How This Website was Built:
Historically offices such as ours struggle with marketing all of the great inventions available from research at their respective institutions and have relied on either preexisting contacts, cold calling, and emails to tell people about the intellectual property housed therein. In an effort to better reach what we consider our audiences both within and outside the University, we decided to pursue a "permission-based" marketing strategy here at OTT. Our idea was to try and use free social-networking utilities and the like to create conversations with others in the education, technology transfer, entrepreneurial, legal, licensing, and other communities. We hoped that by providing content that is useful and valuable we will be able to gain exposure on the web and build a positive reputation in the community.
The center-piece of this strategy is to use the Drupal Twitter module linked to our Twitter account (http://twitter.com/arizonaott - please follow us!) in connection with Drupal's "blog" and "story" content types that we use to provide news content on our site. In particular, we use blog entries to publish content that we want to position as associated with a specific staff member, so for instance Dave Perry, our IP Specialist, will post information on the happenings at the United State Patent and Trademark Office. We use "stories" as press releases and focus those efforts towards success stories coming out of our office, outreach, or presentations by our staff. Any content considered front-page worthy is automatically published to Twitter using the module's features. Also, when we add a new technology to our intellectual property portfolio it is published on Twitter automatically.
So far our efforts have been well received with a lot of positive feedback from educators, technology transfer professionals, entrepreneurs, and the like.
Website: http://ott.arizona.edu
Type of Site: Department
Status: Live
