Marketing Sherpa is at it again with their third annual blog awards and this year they’ve added more categories including one for podcasting. Here are this year’s categories:

B-to-B marketing, Search marketing, Affiliate marketing, Email marketing, PR, Advertising, Marketing to a specific, consumer demographic (ie. women, kids), Blogging or podcasting as a marketing tactic, Viral, word of mouth, buzz, social marketing, Small business marketing, Non-English language blogs on marketing, General (multiple topic) marketing, Other specific niche topic related to marketing.Nominations were taken last week and this week there is voting until this Friday. Voting criteria include: Personality, Usefulness & content value, Usability & design and Would you revisit?. For some reason, and I’m not sure why, there are quite a few well known blogs that were not included.

Of course several Business Blog Consulting contributors have been nominated including:

• B.L. Ochman for best PR blog
• John Jantsch for best small business marketing blog
• Dana Vanden Heuvel for best btob marketing blog
• Toby Bloomberg for best blog on general marketing
• Wayne Hurlbert for best blog on general marketing
• Top Rank for best blog on search marketing.

You can vote for all or some of the blogs by rating them. Cast your vote today.

eMarketer reports on a study by Harris Interactive, and sponsored by Makovsky + Company called the “2006 State of Corporate Blogging”.

“The study found that only a small minority of top executives are convinced that corporate blogging is growing in credibility either as a communications medium, brand-building technique or a sales or lead generation tool.”

Only 20% of the executives surveyed report monitoring blogs for mentions of their own company and only 30% reported understanding what an “internet blog” is. This spells a significant opportunity to educate corporate America on the pros and cons as well as the threats and opportunities of blogging for business.

The list of benefits for business blogging is pretty long, but the results of this study show that business blog consultants need to do a much better job of not only evangelizing blogging for corporate America, but providing case studies and practical examples that demonstrate these benefits. Nothing gets a CEO more interested than bottom line numbers.
Details at eMarketer.

JupiterResearch has published a new report, “RSS Comes of Age” that finds 63 percent of large companies planning to syndicate content via RSS by the end of this year. This growth is surprising in contrast to the low “perceived” adoption rate of RSS.

“The primary challenge to greater adoption is a lack of experience with RSS and resources to deploy it,” said David Schatsky, President of JupiterKagan. “However, recent offerings from e-mail service providers (ESP) and RSS service providers are lowering the barrier for feed management, deployment and measurement.”

Reading this summary reminds me of the research report offered by Yahoo and Ipsos Insight (pdf):

“27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.”

So perhaps this explains the use of “percieved” in reference to adoption rates? Many users of RSS don’t realize they are. Regardless, RSS is a fantastic tool for communication and marketing and is one of the most distinguishing features of a blog.

BtoB Magazine and Marqui are hosting a webcast May 18th on blogging for business – practical recommendations and strategic advice. The online event promises to inform you on:

• how blogging can impact your business – from a strategic perspective
• understand the spectrum of blogging activities you can engage in – based on your profile
• practical advice tailored to your company’s readiness and needs

Speakers include Shel Israel (co-author, with Robert Scoble, of the book Naked Conversations); PR professional Lynann Bradbury, Waggener Edstrom’s Sr. Vice President; and Marqui’s business blogging expert Michael O’Connor Clarke.

You can register here.

The Web Marketing Association’s call for entries in the 2006 WebAwards is underway and there is a new category this year for blogs. WebAwards is made up of volunteer Internet marketing, online advertising, PR, and web site design professionals and has been evaluating web sites since 1997. The deadline for entries is May 31 and winners will be announced September 20th, 2006.

To see the kinds of prominent agencies and corporations that are involved, take a look at the list of WebAward winners from 2005.

If you and/or your clients have a great blog, visit the WebAward.org site and enter. It could be a great online and offline promotion opportunity.

Are you curious about RSS industry benchmark metrics and RSS marketing best practices? Would you like to compare your RSS marketing results with those of your peers? Then you will be interested in the 2006 RSS Marketing Survey being conducted by MarketingStudies.net.

