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…
Have you ever had problems explaining an abstract concept to someone in your business or personal life?
Perhaps you were attempting to sell an intangible product or explaining a technique for achieving a personal goal. To your dismay, the person receiving the information was just not getting the point somehow. The explanation you provided made no sense to them.
Enter the analogy.
You have heard of analogies, right? They are a way of comparing an unfamiliar abstract idea with an already known mental image. It’s like painting a picture in the listener’s mind. That’s of course an analogy too, as you may have guessed. I happen to like making analogies; and for more reasons than just explanations.
Analogies are very important in sales and marketing situations. The item or service being offered to the prospect may not fit into their existing knowledge base. The product or service might be entirely new to them. As such, the prospect needs a familiar frame of reference, from which to make the final buying decision.
Let’s take a real life situation.
This morning, I was discussing SEO with a client who was somewhat new to search engines and search engine optimization. Instead of discussing abstract and completely unfamiliar terms such as title tags, keyword phrases, and alt attributes, to name only a few, I used an analogy.
I described SEO as moving furniture into an empty house. The vacant home represented the website as it exists now. Unloaded into the house is the moving van full of furniture and other household items. As with moving house, the heavy lifting has to be completed before you can do anything else. Once the furniture is in the new premises, then curtains, fancy bedspreads, and fine china and silverware can be added. The initial placement is good, but you think that you can make the home even nicer with some changes.
Of course, after examining the results, it’s decided that the sofa would be better suited to another wall, and the kitchen table would be best on the other side of the room. After a number of changes in layout and additions, the final result is much better than before. So too with SEO. As with setting up your home in the best possible manner, SEO takes some experimentation and testing as well.
Sales and marketing aren’t the only way that analogies can be used to aid your business success. Making connections, between seemingly unrelated things, helps to find creative solutions to everyday and long term business problems as well.
What the utilization of analogies and comparisons does is to change the frame of reference and to force thinking in new and interesting ways. If a person is only thinking of the problem in its own terms, the number of possible solutions is very limited. By making analogies, and forced comparisons, the opportunities for new and creative solutions is multiplied many times over.
Use some analogies in your business and everyday life. Not only will your potential and current customers and clients understand your products and services better, so will you. By making comparisons and connections between your business and another known framework, the possibilities for creative thought and ideas increase exponentially.
Let an analogy go to work for you and your business today.
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.
What follows below are some of my favorite WordPress plugins and why. Many of them I have in common with Cavemonkey’s excellent Top Ten WordPress Plugins list. Here’s my list, in no particular order:
What are your favorites? Did I miss any important ones?
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.
Wells Fargo is offering a sneak preview of the blog it launches tomorrow as part of the bank’s commemoration of San Francisco’s Great Fire & Earthquake of 1906. Guided By History, as the blog is called, is a group blog. It’s a great idea for an event-specific (and time-limited) blog. And yes, Wells Fargo appears to be the first Fortune 500 financial services company to launch a public blog.
I counted 10 contributors on the About page, including Wells Fargo’s new president and COO, John Stumpf. He’s made one of the first entries, titled A Ride Through History. It’s a bit too polished to qualify as “bloggy” in style but it’s pretty interesting. The 1906 earthquake and fire left half of San Francisco’s residents homeless and destroyed 490 city blocks, including Wells Fargo’s headquarters…
Six Apart, creator of MovableType and TypePad, has rececently acquired SplashBlog, “a mobile photo blogging application and service that allows users to instantly publish photos from a camera phone to a blog.”
According to the Six Apart press release,
The addition of the SplashBlog team and the rich mobile blogging technologies they have developed will help assure that our users will continue to have the best user experience and most advanced features available when they blog from mobile devices and cell phones.
Just going to prove that there’s no run-on sentence like a press release run-on sentence.
Others also weigh in:
Today, less than 48 hours away from doing a presentation about business blogging at an Australian Marketing Institute seminar in Sydney, I am rather pleased to see that the lead story in the national newspaper The Australian’s IT Business segment, is ‘Blogging the Brand’, by Chris Jenkins. Neat: I can expect that a reasonable number of my marketing industry audience tomorrow night will have read or at least skimmed this piece on corporate blogging and will be ready with some good, challenging questions. It helps too, that the article comes close on the heels of a page 3 story last weekend in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Online buying frenzy as big business swoops on sites’, by highly respected journalist Tom Burton, about people making money from the web: about half of the article focuses on people making money from blogging.
Back to the article in The Australian. I found it quite informative, not so much for me in terms of theories and broad observations about corporate blogging, but more because of comments from the trenches. I was particularly interested in the comments from Paul Crisp, ‘new media project leader’, responsible for the blogging operation at our major telco, one of Australia’s biggest corporations, Telstra, through its Now We Are Talking site, which has blogs by staff members as a feature.
Crisp acknowledges that Telstra had no Australian corporate blogging models to draw on, so had to adapt what it could learn from studying what US-based corporations were doing, such as Boeing, Microsoft and General Motors. He observes that Telstra does not need blogs to ‘push out’ information’, but sees blogs as giving the corporation a way to plug into public feedback (interesting, given that probably every Australian over the age of 15 has a Telstra story and they are not all positive!). He also sees blogs as allowing Telstra to put a different face to its message.
