Ideas for putting RSS to work in your organization

Many organizations continue to suffer from information pain points - information overload, too little information, siloed information, or overflowing email that is worthless to many in the organization. RSS is gaining traction within organizations to help ease the pain, so here are some ideas for using it exclusively inside your firewall:

RSS for Sales
Track leads, opportunities, contracts and new product development releases

RSS for Marketing
Monitor campaign progression, collateral development and contract status

RSS for Customer Service
Disseminate product and procedural updates; monitor customer resolution issues and out-of-service conditions

RSS for Product Development
Subscribe to a new ideas pipeline, product design phases and stage-gate funding committee nominations

Where’s the buzz? Employees can use RSS to save time in getting to the right information when and where they need it. Rather than spamming your employees with this information, give them a place to subscribe and pull it in when they have the burning need.

 

Buzz Marketing highlights from this week ...

How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life
I hate to say I told you so but ...
Second Life, web2.0 community

How To Track RSS Subscriptions Using Google Analytics | Andy Beard - Niche Marketing
Must read from Andy Beard on understanding RSS subscriber behavior by using Google analytics
RSS

RSS versus Email: A Marketing View | The Marketing Technology Blog
Great discussion on when to use RSS versus email by Douglas Karr
RSS, email,

Spock's Social Search Engine -- Search Engine -- InformationWeek
Interesting twist on filling in the gaps in the Google foundation
search engine

Our Facebook Marketing Campaign Yields Exceptional ROI
Superb ROI using Facebook - everyone should be thinking about how Facebook can be added as a social network aspect to each campaign
social Networking

Will I be fired if I blog? And you just told me corporate blogs were safe? « Marketing Nirvana by Mario Sundar
Mario Sundar covers the topic very well - a must read for anyone considering launching a blog
Blogging, web 2.0

 

How to Build a Successful Blog Quickly, a Podcast with Douglas Karr

I've been following The Marketing Technology Blog by Douglas Karr, and I'm in awe of him and his natural blogging ability. He blogs on his topic daily, sometimes more, and produces really well thought out posts. As a result, he has built a strong following on his blog that is rivaled by very few. And he's done it in record time!

I decided to reach out to Douglas Karr and interview him on a podcast to bring you some key learnings on how to build the audience for your blog. Enjoy …




Original Audio Source

About Doug

Doug is currently a product manager for a major permission-based email service provider - named one of the fastest growing private companies by Inc. magazine. Doug is also a proud member of the Indianapolis Colts Marketing Advisory Board, led by Pat Coyle, the Colts’ database marketing director. Pat and Doug also launched the Indianapolis Book Mashup - a book club to discuss the latest business, marketing and technology publications.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Innovation, Web 2.0, Douglas Karr, The Marketing Technology Blog, Buzz, Buzz Marketing

 

More Thoughts on Calculating the ROI of Blogging

In a post a few weeks back I took a stab at measuring the ROI of blogs (trackback to that post). Since then I've uncovered a few more ideas that might be helpful to anyone building a business case for a blog, or someone who built a grass roots blog and is looking for continued funding.

In the world of real estate there is such a thing as a "comparable home." Home sales and mortgages are granted on the basis of how much similar homes have sold for. There's a nifty little applet at that will tell you just how much that blog is worth (interesting note: they say this blog is worth $71,696.58 – so much for retiring early!) This is based strictly on the value of the traffic coming to the blog.

Another way to examine blog value is to look at the quantity of links, comments and trackbacks for your blog. Technorati can tell you not only the number of links, but also your "influence" rating relative to every other blog out there. This index seems to change daily and is very finicky at major inflection points like the 50,000 or 10,000 mark.

Breaking one of these barriers is often an accomplishment for a blog.

Similarly, there is the Conversation Index, which refers to the ratio between the number of posts the author creates and the number of comments or trackbacks the blog receives. The theory here is that the degree to which you generate conversation is an indicator of the value of the blog in general. So if you add 50 posts to your blog in a month and you get 100 comments, your Conversation Index is 2:1.

Market Sentinel (together with Onalytica and immediate future) released a white paper on measuring the influence of bloggers on corporate reputation. They looked at Jeff Jarvis's campaign against Dell and showed for the first time how to measure his influence and the possible damage to Dell's reputation.

Where’s the buzz? The hardest part for the organization to grasp is not the transparency of blogs, but the lack of control. As the saying goes; “if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.” But the problem is you simply can't manage what 10 million opinionated people are going to say in the blogosphere. And why even try?

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Web 2.0, Conversation Index, Market Sentinel, Jeff Jarvis, Onalytica, Buzz, Buzz Marketing

 

Buzz Marketing highlights from last week ...