From the survey sponsor:

“Participate in the 2006 RSS Marketing Survey, conducted by MarketingStudies.net and aiming to research the RSS marketing landscape, to receive a free copy of the full 2006 RSS Marketing Survey Report, bringing you top RSS marketing best practices and metrics to compare your RSS marketing practices with those of your peers, to improve your RSS marketing results.”

Respondents will get a copy of the overview report including metrics and best practices.

MarketingStudies.net is run by RSS Marketing guru, Rok Hrastnik, who is the author of “Unleashing the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS“. He also publishes a free report, “The Business Case for RSS“.

Rok and I did an interview in March 2005 on using integrated online PR, blogs and RSS for improved results in search engines. After re-listening to that interview, it’s amazing how much can change in a year. At the time, using Technorati tags and social bookmarks was pretty new. Now they are pretty standard fare from the smorgasboard of tactics for blog link building.

If you’re attending the ACCM conference next week in Chicago, you can see Rok Hrastnik in action duing a a session called, “RSS What marketers need to know“. At the same conference, I’ll be speaking on the “15 Sizzling Hot Search Ideas for Merchants” session.

For anyone involved with using RSS for marketing, then be sure to take the 2006 RSS Marketing Survey. There’s an opportunity to share your case study which may be included in Rok’s next book and your experience with RSS may help further this channel for marketing and communication.

As blogs continue to mature as marketing tools, there are an increasing number of “blog optimization” articles and posts appearing. Stephan has written some excellent posts here at BBC on optimizing blogs that have made a world of difference for this blog. It is however, surprising how many of the other blog marketing and optimization resources neglect the importance of inbound links.

To think that researching and placing keywords in the “right places” alone with improve a blog’s traffic is only part of the story. Blogs are simply web sites with special features. Getting web sites to rank well and to engage more traffic involves a large number of variables. The same rules apply to blogs. The difference is that there are unique linking opportunities with blogs that are not common with web sites. These include:

• Trackbacks
• Social book marks
• Guest blogging
• Comments
• Tagging
• Blogroll links

There are also methods to gain links with blogs just as you would a web site:

• Backlink analysis on competing web sites or blogs
• Directories
• Article syndication
• Profiles and bios
• Non-profit contributions
• Press releases
• Testimonials
• Job listings
• Interviews
• Social book marks
• Media coverage
• Buying web sites
• Buying links
• Forums
• Viral marketing – linkbait
• And many more

Not all of these are applicable to blogs, job listings for example, but many are.

As an example, check out the #1 rankings on Google and Yahoo for Online Marketing Blog on the phrase, “marketing blog”.

Another example is Business Blog Consulting with a #1 position on Google and #4 on Yahoo for “business blogging”.

These rankings involve more than just good on-page optimization – they include attention to inbound links. So as you work on getting all of your keyword phrases in all the right places of your blog, understand that on-page optimization is only part of the job. Links can make a night and day difference for your search engine positioning as well as traffic.

For several useful blog marketing tools check out: RSS Buttons, Social Bookmark Tool, Blog Directory List, Article on Blog Optimization.

Over at ClickZ Kate Kaye presents the findings of a recent survey conducted by the Blogads Network that distinguishes blog audiences into four categories: political, gossip, mom and music.

CEO Henry Copeland points out that some political and entertainment advertisers grasp the idea of targeting specific types of blogs based on the unique audiences they reach, many advertisers “don’t get the degree to which these are self-contained universes…This is not a basket of eyeballs; these are very interwoven communities.”

The study also showed that hardly anyone from the four groups listens to podcasts:

“62 percent of music blog readers, 75 percent of political blog readers, 77 percent of mom blog readers and 80 percent of gossip blog readers said they never listen to podcasts.”

Along the lines of advertising, eMarketer reports a study by PQ Media that Blog, Podcast and RSS advertising rose by nearly 200% in 2005 and is expected to grow another 145% in 2006 to reach nearly $50 million.

“Blog, podcast and RSS advertising are being driven by some of the same factors boosting the growth of the overall alternative media sector: continued audience fragmentation, the perceived ineffectiveness of traditional advertising, and the elusive but coveted 18-to-34-year-old demographic,” said Patrick Quinn, president of PQ Media. “[They] have demonstrated an ability to reach younger demographics as well as influentials.”

