years. I think the site is better than it used to be. I know it’s not as good as it could be. I want to make it better. But mostly I want to know that people are using the site, getting value from it, and not cursing (or laughing at) the idiot responsible for the mess.

One unilateral decision I made two years ago was to start this blog. I thought I could convince others to contribute. I failed at that. I thought I could generate conversation. I failed at that too. It’s clear that this blog is a dismal failure and should be put out of its misery.

I shared my conclusion with a co-worker yesterday. She seemed genuinely disappointed.

Hmm, I thought. That was feedback and it felt . . . well . . . good.

Today, I mentioned to a group of co-workers that I had recently written a blog post about our topic of conversation.

“Yeah, I read it,” one of them said.

Wow, more feedback, albeit from another IT employee who may believe that he’s required to read everything I write.

Then a third IT colleague shared that he had recently talked to some nameless person in some department outside of IT who reads the blog and likes it.

Just like that, I had learned that perhaps as many as three people care about the IT Community blog. It was like a Mark Mariani 98-yard kickoff return with the Griz down 27 points in the second half of a do-or-die national playoff football game. It was a scintillating moment . . . a spark . . . perhaps even a momentum changer. But much more is needed before the game is decided.

Please provide feedback. Tell me whether this blog should go on. If you don’t want to comment publicly, you can email me. It’s in your hands now. I will announce the decision soon.