Strategic Planning.....Tour de France

I'm proud to report that I was on the relative forefront of social networking technology during the brainstorming sessions of my organization's annual strategic planning retreat last Thursday. We were discussing ways in which to expand recruitment efforts to increase the diversity of our student population and to better orient new members into the residential communities as soon as possible. While admittedly we are dealing with our client base of college students, some of the networking strategies that we've talked about to better connect and communicate with employees can also be utilized here. Let's look at modeling some of aspects of new member orientation from employee on-boarding strategies (productive members? productive employees? similar). Let's use the web as a means of getting our current members to connect with potential new members (u-tube, blogs). Want to increase feedback mechanisms from our current membership? (Rypple, blogs). My younger colleagues were impressed that I was willing to make these suggestions. Of course, the next step for me is to be help actually implement these things. At least I see them as viable options.

On a "what do you do in your free time" note, I'm not a big July 4th celebrant; my favorite parts of July are my daughter's birthday (21 in a week!!) and the annual Tour de France, which began on Saturday. When I was immersing myself in Tour details, I came across an article about how the riders use Web 2.0 technology. There are web-based coaching tools (such as Ridefast.com) that allow an athlete to track their training progress and communicate with their coaches. The writer noted that Lance Armstrong trains primarily in Europe or in Texas, but his coach lives and works in Colorado. They do most of their communication through Web & e-mail. They can both use the web-based training program at different locations in order to share instant feedback. I also read that a couple of stages of the Tour are to be done this year without the normal communication devices which allow the rider to communicate with their teams while out on the road (going retro). It will be interesting to see if it makes any difference in riders' tactics. Of course, I'm happy the web provides so much information about the race and the riders throughout the two-week event. Maybe some day I'll be able to go to France and watch it first-hand.....Until then, at least I have tivo and the web.