What am I most excited about in the new year? We are not alone anymore.

So I’m a couple months into my second year here at Notre Dame. Let me tell you it’s been great.

There have been challenges and a lot of you have the same challenges I do (resources and time) but I’ve never been as excited as I am right now – well, maybe, my first week on the job. I was pretty excitable back then.

Things look great and let me tell you why.

I feel like lots of people across campus are very interested in helping out communications.

Instead of feeling like we were just a department that was separated away in Grace Hall building posters, brochures, flyers, emails and websites in isolation, now I feel that we are an integrated part of everything here on campus.

We are helping campus communicators build strategic communication plans. We are providing training to you with our Brown Bag Lunch and Learns on Social Media, Photography, Video, Print, etc… If you don’t know about our brown bags, make sure you sign up for the Campus Communicators Listserv and the Linkedin Group.

We are helping guide the Notre Dame brand with onmessage.nd.edu – a website dedicated to the brand guidelines so you can understand how to use the academic mark, the monogram, what are official colors are and how to use them.

And we are still creating videos, photos, print material and websites of the highest quality.

But now, I see there is a new opportunity…it’s not just servicing our campus communicators but helping our entire university – faculty, staff and students.

No one would argue that communications hasn’t changed much in the past few years. In fact, it’s been turned on its head.

With their digital identities on the web via Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, everyone is a communicator for the university. Everyone associated with the university is part of the brand.

And this is a great thing because communicating isn’t as easy as it once was. Telling our story takes many voices in many different channels with many more vehicles. TV, radio, print, web, social media, email, text, mobile, etc…

And guess what? People that never thought of themselves as communicators are actually excited to help out and I can’t wait to help them do it. We all have audiences now. We all have people we influence.

So going into this new year, I’m excited that we’re not alone anymore. There are lots of people willing and able to tell the Notre Dame story (a lot better than I can in instances) and now all we have to do is show them how to use the tools.

Now, how do we show them? Well, that’s another blog post and I would love your ideas on how we do it.