Web Strategy by Jeremiah » A way to measure influence? See this Social Media Index
Here is a good follow on to my podcast on Measuring Engagement by Jeremiah Owyang
Social Media

Blog Business Summit » John Furrier explains how the iTunes podcast catalog works
Great podcast on understanding iTunes and how the listings work
Podcasting

Decker Marketing: Tips for CIO / CMO Relationships
Here is a must read now that marketers are experimenting with Web 2.0
web 2.0

Web Marketing Blog, Web 2.0 Social Tagging, Business Blogging Tools, Micromarkets Blog
Congratulations to Tom Pick who's blog Web Market Central is outgrowing many similar blogs
Blogging

Corporate Blogging: Top Ten Questions from Companies | The Marketing Technology Blog
I great resource for anyone looking to start a corporate blog by Douglas Karr
Blogging

 

Influential Marketing, a podcast with Rohit Bhargava

One of the blogs that I admire most is the Influential Marketing Blog run by Rohit Bhargava. To truly understand the genius of it, you really need to look at the little things Rohit does. For example, check out his social media bio and how his blog titles are optimized for search engines.

He also wrote some great content on an emerging topic called Social Media Optimization (SMO), which I edited for my audience taking my inspiration from his original content.

I asked Rohit to do a podcast with me to better understand SMO and get his views on social media and what PR’s role will be. Enjoy …



Click here to listen to the MP3 Version

About Rohit

Rohit Bhargava leads the interactive marketing team at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide in Washington, D.C., and is a founding member of the 360 Digital Influence team at Ogilvy. He is a frequent speaker at industry events and is a specialist in combining "traditional" interactive marketing efforts with innovative social media marketing strategy to help clients succeed in the new media landscape. His current list of clients includes Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Lenovo, and Unilever. Prior to joining Ogilvy PR, he was executive producer of the interactive team at Leo Burnett in Sydney, Australia, and he has worked internationally in several countries. He authors the popular Influential Marketing Blog and recently signed a deal to publish his first marketing book with McGraw-Hill.

Technorati Tags: social media, social media optimization, Web 2.0, Blogging, Rohit Bhargava, Ogilvy, Buzz, Buzz Marketing

 

Forget Second Life: Build your own World!

Lots of companies are setting up shop in Second Life. But others might prefer to have their own world (just as they have their own website), rather than just an island in someone else's. Multiverse says that companies are starting to create worlds for training simulations, business collaboration, and disaster modeling.

Companies that create their own worlds, or set up new game worlds, will need to find a way to attract visitors—just as they have to draw them to their websites. You have to figure out why you're creating a virtual world, what people will do there, and how you'll promote it. It also would be “fantastic” if Yahoo! and Google wanted to add support for searching for worlds.

Over 10,000 developer teams have registered to use Multiverse’s platform, in part because of its attractive business model. All of its software is free to use. But once developers begin to make money from their worlds—from subscriptions, in-game advertising or sales of in-game items—they pay 10% of their revenue.

One such developer is Edward Castronova, a professor at Indiana University. He is building a world called “Arden,” an idealized portrayal of Shakespearean England. He and his students have spent the past year re-creating medieval Somerset—geography, villages, characters, and an economy—on the Multiverse platform.

Castronova is optimistic about the Multiverse approach, which will provide a choice of hundreds of worlds to explore. Just as the Web makes it possible to create and follow links between a huge variety of websites, an open platform for virtual worlds could allow users to stroll seamlessly through Atlantis, across Mars and all the way to Shakespeare's Arden.

Where is the Buzz? I would love to see the day when there are multiple experiential worlds out there, and I don’t believe we are that far off. As marketers add new Web 2.0 capabilities and build communities, creating their own world might just be the very next innovation on top of all that!

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, Communities, Interactive Marketing, User Generated Content, Second Life, Multiverse, Buzz, Buzz Marketing

 

Links for the week ...

• CMO Study Not Fair To Pro Marketers

  CMOs have been the shortest tenure of its C suite peers

• Wikis in CIO Magazine | Socialtext Enterprise Wiki

  Socialtext does a great job in exploring the Enterprise Wiki

• Some Diggers Seek Alternatives: 6 Interesting Ones

  Looking to make your own Digg on your site - here are 6 possible technologies

• Marketing on the Verge: A Cool Viral Campaign for B2B

  Great example of a B2B company going viral

• How to Measure Engagement, a podcast with Jim Sterne

  Great podcast on what "engagement" means in Web 2.0 terms

 

Herd of Blog Tipping??

In a recent interview with Douglas Karr over at The Marketing Technology Blog, he told me about the blog tipping program he has going on.

Doug tells his readers that whoever posts this - Get your Blogging Tips from Douglas Karr at The Marketing Technology Blog on their blog, and then leaves a note in the comments to tell him where it’s posted, gets a quick little blog review on his site.

Ok, I’m sold!

And here’s why I’m sold. Douglas Karr has a lot of great advice for bloggers and online marketers of technology. I’ve had his blog’s RSS feed in my Google Reader for a few months now. He also shares links to great reads that he’s come across. When he finds the time to do this I will never know!!

Don't miss my upcoming podcast with Doug in which he shares many of his secrets on how to successfully build a blog following quickly and easily.

