Duncan Bucknell, who co-taught the Strategic Management of Intellectual Property course that I took during my MBA at Melbourne Business School has just launched an intellectual property related podcast on his IP Think Tank website (you can get the first episode here).

Not only does Bucknell really know his stuff, his blog is the place to go to for all IP-related news, information, and resources. Indeed, it’s the #1 IP blog in the world according to BlawgSearch. And the podcast is an excellent addition to everything he’s already doing there.

The Age’s Leon Gettler recently wrote a good article on MBA degrees in Australia and had good things to say about Melbourne Business School:

Melbourne Business School is the only Australian business school with an Executive MBA program to rank among the world’s leading programs. The rankings were compiled by Britain’s Financial Times, which recently released its 2008 ranking of the top 95 Executive MBA programs worldwide.

According to the FT index, the Melbourne Business School EMBA program came in at 45. That put it in the company of such prestigious institutions as London Business School, INSEAD and Wharton.

He also quotes Jenny George, the Associate Dean of Academic Programs at MBS, and talks about MBS’s new Professional MBA program.

Speaking of Melbourne Business School, I’ve been very impressed with the way MBS has been building its online presence over the last few months. For example, I was immensely pleased when I found they’d uploaded audio clips of the talks given at the Dean’s Circle launch event that I attended last month.

I’ve already mentioned on this blog the SouRCe student newsletter that is now available online. Here, then, are two more things you can find on the MBS website:

• MBS Leadercasts: These are videos of recorded presentations by MBS faculty members on the various topics of expertise that they possess.
• MBS Today: This is the monthly newsletter that MBS publishes for “alumni, past faculty, and friends in the government, corporate, and community sectors”.

Both are good though the MBS Leadercasts — much like the University of Melbourne’s Up Close Podcasts and Visions Video Podcasts and a little like TED talks — are lots of fun to watch. I highly recommend them. (I was actually going to tell you my favourite three videos but I can’t narrow it down to just three!)

Melbourne Business School recently published its employment statistics for the graduating class of 2008 (i.e. my class). 80% of the students responded to the survey which told us that:

• Over 95% of graduates were either employed or had received an offer of employment within three months of completing their program
• The average starting salary package for an MBS MBA grad is A$133,569, which is a 63% increase on the average pre-MBA salary

Awesome. You can read the full article and download a PDF of the results on the MBS website.

I read two good social media how-to guides this week:

First, Toby Ward at the Intranet Blog linked to Bill Ives’ recent post on a ‘Sample Action Plan for Business Blogging‘. Ives presents a good high-level plan that lists the steps you need to take in order to successfully launch (and, obviously, maintain) a business blog. This is assuming, of course, that you already have a blogging strategy that is aligned with both your business and marketing strategies. And note that by ‘aligned’ I also mean that it makes sense for you to actually start and maintain that blog!

Second, Laurel Papworth recently gave an excellent presentation on how to plan and run a social media marketing campaign. She’s put her slides and a quick bullet-point list of those steps on her blog. This is a must-read for anyone involved in social media — even if you don’t plan to run a social campaign yourself — because a stripped down version of this plan is what you execute when you launch a blog and, more generally, it’s a good overview of how social media itself works. Besides, you’ll inevitable be a part of such a campaign at some point in your life so it’s good to know what’s going on.