Whatever your political persuasion — right, left, or center — the blogosphere is a great place for bloggers to share their political views and make plenty of friends and enemies. We try to follow the conservative, liberal, and everything in between of politics and political blogs/blogging — but only when it intersects with business blogging.
Have a read below of our latest entries on politics and political blogging…
I devote a whole chapter to confronting fear of blogging in The Corporate Blogging Book. Anil Dash makes quick work of the topic with several salient points:
- Blogs are an established technology
- Blogs work with other technology, including email and your website
- A blog can be used anywhere that tools like email and IM are: Inside or outside the company, in one location or around the world.
- There [are] no set rules about how to have a blog. You can start small, with a lot of control over content and community, and expand over time — don’t jump in with both feet if you’re not ready.
His comments are directed at what he calls “normal business people.” Which is an important distinction. Those who read this blog and others that cover the topic of “corporate blogging” may already be convinced that blogs are a new must-use communications channel. But there are lots of folks just beginning to think about this.
Coinciding with Ad:Tech San Francisco April 26-28, the RSS Industry Night Roundtable II aims to assemble a group of the top thought leaders in the RSS industry to discuss key topics that challenge all of us in RSS Advertising. This group will span the disciplines of RSS advertising, RSS manufacture, RSS aggregators and readers, and RSS purveyors and luminaries.
The event is free and seating is limited to 40 people. The event is sponsored by iUpload, PRWeb and Pheedo.
The first RSS Roundtable dinner, brought together some of the pioneers in RSS marketing and services including, Yahoo!, Microsoft, eBay, NewsGator, Simplefeed, Pubsub, Feedburner, Pheedo and Forrester.
The intent of this meeting is to discuss a number of key issues facing our industry and it’s chances for continued success. This meeting will also serve as a vehicle for our key industry partners to discuss mutual challenges and viable solutions, as well as come to a mutual understanding of goals and objectives that we all have for the RSS advertising space. Lastly, we will have an opportunity to collaborate, as leaders in the industry, on how we can increase the rate of RSS adoption among information consumers. Case studies on RSS advertising success will also be presented. Attendees will also be encouraged to share their stories.
Where: San Francisco, 10-15 minute walk from Moscone (location of Ad:Tech). Event location details will be sent to interested parties.
Time: 6:30PM – 9:30PM
Date: April 27 (second day of Ad:Tech)
Cost: Free dinner sponsored by iUpload, PRWeb, Pheedo, cash bar
RSVP:: Send an email to bill AT Pheedo.com with your name, email, telephone and company name/address
Topics:
There are so many topics that we can collectively address as an industry, however, it’s critical that we focus on the important few that address issues of RSS growth and adoption.
We will focus on key industry issues that are preventing business adoption of RSS. Below are the high-level issues that we’ll cover. At the end of the document are additional topics that can be discussed if there is additional time.
–> Lack of standardized RSS metrics
–> Lack of presentable case studies and best practices
–> IRSS mass syndication
–> Actual RSS penetration
–> Rich-media advertising
Attendees:
Ideally, the event will attract around 40 high level leaders from within the RSS and Advertising industries including the following disciplines.
RSS Manufacturer
RSS Advertising
RSS Readers
RSS Services
RSS Convergence
RSS Research
If you are interested in attending, please send an email to bill AT Pheedo.com with your name, email, telephone and company name/address.
So Andy whimped out and asked me to post for him about the official release of his book “BlogWild!“. Geez Andy, it’s a great book! Why wouldn’t you want to write about it? Now I’ve already done a review of both Andy’s and Des’ books, but this is Andy’s day. The book is real, it’s done, it’s even hard cover!
And I really did enjoy it (I still have to try the recipes). Here’s my thing about business books. First they need to be readable. Good prose is key. Humour is important. Next, they need to cut to the chase. Brevity scores major points in my book. Took me less than an hour to go cover to cover (yeah, okay I skimmed the Typepad sections … but I know when I’m fixing Toby’s site I’ll be referring to it). So if you car pool to work or take transit, you might be able to be done and have action steps before you even get to work!
