Enterprise RSS

Blogging == more sales leads..

Jupiter – blogging as pre-sales collateral;

Our JupiterResearch team has been writing blogs for close to two years (JupiterResearch was the first Research company to offer blogs). Readership has grown dynamically (Close to 70,000 page views per day). And we now have several cases of gaining sales leads as a result of a reader becoming interested in our research because of being impressed by analysts' comments.

Other areas of Jupitermedia have blogs as well. In addition to my blog, Danny Sullivan's blog has been growing significantly as well. Danny and his news editor Gary Price now garner near 30,000 page views per day. When combined with our SearchengineWatchforum and Searchenginewatch.com site we have daily page views in the Search field of over 200,000 per day (and growing).

All in all the blog experience (started with my blog in February 2003) has been very positive for Jupitermedia.

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[Alan Meckler]

WhyBlog?

Fred Wilson points to this (query – if he’s inserted a feedburner ad into his feed, should a re-poster of his post pick it up?? what do you think of those ads?)

Go read Tom Watson's lessons learned from his first year of blogging.

More and more people ask me why I blog these days.

I am going to print out Tom's post and read it verbatim to them.

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[A VC]

His earlier post on same topic...

PR Agencies get CorpBlog buzzing

via Scoble's linkblog:

Meet the GM FastLane Blog (from: Buzz Marketing with Blogs)

Last night at the Blog Business Summit reception I met Laurie Mayers of Hass MS&L, the PR company who worked with Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman of General Motors, to create the GM FastLane Blog. I learned a little bit from Laura about how the blog works and thought you might be interesed, too.

The blog was result of an ongoing conversation between Hass and GM about blogs. It is run on Movable Type, and Bob Lutz sometimes moblogs using his Blackberry. The company has been pretty happy with all the attention the launch has gotten so far. I love that on the About page GM has indicated their adaption of the Blogger Code of Ethics. I mean, how cool is that?

The blog was a follow to the GM Smallblock Blog, which Hass and GM created as a kind of trial foray into the blogosphere. (more...)

RSS it is a 'spinnin...

Charlie Wood: 

The mainstream business press continues its coverage of the space. But is RSS really "search on steroids"?

RSS and Blogging on CNBC and in Fortune: "CNBC’s segment is two minutes long and was at the tail end of Closing Bell a week ago. The segment was an introduction to RSS and features NewsGator / Greg Reinacker and Yahoo! / Scott Gatz. The Fortune article - Why There’s No Escaping the Blog is a big one full of good stuff including mentions our of companies Technorati and NewsGator."—Brad Feld (Mobius)

Greg Reinacker got in the best quote in the CNBC piece: "First there was email, then there was the web. Now there's RSS."

Related...

[Moonwatcher]

Blogs help atomize media...

Continued atomization, as cited by Rubel: 

AP tech editor Frank Bajak: The sovereignty of Big Journalism is eroding.

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[Micro Persuasion]

Catchin' on...

E-media wire, via Shore;

RSS Rapidly Becoming the Next Standard in Commercial Web-Publishing and Online Information Distribution

Plug for the RSS Basics book, but true...

Boeing's VP of Marketing Launches a Blog

More Senior Exec bloggers; 

Randy Baseler, VP of Marketing for Boeing Commercial Airplanes, has started a blog called Randy's Blog. But Matt Rosenberg raises a good question - when is a blog a blog and not simply a corporate Web site "journal?" Matt points out that Baseler's blog lacks permalinks, comments and an abscence of news links. He also tells Boeing to check in with GM to see how it's done...

I know this can be a tricky area for corporations. But if General Motors Vice Chairman Bob Lutz can allow reader comments on his kickin' FastLane blog, so can you. Surely, at Boeing, of all places, you can find someone to watchdog the comment strings on your posts, Randy.

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[Micro Persuasion]

Dow Jones E-Mail Newsletter Strategy

But why aren’t these all just RSS subscriptions???... 

I periodically comment on Dow Jones' Internet strategy. Of particular interest to me has been the erroneous strategy of having a closed site (subscription driven). Their recent purchase of MarketWatch will help somewhat alleviate this poor strategy.

Today, however, I write to congratulate Dow Jones. I believe the company was clever to have acquired the VentureWire related email services. Branding them as Dow Jones services brought the product to a whole new level of credibility. And Dow Jones does a nice job cross promoting other services in the daily email offerings.

And I noted yesterday that Dow Jones continues to broaden its email newsletter offerings by announcing the launch of "The Wall Street Journal Briefings" which are a bunch of email newsletters focusing on the Chinese economy.

