Prestige

…if your goal is to leverage the degree into a high-paying corporate job, then the “brand name” truly matters. The idea of putting yourself into debt can be intimidating, especially if you’re not from a wealthy family. But the extra expense of a prestigious school will usually pay off

…Alumni network. Most high-powered executives simply won’t make time for an ambitious young professional—unless he or she is a student at his alma mater.

…Peer network. The best schools usually attract motivated, ambitious students—so if you attend one, in 10 or 15 years your peer network is likely to be orders of magnitude better than it would otherwise be.

 …Recruiters. Finding excellent job candidates can be hard—therefore, many top firms take the short cut of recruiting from a limited number of high-calibre schools, which have essentially done the screening for them.

…Turbocharging your resume. There are certain powerful signals of professional accomplishment. If you become a Rhodes Scholar or attend Harvard or an IIM, that’s a permanent fact that most people will remember—and it will influence their perception of you. For the rest of your life, you’ll be marked as exceptional, because a high-quality brand has embraced you as one of its own. That alone is often worth the price of admission.

Via Why the brand name matters

Trust Needs to be a Two Way Street

Jeff Bullas writes a great article with 7 Reasons Why Companies Should Blog.

1. It helps your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as Google loves new content!
2. You can engage and understand your customers better.
3. You are seen as an expert in your field, a ” Thought Leader”
4. Great new content gives people a reason to keep coming back to your site.
5. Blogs are a much more trusted source than companies press releases and official company PR.
6. It moves customers to a conversion point where enough trust is created for people to take the next step and buy.
7. By writing you are learning.

Fantastic list.  However, I’d modify reason 2 to read, “You can engage and understand your customers better.  & vice versa.”  As a customer I want to engage and understand your company better by being able to ask questions & offer feedback.  Show me that you want my input, not just ear.  User experience is so important.  This type of two way street is the is the strongest way to bullet point 6: Moving  customers “to a conversion point where enough trust is created for people to take the next step and buy”.

Once your company has decided to blog, what functions and features should a blog include?

After stellar content, definitely give users a way to share that content via share buttons from the following:

• Digg (Over 20 million  people visit this site every month)
• Reddit (Alexa rank of 664 and a Google page rank of 8.. this means one of the top sites in the world with a large number of inbound links and over 6 million unique visitors a month)
• Delicious (nearly 2 Million unique visitors per month)
• Stumbleupon (over 5 million unique visitors a month)
• Facebook ( over 250 Million subscribers)
• Twitter (No 2 Social Media site and is monitored by search engines and becoming more important for SEO)