That brings me to my next (and next to last) point … action items. End the chapters with nice easy action items. Something short and tangible that could even be done while you’re on hold or something. Intense action items just don’t work. KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid.
Finally, the anti-hype factor. Yes, blogs are hot. Yes, people are clamoring about them. But there are real business reasons for using the a blog to get your message out. How about saving money! There’s a good one (and it’s in Andy’s book). Andy leverages the hype about blogs to get your attention, but then puts all the advice into anti-hype tone. This is so important. People might get sick of talking about “blogs” per se, but they aren’t going to get sick of being able to write about their business, communicate with customers, and get a good search engine ranking for like $15/mo.
So … Andy’s book is for real. Congrats Andy!. And boy with all the authors on this site I’m getting to feel like the odd man out! Oh well. Who wants to read a book written by a geek anyway.
Tags: BlogWild, Andy Wibbels
I’ve been pretty absent from the Blogosphere lately and if you’ve been wondering why (or maybe you haven’t 😉 ) this is why. For the past month + I’ve been orchestrating the launch of a deal with Lycos to use and promote Qumana’s offline blog editor and our RSS reader QReader (formerly Lektora).
This has been a huge and exciting project for us and, to the best of my knowledge, is the first time a blog platform has chosen to promote a single blog tool for their users. Believe me this is just the first of these kinds of deals we’re working on.
Beyond what this means for Qumana, I think this is the first step towards a great thing for blogs and blogging. Make it easy for “regular people” to publish rich posts, publish to nearly any blog platform, tag their posts, and insert a key-word driven via Q Ads (formerly Adgenta) and I think we are enabling people to write more content, better and leverage it across lots of places.
So, thank you to the whole Qumana and Lycos team. The fun is just starting now!
I did PR for a year, so I mean it in the nicest possible way when I say that, yes, at a certain level it’s a profession of whores. (Really…the nicest possible way. I mean, I’m now in advertising for crying out loud, so I’m certainly not judging!)
To that end, you have to love the literalism of Rellatio: a PR firm founded by ex-porn stars. Naturally, they have a (brand new) blog.
UPDATE:
The more I think about it, the more I’m thinking this is probably a hoax, yet another faux blog. What made me think initially it wasn’t is that the first blog post is dated today, not April 1. But still, it just seems too good to be true. Please let me know if it turns out to be a send-up.
With our recent posts on RSS, I figured I’d weigh in with a quick opinion of my own. I know its heretical for a blogger to say so, but I think RSS is vastly over-hyped. To that end, I’m happy to point out Dave Taylor’s recent post where he points out an obvious truth: most RSS readers suck.
Here’s a brave admission: I don’t use any RSS reader. I haven’t for a couple of years. I tried various ones here and there, but ultimately I come back to the fact that I just don’t have time to keep up with all that information, and I’m an information junkie, blogger and researcher. I don’t know how the rest of you do it. I have simply don’t have an extra hour every day to scan the posts of the 200 blogs I love. I barely have time to read the industry sites that cover my sector (Internet advertising). Basically, I try to scan MarketingVOX daily, and then spend 2-3 hours with email and then, if I have any time left, I try to actually do some work. I’d love to read more blogs, but where do you fit it in? I’m sleeping only six hours a night as it is. I’m a drop-by blog reader; I cycle through my favorites here and there where I have time andbrowse their archives.
But it’s one thing for a blogger to admit this (and those who follow my blogging know that I’m also a catch-as-catch-can blogger, not a daily machine like some people). But what the hell does an ordinary person need with RSS? A blogger, a trend watcher, a journalist, or just info junkies, I can see the point of why they use RSS. But that accounts for the 5% of the population that already uses RSS. Why on earth would my mom need an RSS reader?
Here’s what baffles me most about RSS and the blogosphere: for all the excitement about about RSS as a reader subscription feature, it’s been virtually ignored by blog software tools as a true syndication mechanism. Why isn’t it a standard feature of every blog publishing tool that you can customize the resyndication of your other favorite blogs? E.g., I’d like flexible controls to put in the margin of my blogs up-to-the-minute headlines (or short posts, or long posts) from my favorite five (or 10, or 20) blogs. I tried to do this two years ago and all I found was some university hack. I suspect there are (but don’t actually know of) some more mature widgets out there that let you do this now, as I’ve seen it here and there on other blogs, but it’s certainly not widespread. It would be like blogrolling on crack. Seems like a no-brainer. Is there a WordPress plug-in for that?