These are good moves. It will be interesting to watch Dow Jones' strategy in the coming months relating to integration of wsj.com, Marketwatch.com and their growing email newsletter collection.

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[Alan Meckler]

Notes on Enterprise Blogging - in practice

Good, thorough post at Cote's weblog about all the steps involved in blogging from behind the firewall...   He walks through how they went from 0 to 80 blogs ; what people blog about; the technical and social issues involved in spreading the flame....

Well worth the read..

Sun vs. IBM: Blog-off

San Francisco Chronicle this morning;

Sun Microsystems' President Jonathan Schwartz is using an unusual tactic in his company's long-simmering feud with IBM. He posted a letter on his personal blog Friday addressed to Big Blue's Chief Executive Officer Sam Palmisano, in which he challenged the computer giant to work harder at making the two firms' product lines compatible. ...

Podcasting Goes Corporate???

What do you think about Rubel’s point?

Two signs point to rising corporate interest in podcasting. First, Frederik Wacka points to the American Association of Petroleum Geologists' first official corporate podcast. Meanwhile down under, Cameron Reilly says that over the last couple of days he has been having a very interesting conversation with a senior manager from a tier one US company who is interested in engaging his services to help produce an internal podcast for a certain segment of their staff around the world. Anecdotally, I have heard about other companies looking at podcasting. This year not only will podcasting increasingly become a popular tool for corporations, but also for celebrities and musicians who want to stay in regular touch with their fans.

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[Micro Persuasion]

And, via Russ Mayfield, link to a thorough piece on what podcasting is all about... (and why it's good...)

Blog and RSS growth

PubSub's view (via Rubel):

Why CorpBlogging Matters

... according to David Berlind on ZD Net (via Shore Communications).  Excerpt:

... First, blogging isn't just some trendy, cathartic technology for broadcasting our deepest thoughts to the world, building community, and joining the new age media movement where grassroots journalism could end up threatening media monopolies. Second, every business should consider blogging fundamentals -- particularly the notions of persistence and subscription -- in virtually everything they do.

.....corporate culture will need to change. Provided the capability exists, those who publish information will know when to use a blog versus a tool like e-mail. Ultimately, this could force a sea-change, not just in corporate culture, but also in content management software.

Fortune: Corporate Blogging a must...

The long piece by David Kirkpatrick and Dan Roth in Fortune has generated quite a response, particularly, according to David, this comment by O&M's Steve Hayden:

"If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie," says Steve Hayden, vice chairman of advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather, which creates blogs for clients. "The negative reaction will be so great that, whatever your intention was, it will be overwhelmed and crushed like a bug. You're fighting with very powerful forces because it's real people's opinions." .

Eathlink's corporate blog

Via Rubel:

Earthlink, a major ISP, today debuted its first corporate weblog. The TypePad-powered blog site provides information to help consumers stay safe while they're surfing the Web. Chris Brandon, the blog's Managing Editor, wrote in an email to me ...

"This is a brand new endeavor for us, and we're doing it to communicate with customers and non-customers in a new way. We also think it can play an important role in building our brand as the online advocates."

Wow. That's great. Can I get an ayyyymen? The Earthlink blog - at http://www.protectionblog.net - has comments and trackbacks turned off, at least for now. Too bad. However, it does at least have an RSS feed and the site is written in human speak by real individuals, not in corporate-speak. Congrats to Earthlink for joining the blogosphere and doing it properly.

Power tools

Link

Blog applications in Business

Alex Barnett and Scott Reynolds, via Peter Hoskins, talk about multiple applications for blogging within the enterprise.  On the list; leads management, trigger-based and data-mined intelligence, customised report subscriptions, and internal communications.

Fortune A Blog Evangelist? (from: Toby Bloomberg)

Scoble channels Dave Kirkpatrick of Fortune via Toby Bloomberg: 

Is Fortune magazine turning into an evangelist for business/marketing blogs? David Kirkpatrick has written two article in the course of four days about the benefits of blogging. Why There's No Escaping the Blog on Jan 10 and Want Truth In Advertising? Try A Blog on Jan 14.

In his Jan 14 article, Kirkpatrick continues writing about his interview with Steve Hayden, vice chairman of New York-based Ogilvy & Mather. The article puts a positive spin on the benefits of a corporate blog and is well worth a read.

In the blogosphere, we learn not to reinvent the wheel, or the post, if someone else has done an it well. Evelyn Rodriguez, Crossroads Dispatches, has written an excellent summary of the article; following is a snippet.