And then there was this interesting quote about podcasting:

Looking ahead, PQ Media estimates that podcast advertising will be a larger market than blog advertising by 2010, when the blog segment will comprise only 39.7%, or $300.4 million, of overall expenditures. Podcasting, projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 154.4%, is predicted to reach a total of $327.0 million in 2010. These numbers are closely in line with eMarketer’s own projections, which recently put total spending on podcast advertising at a total of $300 million by 2010.

Perhaps Blogads CEO Henry Copeland and PQ Media President Patrick Quinn should get together and compare notes?

This week in Boston the Pubcon conference kicked off with the Boston Marathon and a keynote from Malcolm Gladwell. The conference covered a lot of ground including a session on blogs, podcasting and RSS.

On Tuesday, the “Blogging, Pod Casting and RSS Feeds” session included Dr. Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit, Daron Babin of New Gen Media, Brian Prince of BOTW as well as Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo and Matt Cutts of Google for the Q and A.

The mechanics of blogging and marketing blogs included alternative uses for RSS, blog and feed optimization, plugins, promotion and blog metrics. Babin discussed the pros and cons of podcasting with practical insight based his experience with the explosive growth of WebmasterRadio.FM.

The Q and A brought up the blurring line between what is a blog and what is a web site with the search engine reps defending their performance at indexing blogs. There was also a good question about whether to convert a whole site to a blog platform or to just add a blog to the existing site. Jeremey Zawodny’s response was to pick the right tool for the job based on your needs whether it’s forum software or blog or a content management system.

Here’s more detailed coverage of the Blogs, RSS and Podcasts session.

Over at TechCrunch there’s a good review on several of the major online feed readers written up by Frank Gruber of Somewhat Frank. The post covers: Attensa Online, Bloglines, FeedLounge, Google Reader, Gritwire, News Alloy, NewsGator Online, Pluck Web Edition, Rojo. My Yahoo, Live.com, Google IG and Netvibes were omitted as “virtual desktop applications” and not “heavy duty” RSS readers.

When checking Feedburner stats for one of my own blogs, I was interested to see that the top feed readers in the past 24 hours were: Bloglines, NewsGator Online, Rojo, Firefox Live Bookmarks, BlogBridge, Pluck, RssReader, Google Desktop, Opera RSS Reader and NetNewsWire. There were 50 overall, although I don’t know how many Feedburner will display at any one time.

The RSS reader reviews at TechCrunch were based on criteria in each of the following categories: user interface, feed set-up and discovery, support, mobile access and performance. What are the results? Here’s Frank’s summary:

If you are looking purely for performance, Google Reader and FeedLounge are the fastest in our tests. Bloglines and Rojo are the best choice if you are looking for a feature rich application (and Rojo blows Bloglines away on “web 2.0″ type features).

None, however, yet approach the speed and agility of the best desktop based readers like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

What I think was missing was the Sage plugin for Firefox. I’ve been using Sage for over a year now and it is by far my favorite way to track 200 plus search marketing feed subscriptions. Granted, it does not have all the features of the some of the desktop RSS readers, but that part of why I like it. What’s your favorite RSS Reader?
Update: Shortly after posting this, I received an email from Dave Taylor of Intuitive Life on his dissatisfaction with RSS and in particular, RSS readers. He makes some very good points.  For another view on RSS readers, check out Dave’s RSS reader rant.

Using blogs for public relations is new territory for most traditional PR practitioners. I recently engaged in a Q/A about blogs and RSS with a PR agency specialist that I thought would be interesting to post here. If you’ve been in the business of blogging for any length of time, you’ll see how telling the questions are as to the perception of RSS/blogs and how much room there is for clarification and education.

What are the most popular news feeds to subscribe to?

The beauty of RSS is that there are so many niche, quality sources. However, the most popular feeds overall may not be the best for any one individual. In other words, it depends on the interests of the user. In terms of overall popularity, here are several lists of popular blogs/feeds:

• http://top500.feedster.com/
• http://www.technorati.com/pop/blogs/
• http://bloglines.com/toplinks
  

You can also find feeds using one of the many blog search engines such as: Technorati, Google Blog Search, Feedster or Gada.be.