(Of course, what blog publishing tools really need is the ability to aggregate posts and publishing them as an email newsletter, but, as Molly Shannon memorably said, don’t even get me started…)
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.
I am not a techie, affectionately know to many as a geek. I don’t know how to code. I can barely get Technorati tags to work. I am simply a marketer who loves this new media 2.0 technology because of what it can do: increase awareness, further reach, build relationships, tell the story my way. In other words for the end results.
One of the techniques that I believe will impact new media word of mouth buzz is RSS – Real Simple Syndication. However, I often find it’s not so simple to explain. If you can’t help people get it .. they’re obviously not going to use it.
Deb Franke, e-Marketing Manager at Emerson Process Management faced the same challenge when she wanted to bring blogs and RSS to the company’s emarketing efforts. Deb knew that the RSS adoption rates were low and needed a to find a way to increase those numbers. She told me that her team created an RSS Starter Kit as a way to help customers with the learning curve. By the way count EPM as the newest F100 blog.
“We hope to help the entire process manufacturing community see the value that we see with RSS and be able to immediately work smarter and faster because we believe RSS can short-cut the learning process. We hope one of the ways they use RSS is to more easily fnd the experts around Emerson who can help address some of the challenges they face on a daily basis.”
EPM is making their RSS Starter Kit available to all. The kit includes a how-to subscribe-to an RSS reader video along with all the who-what-whys of RSS. You may have a different favorite reader but the video does show the process of how easy it is to get started and provides clear answers to the basic who-what-why questions.
If you really want to jazz up a news aggregator and use it as a marketing tool – BuzzHop will create a branded reader with the elements of your logo.
Diva Markeing has examples of companies using RSS as a website strategy.
It was bound to happen. An A-list blogger or two decides to throw in the towel. Enough blogging is, er, enough. But why? Read on…
Two well-respected bloggers have announced their retirement recently. One is the irascible Dave Winer, creator of the RSS format and a blogger for almost a decade:
On March 13th he wrote in Scripting News:
I can do it, folks, I have already, in some sense, stopped one of my rivers, and soon, probably before the end of 2006, I will put this site in mothballs, in archive mode, and go on to other things, Murphy-willing of course…
Note his “I can do it” assertion, as if he’s already hearing the “No, you can’t!” chorus that did, in fact, spring up from the bloggerati upon his announcement.
Another is David Allen, best-selling author of Getting Things Done. On March 15th he wrote: I’m halting my personal blog for now…
‘Twas a noble experiment, 270 Entries and 1,529 Comments later, and it was great for me to experience this medium from the inside out, in my limited way. I’d probably continue it in some form, if I didn’t have a multitude of other things to do that are taking priority…
Get the inside story of how and why these two A-listers decided to retire from the blogosphere. They cite the time factor and re-ordering priorities as the main reasons. And one talks about wanting more “privacy.
For those watching the world of blog publishing ventures, the latest one to watch launched this week, DealBreaker.com. This is first in what promises to be a series of blog sites, a la Gawker Media. And speaking of Gawker, what’s most exciting about DealBreaker, an invective gossip blog about Wall St. and high finance, is that it heralds the return to the blogosphere (in a real way) of the first true It Girl of blogging, Elizabeth Spiers, Gawker.com’s original editor.
The new blog’s introductory post promises:
[H]ere’s what you will find: posts about the precise size of the guitar collection on Paul Allen’s
yachtspaceship, posts about the disparity between what Aswath Damodaran thinks is the dark side of valuation and what we think is the dark side of valuation (hint: high-quality cocaine), banker body counts (thank you, John Mack), interviews with people about how much money they make and whether they sometimes buy things just so they can throw them away, sightings of Eliot Spitzer, pitchbook origami, fun with league tables, and so on. And occasionally we’ll break news or do something that’s otherwise useful. Which will be entirely an accident. We apologize in advance.