1. Blogs can serve as a trusted source. "When those magazines review a product it’s generally a universally good review, because they don’t want to lose the advertising revenues. So you go to the blog to get the real review."

2. They can provide companies with reliable feedback. "The advertiser has to accept that what’s on any blog won’t all be positive. Negative things will be said. But consumers are sophisticated enough to filter out the good from the bad."

3. They provide an outlet for happy and unhappy customers. "But the point is that even with all the ranting and raving over a number of problems with the [Porsche] Cayenne because it was a new model” it didn’t interrupt sales. On the message boards and blogs the overall conclusion was it was still a great car. There was an acceptance of the problems.

4. They can serve as a reality check.  "People believe stuff that is flavored with the reality of bad news. Yet typically when you go to a marketing department or an ad agency, the first thing you hear is that everything we say about this product must be positive.

5. They can help companies reach an influential audience. "What the bloggers say is pretty significant to us as a research tool."

Kirkpatrick concludes:

Has your company’s CEO blogged, or spoken to a blog, yet? Maybe it's about time.

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[Scoble]

Use Case: Blogging to Improve Investor Relations

Charlie Wood: 

Can blogs foster better communication between corporate boards and shareholders? One IR analyst thinks so.

In a recent article, IR Web Report offers some strong arguments as to Why Corporate Boards Should Blog:

The blogging technology platform, when properly executed, provides boards and legitimate shareholders with a transparent platform to seriously engage one another on the issues. It can provide boards with a low-cost, highly effective means to establish a credible dialogue and allow directors to obtain feedback from a wider variety of shareholders with differing viewpoints.

Ultimately, the benefits of boardroom blogging are better communication and transparency. Having worked in the Sarbanes-Oxley world for longer than I care to admit, I can tell you that few companies of any size have a clear idea as to how to improve transparency in their dealings with shareholders. Opening up informal, auditable, online communications would be a big first step.

Thanks to Neville Hobson for the original link to this story.

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[Moonwatcher]

10 Reasons Why Marketers Should Blog

Steve Rubel: 

Blogs are a cheap, convenient and enjoyable form of PR and marketing that should be part of every business plan in 2005, writes Bob Cargill, senior creative director of Yellowfin Direct Marketing. He offers 10 reasons why advertising, marketing and PR pros should blog.

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[Micro Persuasion]

Case Study: Lucent Technologies

Moowatcher (aka Charlie Wood) has multiple postings on RSS use in Enteprises, among which this: 

Lucent evangelist presents, "a case study that also describes best practices for implementing a project blog."

Michael Angeles has posted a very nice presentation he was scheduled to give at the (cancelled) Weblog and WIki Summit (too many conferences!) about Luncent's use of weblogs internally as project-level knowledge management tools.

Included is also some very good contextual information for others trying to sell blogs as tools to aid knowledge-management projects, including both a "long pitch", and an example "short pitch":

By making internal websites simple to update, weblogs allow individuals and teams to maintain online journals that chronicle projects inside the company. These professional journals make it easy to produce and access internal news, providing context to the company — context that can profoundly affect decision making. In this way, weblogs allow employees and leaders to make more informed decisions through increasing their awareness of internal news and events.
—Lee Lefever

See his blog post for more information.

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[Moonwatcher]

Calling all CorpBloggers...

From Gary Stein – good initiative: 

Although he sounds a bit like Mulder from the X-Files, Steve Rubel who runs Micropersuasion has sent out a call to bloggers inside of corporations.

Steve has done a lot of truly strong thinking and writing about the influence of blogs on corporations. His call today for those people inside of big organizations that tune in to begin talking about it is great.

This is a proven path for Internet technologies. It reminds me of how the Internet found its way into companies in the first place. The archetypal story is that someone visited someone who had an Internet connection--and was so blown away by the potential, that s/he brought it into the company as a personal project. Things snowballed, and eventually the Internet was built into the overall corporate structure.

That structure, I think, is what's necessary right now. Listen and talking via blogs is great. But there is a huge deficit in business practices around this flow of content in and out. Learning for the Internet experience, corporations (or those 'believers' as Steve calls them) should not just say "hey--BLOGS!". They should say "hey--BLOGS---here's how we should handle them."

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[Gary Stein]

Mad Avenue goes Blog

Steve Rubel comments on the big ad/PR agencies getting into the corpblog advisory business. They’re also aggressively setting up RSS practices – our company, NewsGator, just inked a deal with a major along those lines… 

Interpublic-owned PR firm MWW Group today launched a weblog marketing practice called Blog 360. The practice will advise clients on strategies to create, participate in, monitor, and advertise in blogs. I give my perspective on this effort in ClickZ's report on the launch.