If a journalist is using an aggregator, which news feeds does it draw from?

Most feed aggregators offer pre-selected feeds to general news sources, but you can add feeds directly from blogs of interest. When you visit a blog, there are often subscription buttons for the various feed readers and aggregators. Clicking on one will subscribe you to that feed. You can also subscribe to feeds from other sources such as search results from Yahoo News, MSN search results or social bookmark sites like del.icio.us.

How can a PR firm submit news to RSS feeds?

When an entry is made to a blog, it automatically places that information to a web page and also as a post to a corresponding RSS feed. It’s possible to create a feed manually using software if a blog is not desired.

Other opportunities to get your news out via RSS include making sure your blog software is configured so that each time a post is made, a “ping� is sent out the the major blog and RSS search engines to notify them you’ve made an update.

If a blogger picks up your release then it will be included in the RSS feed of that blog and all of it’s subscribers. You can also promote a blog through the major blog directories.

Wire services such as PRWeb will automatically offer a form of your press release as part of an RSS feed which can be pinged to RSS search engines.

If your press releases are archived and managed with a blog, then readers (including journalists) can subscribe to the corresponding RSS feed. Increasingly, journalists are prone to pulling news ideas and sources in, rather than relying on the deluge of press releases being pushed to them via email. Making sure the press release RSS feed is added to the main company site in an auto discovery tag enables visitors using a RSS-friendly browser to subscribe without having to navigate to that part of the site with their browser.

Is there any way to find out which news feeds journalists are using (without asking them)?

Sort of. You can gain some insight by visiting journalists blogs and seeing who is listed in their blogroll – which is a list of links to other blogs that they like.

Also, you can see if they have a del.icio.us account. If you could see the sites a journalist has bookmarked it may gain some insight into what’s interesting to them. That’s what viewing their del.icio.us account could do,- if they have one. Here is a screencast by prominent tech journalist, Jon Udell explaining how he uses del.icio.us to track memes and find information for stories. Very insightful for blogger PR.

Tools such as similicious, Alexa and TouchGraph Google Browser are useful for finding similar or related blogs and may prove useful for discovering journalist blogs that focus on particular industries or related topics.

Another useful feature of RSS is to monitor search results as a feed based on a keyword query. If you want to monitor a certain Journalist, publication or topic, you can perform the corresponding keyword query at a Yahoo, Yahoo News, Google News, Google Blog Search, BlogPulse and others and subscribe to the search results in your Feed Reader/Aggregator – sort of like Google Alerts on steriods.

BlogPulse and PubSub offer excellent blog tracking tools and Aaron Wall has an excellent blog post listing trending and tracking tools for the blogosphere and newsosphere.

There’s a lot more to blogger PR than these few questions and answers. But they do provide some insight into what PR firms are thinking and hopefully a few useful tools.

Analysis firm Cymphony and PR agency Porter Novelli have partnered to conduct research into how companies are executing their corporate blog strategy with a research survey called Corporate Blog – Best Practice. If you’re involved with business or corporate blogging, this survey is for you.

Jim Nail of Cymphony emailed me the details:

“The survey is delving into some of the unglamorous but important questions around corporate blogging: who actually manages the blog? Who actually writes the posts? How often? What tools do they use to monitor blogs? How often? There’s lots of talk about the reasons why companies should have blogs and what types of information they should include, but I haven’t seen anything about these practical day-to-day implementation issues that companies need to work out to effectively manage this channel.”

After you take the survey, you have the option of providing contact information to receive a executive summary of the findings and an invitation to a webinar where the full report will be provided.

After getting Jim’s email, I recalled the Blogger Survey conducted by Technorati and Edelman last year that provided some interesting insights focusing on how bloggers interact with companies and PR firms. The Corporate Blog – Best Practice survey focuses more on how businesses use blogs and it will be interesting to compare the results with previous research.

If the name Jim Nail is familiar, I mentioned him in an earlier post on blog buzz from a panel at the New York Search Engine Strategies conference. Jim was at Forrester for 8 years prior to joining Cymphony.