Just out of beta, the site already appears to have legit ads from the likes of Universal Studios, CFO.com and others.
During her run as editor of Gawker, it would be fair to say that Spiers was overexposed as a media darling postergirl for blog hype. But it was all well deserved, as her genius for short-form snark remains virtually unmatched in the blogosphere before or since. (Full disclosure: she and I are good friends, and I’m secretly in love with her. Oops, too much disclosure…)
After Gawker, she went on to join the staff of New York Magazine, writing for the print magazine and its short-lived blog The Kicker. From there, she ran the editorial department of the journalism resources site MediaBisto for a year or so, including launching a suite of media-watching blogs there. Both jobs honed her journalism and management chops, I’m sure, but they didn’t showcase her preternatural blogging talents to their fullest. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that DealBreaker matches the brilliance of her original (and my favorite) blog, Capital Influx, which, like DealBreaker, obsessed a lot on Wall Street misdeeds (as well as Christopher Hitches, Jonathan Franzen and some other pet interests). Or at least I hope it gives Gawker a run for its money in the industry-niche gossip rags sector.
Investment partners with Spiers in the new ventures (which has a yet-to-be-announced publishing company name) are Justin Smith, president of The Week Magazine, and Carter Burden, CEO of web hosting company Logicworks. Spiers is also at work on a novel And They All Die in the End, a satire about the world of Wall Street, to be published by Riverhead (Penguin) in 2007.
I just realized this site recently passed its second anniversary (born sometime in March 2004). Hooray for us!
[Skip to NEW UPDATE]
You want me to write about your stupid company, Greg? Okay, here you go. (Let this be a lesson to the rest of you!)
From: gregs@[mystupidcompany].com
To: Rick Bruner
Date: 30 Mar 2006 15:02:28 -0500
Subject: [mystupidcompany].COM = Restaurant Finder
Well here is my question………I need to get my name out there…I read your Blog it is about websites which is what [mystupidcompany].COM is. I need people that are internet savy to look at my site.
Do your readers eat out? If the answer is yes then why not right a small blurb about [mystupidcompany].com
Let me know how to aproach guys like you in the future…….so that I can better prepare myself.
Thank you for the guidence, also let me know what to put in the title.
Have a great day
Greg
—–Original Message—–
From: Rick Bruner
Sent: Thu, 30 March 2006 19:12:01
To: gregs@[mystupidcompany].com
Subject: Re: *****PLEASE READ****Not that I want to get into a big thing over this, but you don’t know me, your business has nothing to do with anything I write about, and your subject line is obnoxious. I realize you’re not harvesting addresses and sending out a million emails in a batch, but anyway it’s not what I would call best-practice PR.
On 30 Mar 2006 12:26:57 -0500, gregs@[mystupidcompany].com wrote:
>
> I was not spaming I was asking………….thank you for your time.
>
> Have a great day
>
> Greg S********
>
> By the way I thought it was cool how you give people your email
>
> Rickbruner at gmail dot com
>
> Genious if it is okay with you I will strat doing thesame thing.
>
> Again sory to bother you have a great day
>
> greg
>
> —–Original Message—–
> From: Rick Bruner
> Sent: Thu, 30 March 2006 16:48:01
> To: gregs@[mystupidcompany].com
> Subject: Re: *****PLEASE READ****
>
> No, I won’t, as this has nothing to do with anything I write about,
> and you should have more creative ways of getting PR than spam.
>
> On 30 Mar 2006 11:43:35 -0500, gregs@[mystupidcompany].com wrote:
>
> > Hello Rick my name is Greg S******** was wondering if you would be able to write about [MYSTUPIDCOMPANY].COM
> >
> > http://www.[redacted-url].com/subscribe/
> > http://www.[another-redacted-url].com/article.php?id_articol=134
> >
> > We are going through first round of funding starting June 15.
> >
> > Thank you so much
> > Have a great day
> >
> > Greg S*****
> > 847 – ### – ####
> >
>
You have a great day, too! And do me a favor and lose my email address.
