College Basketball: Digital Big Ten Preview, #6 Purdue

Let's continue our digital minded journey through the Big Ten Conference, from less best to best. We know these programs are out there, waiting for potential recruits to click in. And we'll see who gets it and who doesn't. Thus far, our tour has shown us #11 Northwestern, #10Michigan, #9 Ohio State, and #8 Wisconsin, and #7 Indiana.

Here we go.

#6: Purdue

The Digital Scouting Report

Strengths: A pretty cool interactive basketball catalog matched with a nice Twitter presence.

Weaknesses: Need more of a presence from Coach Painter pumped into the site.

Full Scouting Report:

Clicking into the Purdue home page, here, shows you a pretty standard, clean looking home page. Let's look around. At the top of the page, you'll see an envelope icon, which is your chance to sign up for daily email updates from the program. It's simple, but I do think there's still a place where that daily reminder of what you stand for can be powerful.

But things really get interesting just beneath this window, when you see these two icons (nicely designed). The content beneath this iswhere I'll spend the majority of my Boiler analysis...

First, clicking on the Twitter icon takes you here - to an extremely deep directory of Twitter pages. I like the directory style, I only wish there was some sort of hierarchy here. This isn't alphabetical, and it most likely isn't in order of importance. It feels pretty random. But let's put that aside and drill on into the basketball section.

The Purdue Men's Basketball Twitter page, here, has roughly 2000 followers and seems to offer a mix of info sharing and updates. It is still missing some of the original content or insight I'd hope for, but it is a decent site.

There are a couple additional Purdue Twitter sites to point out. First, the general athletics site is here, with roughly 2000 followers. This site is a basic updates and alerts type of site.

And, finally, Coach Painter is up on Twitter... though it's pretty clear he isn't using it to share insights at this stage. Come on Coach! If he gets active I'd look to see the Coach Painter page connected in both to the Men's Basketball page and into the Purdue Athletics directory. Fingers crossing here.

The official Purdue Athletics Facebook page is also not connected into the site at this time, although it does seem like the program does successfully use this site to break updates.

OK. Let's get back to our original button. The Virtual Publications callout. I was pretty curious what that might mean. I don't think we've come across anything like this yet. So I dove in. You can too by clicking here.


Nice. You'll see this is a franchise that spans multiple sports and is being set up as something that will go forward to future years and build off this year. Cool. Let's choose the 2009-10 season (not that we have a choice, I know).



This is a pretty exciting development. It is the school's media guide. But unlike what we've seen in other places, they are offering unique features and video content that is only available online. So you get all the things created for the print edition and then adding additional pieces for the website. That's pretty cool.

And, as you can see, there's some pretty interesting video content as well. This is a pretty cool experience, and makes me excited to see where it can evolve. Here's a pretty cool feature on Mackey Arena.



Moving on, I went to the Men's Basketball section. You'll see the nice Twitter shout out in the upper corner, which we've already broken down.

You'll see two things I'm going to highlight. First, Boilers in the NBA. This is right on most young athletes' brains and I like this always. Good coverage. Good reminder.

Next, see the callout for the Clitz Blog.

This was a blog kept up last season by one of the Purdue Network announcers, and it gave a super thorough perspective on the Boilers team. This is a great blog, and one I hope continues next season. Check it out here.

Thanks for sticking with me. Tune back in tomorrow as we move on into the top five Big Ten digital hoops squads!