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[Micro Persuasion]

RSS: Marketing Use Case

Must-read from Charlie Wood of Moonwatcher (excerpt below): 

I recently spoke with a marketing director at a multibillion dollar semiconductor manufacturer who had just spent a year and $1 million on an integrated portal/content management system. As it turns out, what she really needed was Enterprise RSS.

The company she works for is a $2 billion semiconductor manufacturer that markets its products to design engineers creating new industrial, communication, computer, and consumer products. The company sells its products through an extensive network of distributors. Both customers and distributors need access to updated information about the company's products, and since the commonditization curve for these products is very steep, the sooner the information gets into the customers' hands, the higher the margin on the sale will be.

Last year, the company made a large investment in building a customer portal to make sure that the latest product information was always availble. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on software, and that much again on professional services, to implement a fully personalized site that allowed customers and distibutors to create custom pages for themselves containing information on the types of products in which they were interested. But even though the company built it, no one came. As it turns out, their audience didn't want to constantly check the web, even a personalized site, for sporadically updated information. They wanted notifications…. ….

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 [Moonwatcher]

Blogs for Business

Electronic Business magazine weighs in:

Blogs for business?

Strip away the hype, and find a newly useful tool for communication

Forget about all the hype you've heard about blogs (a.k.a. Web logs) as the latest outlet for personal journalism. It turns out they also have a remarkable ability to aid communication in business, whether within internal workgroups or among external chains of suppliers and partners. For an industry such as electronics—where relationships are far-flung and time-to-market pressures require fast communications—blogs can bring a new agility to the workforce... ...

... ...

For Sun's Lark, this two-way communication is a key advantage for engineers, working on something as focused as running Java on medical devices, who want to talk to other developers and designers. "You get a lot of insight into how real people think about what we're doing, but it also gives engineers a voice in the market they didn't have before." For instance, with the release of Solaris 10—essentially Sun's open source version of its operating system—Sun's OS developers have been able to respond to concerns from application developers with swift and unfiltered access. Lark adds, "It gives our people a chance to participate in the tribes and communities that are part of our business."

Blogs vs. Email; Debbie Weil Weighs In

Some expertise from abroad on blogging and corp marcom…. 

Now that blogs are gaining ground as a mainstream communications tool, where does that leave good old email?

Debbie Weil has put together some thoughts on the matter that ought to encourage both business bloggers and email marketers. In a nutshell she says email is not dead, and you ought to add a blog to your marketing communications mix. I couldn't agree more Debbie!

(Scroll down to the "Ask the Expert" section to read her comments.)

Related...

[Radiant Marketing Group]

Business Blogging Awards

Attention, blog award voters!.... 

Jeremy Wright and the folks at InsideBlogging have just launched a new website, the 2005 Business Blogging Awards. You can nominate any blogs you wish, even your own, according to a number of categories. I'm thinking about nominating RMG for the Peacock Award. :-) (You'll have to go to the website to see which one that this.)

There is a category for the best Small Business Blog, and I know exactly who I'm nominating for that one!

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[Radiant Marketing Group]

Blog explosion : The latest Pew Internet and American Life study has...

More Jarvis:

Blog explosion

: The latest Pew Internet and American Life study has astounding findings on the growth of blogs:

: 7% of the 120 million U.S. adults who use the internet say they have created a blog or web-based diary. That represents more than 8 million people.

: 27% of internet users say they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% who told us they were blog readers in February. This means that by the end of 2004 32 million Americans were blog readers. Much of the attention to blogs focused on those that covered the recent political campaign and the media. And at least some of the overall growth in blog readership is attributable to political blogs. Some 9% of internet users said they read political blogs “frequently” or “sometimes” during the campaign.

: 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online. This is a first-time measurement from our surveys and is an indicator that this application is gaining an impressive foothold.

: The interactive features of many blogs are also catching on: 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs.

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[BuzzMachine]

For whom Jarivs tolls today....

 Jeff says:

The five stages of media death

…

I see the exact same stages going in with citizens's meedia and big media... and citizens' marketing and big advertising... and online politics and top-down politics. They're at different stages, but the path is the same.

First, big media denied that blogs existed or mattered. Then we saw anger, witness The New York Times' dis below. We are starting to see bargaining as blogs are incorporated in, gingerly, by some big media. I've seen depression; some people I know in this business say it will never be the same (and I try to supress my grins). Acceptance isn't far off.

: Here's Hugh Hewitt banging nails in media's coffin.

Related...

[BuzzMachine]