UPDATE:
I just couldn’t leave well enough alone and had to check my email trash folder (I had set up a filter on Greg’s email to auto delete any further emails, but something told me he was going to write again…)
See that the problem with guys like you………you spend time writing something what you wrote……….if you would of wrote something nice I would of given you 100,000 shares of my company.
But you waste your time………doing what you did………………
—–Original Message—–
From: Rick Bruner
Sent: Thu, 30 March 2006 20:11:21
To: gregs@[mystupidcompany].com
Subject: Re: [MYSTUPIDCOMPANY].COM = Restaurant Finderhttp://www.businessblogconsulting.com/2006/03/pr-case-study-how-not-to-email-a-blogger.html
I’ll be blocking your email address now, so please just move on with your life.
All the best,
Rick
I swear I’m not making this shit up!
PS: If anyone wants to take Greg up on his offer for 100,000 shares of his stupid company for a blog post, paypal me $1 at rickbruner at gmail dot com and I’ll send you the name of his firm.
PPS: I think I accidentally saved this post to draft form last night (still getting the hang of WordPress), so sorry it disappeared for 10 hours.
You know what “ego surfing” is, right? It’s when you look for references to yourself on various Web sites, in search engines, etc. What caught my attention today in this regard is that doing a wee bit of ego surfing on both MSN Search and Google really highlights to me the fundamental difference between the two search engines and shows why Google is still the clear market leader in this space.
Wait, don’t run away yet. The issue isn’t the search results, but rather the ability of the search engine to intelligently target advertising on the results page. If you do a random search, which site produces the best, most relevant, most contextually useful advertising and “sponsored links” for you?
I content – and demonstrate – that in this one instance, at least, Google far outshines MSN, with two out of the three matching adverts being very good matches, while MSN has a far worse result, with only two of its seven ads even remotely relevant for the search.
You can read more and see the specific advertisements here: Google still beats MSN on ad targeting.
Recently I wrote a post on optimizing your TypePad blog titles for the search engines. Today I read a well-documented article called Search Engine Optimization for Blogs by Bill Hartzer.
In it he discusses techniques to use if WordPress or Movable Type is your platform of choice. He also has some good information on promoting your blog. (Although, how he forgot Stephan Spencer’s fantastic collection of WordPress plug-ins I’ll never know!)
If you’re using your blog as a lead-generation tool be sure to check this article out.
Last Friday I spoke at the annual conference for NAPO: The National Association of Professional Organizers, on the topic of “How to Plan, Build and Promote a Business Blog.”Since this is a constantly evolving seminar for me, there were significant changes from what I submitted in January and what I presented in March. I posted the handouts to my Web site for any attendees who wanted to download them.
I then decided to open that up to anyone who wanted to download and review the handouts. The target audience for the seminar is entrepreneurs and small business owners, but there’s a lot of information in there for anyone.
The download is free, but an email registration is required. (1MB, PDF.)
Since my list of WordPress plugins was so well-received, I’ve got another list to share. This time it’s my favorite Firefox extensions…
Here’s a tip that isn’t quite an extension, but over time it’s a huge time-saver. And it works in IE too.
This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list of useful Firefox extensions. Check out the new FirefoxFacts ebook for a bigger list of recommended extensions and tips for Firefox. And if there’s an extension you feel should be added to the above list of favorites, please leave me a comment!
When I started riding motor bikes some years ago, for commuting and occasional touring, I was made aware by other riders that Ducati owners were a special breed of enthusiasts. And the machines themselves were clearly serious racing bikes, which I usually saw disappearing very quickly out in front of wherever I was.
I don’t know how many Ducati owners are blogging just now, but my hunch is that the number is about to rise with the news that Federico Minoli, the corporate turnaround man who took the reins at the Italian company some nine years ago, is one of the newest CEO bloggers on the block. Two weeks ago, Minoli and his company launched Desmoblog. The company announced at the time that the blog would tell what is happening at Ducati and in the world of its fans, as well as decisions about new products, Ducati events, business strategies, ‘behind the scenes’ news from the race track and more.
In his welcome to the blog, Minoli says:
This new space online gives me a new way to communicate with colleagues, fans and bikers about my life, my experience with Ducati, the company, the motorcycles and of course Ducati Corse (link added).