With the growing number of businesses launching blogs, there’s a huge opportunity in the blog metrics and analytics space. Many blogs use free programs with limited functionality and some use the same stats programs as for a regular web site such as Google Analytics.

There is a distinction to be made though, since the measurable outcomes for a content publisher, particularly a blog, are different than for an ecommerce site. Therefore Google Analytics and many other stats programs are not the best fit for blog metrics.

What options for blog focused analytics are out there?

blogbeat is a fairly new hosted blog stats program that caters specifically to the needs of blog content publishers. It plays well with FeedBurner and offers tabs of information separated by: Posts, Visitors, Referrers, Searches and Links. There’s a free trial period and then a small monthly fee.

Google recently purchased Measure Map which also pays more attention to blog-centric information, but they are not adding any new accounts at the moment. I have not been able to try it myself, however Solution Watch offers a rundown and screen shots of Measure Map.

Performancing Metrics stands out as a measurement tool meant for blogs. To get an idea of the features offered, see the post by Ahmed Bilal who reviews Performancing Metrics or the breakdown by Darren Rowse who also includes screen shots.

Performancing Metrics offers ad tracking, real-time blog stats, the ability to track mutiple blogs with one user account, RSS 2.0 feeds of your stats (how cool is that) as well as many other features.

I did a short interview yesterday with the Nick Wilson, co-founder of Performancing where he clarifies the Performancing mission as well as where their blog metrics offering fits within the services being developed for pro bloggers.

Performancing Metrics public beta launched today and is now taking on free accounts.

With some of the recent attention towards blog relations, there’s no question that buzz marketing through blogs and similar consumer generated media is on the rise. Blogs are many things including marketing tools for business and also voices to be heard – consumer voices that provide insight into a marketplace. Availability and ease of communications along with creative tools make consumer generated media (CGM) a force to be reckoned with.

Recently Al Gore’s Current TV announced that they are looking for consumers to create commercials for its commercial sponsors (AdJab). I think you’ll see more of that as marketers and consumers embrace the medium.

At the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York last week, Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ moderated a session including Dave Balter from BzzAgent, Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen BuzzMetrics (Intelliseek) and Jim Nail of Cymfony who presented on creating and measuring buzz using blogs and word of mouth (WOM).

Some interesting stats and insights from the session:

• According to a study by McKinsey, two thirds of the U.S. economy is influenced by word of mouth.
• 50% of negative WOM happens because of a feeling of injustice on behalf on the value of the brand.
• Blogs are indexed at a faster rate and will enter search results more quickly. Brands have an oppotunity to leverage this to acquire more “shelf space” in the search results.
• Just because journalists are not writing about an issue or event, doesn’t mean it’s not being talked about.

Overall it was an excellent session. Here are notes on the entire session on CGM and Blog Buzz.

The New York Times reports on efforts by Wal-Mart and its PR firm, Edelman to influence public opinion by providing information to bloggers. Nothing wrong with that, but apparently a number of the bloggers picking up on the information are posting it word for word and not citing the source.

Pitching blogs is picking up steam as a public relations activity by companies big and small. Wal-Mart’s Mona Williams is quoted on MediaBuyerPlanner.com: “As more and more Americans go to the internet to get information from varied, credible, trusted sources, Wal-Mart is committed to participating in that online conversation.”

While the issue getting attention stems from the way in which bloggers are posting the news and information, it’s Wal-Mart and Edelman that are left to deal with all the less-than-desired blog buzz that will result.

This is just another lesson for corporate PR on the right and wrong way to implement blog public relations and WOM marketing.

Recently there’s been some buzz about Google’s most recent service offering: Google Page Creator. Here’s the lowdown:

Google Page Creator is an easy to use WYSIWYG web page editor. It offers 100 mb of space and requires a Google account. An example url: googleaccountname.googlepages.com/home. Unfortunately, this URL syntax makes it easy to extract Gmail account names since the subdomain in the Google Page Creator sites are Gmail accounts. More on that at Google Blogscoped.

Google Page Creator is focused on making it easy to create static web pages, similar in concept to Geocities and Tripod.