Tags: Blogging, Douglas Karr, Blog Tipping, Buzz, Buzz Marketing

 

How to Measure Engagement, a podcast with Jim Sterne

It's becoming clear to me that Web 1.0 statistics won’t work in a Web 2.0 world. Measuring “engagement” is rapidly becoming the new “black” in Web stats.

But there is no single button that gives you a clear picture of engagement. Or is there??

Engagement tends to be a much broader endeavor than marketers have had to face in the past. It reflects the need to orchestrate various media channels to capture the most precious of all commodities these days: People's time!

After reading an article in B2B magazine entitled “How much do you really love me?” I decided to conduct an interview with the author, Jim Sterne. I asked him how to measure engagement, and some of his answers may surprise you! Enjoy …



Original Audio Source

About Jim

Jim Sterne is an international speaker on electronic marketing and customer interaction. A consultant to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurs, Sterne focuses his 25 years in sales and marketing on measuring the value of the Internet as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. Sterne has written six books on Internet advertising, marketing and customer service including, "Web Metrics; Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success." Sterne is the producer of the annual Emetrics Summit and is the Founding President of the Web Analytics Association. He was named one of the 50 most influential people in digital marketing by Revolution, the United Kingdom's premier interactive marketing magazine

Tags: Web 2.0, Engagement Metrics, Jim Sterne, B2B Magazine, Crains, Web Analytics Association, Emetrics Summit, Buzz, Buzz Marketing

 

iPhone competition playing dead?

Newswireless.net claims that AT&T has activated 600,000 iPhones, and as a result believes that Apple will hit one million iPhone sales. So you would expect the marketing departments of the iPhone competitors to be cranking up the volume on their products to neutralize some of the iPhone frenzy. So let’s take a look at what these marketers are doing, shall we …

At T-Mobile, they don’t seem to have a competitive product (despite the long warning from Steve Jobs). What they do have is some catchy slogans: "Phones you love. Plans you want. Free shipping on all phones!"

At Sprint, they ask if you want to experience life at SprintSpeed™ and have an exclusive product called the Upstage™ by Samsung in a cool red color.

Motorola has the MOTOROKR 26™, which seems to be targeted to the 18-to-35-year-old-music-loving-men segment. With clean lines and an appealing silhouette, MOTOROKR Z6™ slider is true Motorola high fashion!

The Samsung Black Carbon™ is part of Samsung’s Ultra Edition line, and for good reason. It’s ultra thin, ultra powerful and ultra cool. There’s a lot of good stuff packed into this beautifully sculpted, stylish slim slider, including global GSM quad-band flexibility.

LG has the Born to Shine™, which is a shiny mirrored finished metal body phone. “The moment you place "Shine" on a table, you will notice how the attractive features of this phone catch the attention of those close by. This is a natural human reaction to all things that shine. Its design was inspired by the luxurious shine of metal, creating a simple yet chic look and feel that will undoubtedly make you and your phone stand out from the crowd.” Wow!

Nokia is the only one that I saw, thanks to Giga OM's blog, that has a competitive product. It's the Nokia N800, which supports Skype, has an Adobe Flash browser plug-in for watching videos on the go and supports up to 8GB memory cards. Well, those are three things Apple’s iPhone can’t do!

Where’s the buzz? I am not sure. Frankly, I would have expected a much more aggressive assault on the iPhone given all the warning and flawless drop date by Apple. But I guess I am just way too competitive!

Technorati Tags: Innovation, Apple, iPhone, Giga OM, Nokia, Nokia N800, LG, Samsung, Motorola, MOTOROKR 26, Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, Buzz, Buzz Marketing

 

Measuring Effects of Social Networks

Adidas agency Carat Fusion knew Adidas Soccer was popular: Its year-old MySpace profile has 80,000 friends who downloaded wallpaper and adopted the persona of one of the company’s shoe styles.

What the agency didn’t know was whether that popularity translated into real value. But thanks to a new study it conducted, the agency now knows that the consumer-powered campaign increased purchase intent 78%, brand image 71%, and likelihood to recommend 57%!

Web 1.0 was the ultimate in one-way communication. Publish your web page and wait for the business to just roll in.

Web 2.0 is the start of two-way communication where content is king and the frequency and quality of that content rules. But I believe Web 2.0 actually is taking us to a place where conversations are king, and the stories contained in those conversations will speak volumes.

Just as Sean O’Driscoll of Microsoft said in my podcast interview with him that he "knows the content of every Web page out there – it tells me that a Nikon camera is great, reliable, etc. – so why would I even go there? But what I need it to tell me is how the user feels about using it.” This is the world Amazon started where user reviews and customer feedback will separate the best from the rest.

What's going on here? I believe the brands that will win are the ones whose consumers tell the best stories, rather than the ones who tell their consumers the best stories. It's a subtle difference but an important one. Think about it.

For more on good consumer stories read: Made to Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die (I just read it on vacation and couldn't put it down!)

Technorati Tags: Social Networking, Social Networks, Communities, Sean O'Driscoll, Microsoft, Amazon, Made to Stick, Adidas, Carat Fusion, Buzz, Buzz Marketing