The blog and the company website design are seamlessly integrated, and the Desmoblog is bi-lingual, in English as well as Italian.
The announcement of the blog on the Ducati website presents the blog as providing for a dialogue directly between blogger and readers and offers the opportunity of sharing ‘the fever for Ducati’, receiving frank comments from fans and replying directly.
Podcasts are also foreshadowed.
The many comments on the Desmoblog site in just two weeks, some in English, some in Italian, suggest that the ‘Ducatisti’ tribe has taken up the challenge with gusto, as for example in the comments on Minoli’s After the race March 11 post from Daytona.Â
Summary: WordPress.com offers free, instant blogging but lacks the full features of the WordPress platform.
A lot of clients are asking me about WordPress and how it stacks up to other blogging platforms like Blogger or Typepad. Only problem is: There are two types of WordPress: WordPress.org and WordPress.com.
If you go to WordPress.org you’ll see the site for the WordPress blogging platform. WordPress is an open source software project. Open source software is developed by a global community of programmers – anyone can contribute to an open source software project. Further, open source software is free to download, free to install and free to tweak as you see fit (there’s a lot more to open source than that, though). WordPress.org is for information about software – the blogging platform called WordPress.
WordPress.com is a hosted version of the WordPress platform. WordPress.com, like Blogger, offers anybody not just the software to manage their blog, but also the server space to host it. WordPress.com uses a slightly scaled down version of the WordPress platform – a version called WordPress MU, intended for multi-user sites with up to thousands of blogs. WordPress.com is intended to give interested bloggers a place to get started, the software to blog, the space to host and a flavor for the full-scale WordPress software that they could install on their own servers if they so choose.
WordPress.com is an instant solution much like Blogger. There’s no installation and no fees to pay – you simply sign up and start blogging. But WordPress.com lacks the full features of a blogging platform that you’ve had installed on your own server for full control over the functionality and look and feel of your blog. Plus, WordPress.com does not offer domain mapping yet so your WordPress.com blog’s URL is always going to look like something.wordpress.com.
WordPress.org is where you go to download the full-scale WordPress blogging platform that you install on your own web server for full control and functionality. To complicate things further, many webhosts offer 1-Click Install of WordPress so you don’t have to go through too much geeky rigamarole.
In retrospect perhaps they should have called WordPress.com WordPress Lite to help differentiate it. It can be a bit confusing. Usually folks call WordPress.org simply WordPress and then differentiate when they are referring to WordPress.com.
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:
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.
I was asked via email by a reader whether a company’s blog should live at blog.mycompany.com or mycompanyblog.com.
If the blog will get more links by being at an arm’s length from the corporate site, then I’d have it on a totally separate domain.
For example, if a life insurance company had a blog about health and wellness at www.stayinghealthy.com, I would expect that to garner many more links from the blogosphere than one at blog.lifeinsuranceco.com.
This may seem like an oversimplification, since I haven’t discussed the branding implications, but I believe the “link-ability” of the blog is the key ingredient for long-term success with a corporate blog. Everything else to me is peripheral.
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Business Blog Consulting is a site devoted to demonstrating how effective weblogs can be for communicating with customers and marketing to new customer prospects. You will find here lots of examples of business and corporate blogs, as well as resources to help you learn more about the topic.
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Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing
Andy Bourland of Bourland.com
Rich Brooks of Flyte
Paul Chaney of Blogging Systems Group
Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus
Josh Hallett of Hyku
Tris Hussey of Larix Consulting
Lee Odden of TopRank
Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts
Dave Taylor of Intuitive Life for Business
Jim Turner of One by One Media
Dana VanDen Heuvel of BlogSavant
Des Walsh of Thinking Home Business
Debbie Weil of WordBiz and BlogWrite
Jeremy Wright of Ensight
Rick E. Bruner is co-author and principal analyst on this report
Our own contributor Jeremy Wright is the author of this book
"The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right" with a foreword by GM's Bob Lutz..and the rest by Debbie Weil.
Produced by contributor to this site Debbie Weil. Rick E. Bruner is one of the featured experts in this report
This report is written by contributor to this site BL Ochman
I guess this was inevitable