As with Google Analytics, Google Pages launched and is now not taking on any more accounts due to an overwhelming response. Although, a press release on Google’s site says:

“We decided in advance to limit the number of page sign-ups in order to provide users with an optimal publishing experience. Due to extraordinary demand, we recently reached that limit so we have temporarily paused additional sign-ups. We expect to offer sign-ups again very soon.”

Here’s what others have to say about Google Page Creator:

• WebmasterWorld discusses the ease of use as well as accessibility issues similar to Gmail.
• David Utter at WebProNews points out how Google Page Creator takes the wind out of Microsoft Office Live Beta and the interesting message you get if you use another browser besides MSIE or Firefox.
• Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal comments on how Google Page Creator fits in with Google’s plan to acquire and host user content.
• Chris Sherman at Search Engine Watch offers comments from Google Page Creator Product Manager, Justin Rosenstein who says the service was the result of frustration he experienced when friends or family members wanted to create web sites but were stymied by technical challenges. The new Google offering is another in a long line of 20% projects developed by Google engineers.
• Nik Cubrilovic at TechCrunch adds his commmentary and compares to other web page creation and CMS systems.
• Matt Cutts, from Google, offers a great array of screen shots.

Hopefully Google is not starting a trend in underestimating demand and therefore resources/infrastructure for new products and services.

When visiting Technorati.com this morning I noticed Dave Sifry’s mug on the lower right corner promoting a new feature called Technorati Favorites. From the Sifry’s Alerts blog:

“The blogosphere doubles every five months. As I’m writing this, Technorati is tracking 28.4 million blogs. That’s a whole lot of voices. Here at Technorati, we want to make the world of weblogs accessible, searchable, and fun for everyone to explore. Today we’re taking another step in that direction with a brand new feature: Technorati Favorites.”

You can add blogs manually, through the blog finder, through buttons you can place on your own blog, a bookmarklet or whenever you see the star icon on Technorati.com. There’s a search function just for your favorite blogs (sort of like Rollyo) and you can share your your favorites publicly with a static url.

Each Technorati account can add up to 50 of their favorite blogs. You can start now by adding Business Blog Consulting as one of your favorites by clicking this image:

Blogs to Riches – New York Magazine

Technorati adds authority weighting – Scoble
What is authority? – Rubel

State of the Blogosphere Part 2: Beyond Search – Sifry

How to Almost Live on Blogging – Wired

Corporate Brand Blog: Liberator or Oppressor? – Chief Marketer

Steve Rubel has made the big leap from CooperKatz to public relations giant Edelman:

“After five years at CooperKatz, I felt it was time for me to take the next step in my evolution. So I am excited to announce that I will be joining Rick Murray’s team at Edelman (the world’s largest independent PR firm) on February 27 as a Senior Vice President. I will be working out of their New York office.”

He humbly says he’ll be doing pretty much the same thing, just a bigger organization. One big question is, what happens to Micropersuasion? Apparently CooperKatz will rename their blog practice to Cogence and Edelman will not use the Micropersuasion name in any of their service offerings. Steve will be able to continue using the micropersuasion.com domain name. Further details can be found on the Micropersuasion blog.

Congratulations Steve!

The Economist published an article this week on the threats and opportunities of blogs and bloggers, “Corporate reputations – The blog in the corporate machine“.

The Threat:

“The spread of “social mediaâ€? across the internet—such as online discussion groups, e-mailing lists and blogs—has brought forth a new breed of brand assassin, who can materialise from nowhere and savage a firm’s reputation.”

The Opportunity:

“Many big companies have been looking eagerly for ways to tailor their advertising to specific groups of consumers. They have found that web logs and internet discussion groups, which bring together people of similar interests, can help them turn hot links into cold cash. But besides trying to get out their message, companies are also learning that blogs can provide early warning signs of potential problems.”

Steve Rubel was also quoted in the article giving tips on how to use a blog for crisis communications, suggesting the creation of a “lockbox blog”.

Despite the attempt at describing pros and cons of consumer generated media and blogs in particular, the article doesn’t do justice to the many positive marketing, PR and branding benefits. Reputation management is not the only reason companies should pay attention to the blogosphere. Regardless, the article does draw more attention to blogging with an influential audience and that’s a good thing.