Announcing the Intellum Community

As many of you know, we have been using our blog solely as a way to organize and deliver our monthly interview podcast, which we started at the beginning of this year. That approach has always seemed like a waist of a perfectly good communications platform, but we didn't want to rush into a community strategy that didn't provide value to our readers. To be quite honest, a lot of corporate blogs we see seem more interested in self-promotion than the value of their content, and that is absolutely not the path we wanted to follow. We knew we had a good thing going with the interview podcast, for which we have to thank our wonderful list of participants and everyone that has emailed us with positive feedback, but we wondered how we could reproduce that same spirit in a different format with more frequent updates.

We believe we have finally figured out the correct balance. Today, we are excited to announce the launch of the new Intellum Community, which will serve as the central destination for our community activities:

1) The Podcast
The podcast has been a huge success, and we have a growing list of passionate, inspiring participants lined up for future episodes. I'm personally looking forward to hearing from these individuals, and think you will too.

2) The Blog
Okay, there's nothing new about a blog. It seems everyone starts one at some point, only to lose interest in it a few months later. Regardless, there are a number of good ones that I still enjoy reading through Google Reader (despite the fact that the feed is supposedly dead). We feel that the blog can serve two main roles for us: (1) as a place to share more in-depth articles about challenges our clients have overcome; and (2) as a way to aggregate updates about our other community activities.

3) Intellum TV
In talking to our clients and podcast participants like Sal Kahn and Steve Garfield, it has become apparent that obsessing about production quality can easily get in the way of creating something that people find valuable. With that lesson in mind, we have begun producing short, casual video clips that touch on the behind-the-scenes aspects of the work we do at Intellum. We hope that these videos serve as a helpful educational resource for those of you that want to learn more about e-learning, technology, or entrepreneurship.

4) Social Networks
We have created accounts on Facebook and Twitter to provide an easy and timely way for you to keep up with our community updates, which we hope will have the added benefit of fostering discussion and providing real-time feedback.

We are very excited about our plans for the Intellum Community, but we know, like anything else, it's all in the execution. We'll be working hard to add valuable resources for you, but we can't build a true community without your participation. If you have any ideas or feedback, please let us know.

We look forward to hearing from you!