‘If you want to hear from the rank and file of the company, to try and put a face to the people that make this big company work and get their perspective and the challenges they face and what turns them on, here’s an opportunity to get it directly from the horse’s mouth.’
I took some time out to check out the blogs at Now We Are Talking. I had honestly expected them to be rather bland. They aren’t, and I’m impressed. I’m especially impressed because employees are writing about potentially contentious issues and there are comments on the blogs from the general public (I am so not a conspiracy theorist that I do believe they are from the general public!). Â
The article also quotes Aussie Microsoft blogger, Frank Arrigo, author of the excellent Frankarr blog. On the subject of risk, which is invariably given prominence in the occasional Australian media story about corporate blogging, Frank observes succinctly:Â
“There is always a risk, but it’s no different to me being at the pub and bitching about my job and there is a journo next to me,’ he says.
And with eminent good sense, it seems to me, Frank goes on to say that if he doesn’t want to see something appear on the front page of one of the national dailies, he doesn’t blog it.
(Note that the link above to the story in The Australian is a weblink but not a permalink and regrettably there is no link available for the Sydney Morning Herald piece.)
Recently I was meeting with a couple of blogging clients and one asked me, “How do I get the most out of Technorati?”
I thought that was a great question, and worthy of a few posts. Although I’m sure there’s more than what I’ve written below, this is a good start for any one who’s interested in driving more traffic to their blog and finding like minded business bloggers. I’ve even included a couple of how-to movies.
If you have any Technorati specific questions or issues leave a comment below, and I’ll try and add them to this list.
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:
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.
Malcolm Gladwell, author Blink and The Tipping Point, (two of my favorite books that I read last year,) has started blogging over at http://gladwell.typepad.com.
This only makes sense, since Gladwell has long been providing bloggers, especially business bloggers, with fodder for their posts.
What I love about Gladwell (and Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner and Seth Godin) is how he makes you reflect on your own world view. You won’t always agree with these guys, but it does cause you to examine your own preconceptions that you might be holding onto out of sheer laziness.
BTW, I had never visited Gladwell’s home page before today, but I’m pretty sure he stole the idea from us.
Welcome to the blogosphere, Malcolm. Glad to hear your voice in the first person!
Blog posting errors are rarely discussed in blogging circles. They are a bit of a dirty little secret, you might say.
You know the errors that creep into your blog posts. We all make them at one time or another. Minor blog posting mistakes may be spelling errors; incorrect or misleading photographs; wrong names of people or blogs; links that are missing, don’t work, or go to the wrong blog; or simply neglected pings.
More important blog post problems involve knowingly posting incorrect information; predictions or opinions that turned out differently than claimed or expected; failure to cite and link references to blogs or static websites; or claiming someone else’s ideas as your own in the form of plagiarism. These, of course, are only a few examples of the errors that can creep into your blog postings.
The question then arises as to what to do about the mistake. The all too obvious answer is to return to the problematic post and change history. Sometimes correcting a blog error is acceptable, and even the proper thing to do. For example, any non-working or misdirected links can and should be repaired as a service to the linked blog. If an intended link was overlooked, and missed in the posting, it’s good to return to the post and create the missed link. The cited blogger’s traffic and SEO linking benefits shouldn’t be reduced because someone messed up a link to their blog.
Spelling errors are the source of some controversy among bloggers. While some bloggers believe that spelling errors and typos should be left intact, I see no problem with going back and fixing those proofreading problems. This is especially important if the typo is a misspelling of someone’s name. There is one provision on this recommendation, however. Only the typo can be corrected. No other changes can be made to the post that might change its meaning or intention.
For more serious errors, including incorrect information, the original post must not be altered to change history. Instead, the blogger has a two choices. One option is to make the correction, apology, or retraction in the blog comments section for that post. A second option is to write another post that retracts, corrects, or apologizes for the previous error. The new post should, however, quote the problem area of the previous post, and also link back to the previous post. The link back to the old post is essential.
Posting without crediting sources, or claiming their work as your own, is not acceptable blogging practice. While some would argue that “other bloggers do it”, that is no excuse. Maintaining good blogging technique helps everyone in the blogging community. If bloggers want their writing to receive respect, then proper”>http://www.penmachine.com/techie/corp_weblog_manifesto.html”>proper credit must be given to others. Linking to, and properly citing your sources, is simply good blogging practice. It should be practiced by everyone.
In most cases of blog posting errors, common sense will dictate the proper course of action. If fixing a post or link helps another blogger, then it’s an acceptable blogging practice.
The best idea, of course, is to always proofread your posts before clicking the Publish button.
Not making the error in the first place means it doesn’t have to be corrected.
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Scott McNealy has a terrific piece in today’s Wall St Journal, Software Hardware that should have all of us thinking, then joining the demand to keep our documents open.
No one would argue that content you create belongs to anyone but you. But, in fact, it doesn’t.
That’s the dirty little secret behind much of the software people use today. In business, in government, in schools and in homes all around the world, we entrust our work to software applications: word processors, spreadsheets, presentation programs and all the rest. And, too often, that’s where we lose control of our own words and thoughts — simply on account of the way we save our documents. Because we tend to store information in formats that are owned and managed by a single dominant company, in a few short years we may no longer be able to access our files if the format is “upgraded.” Or we may be required to buy a new expensive version of the software just to access our own thoughts.
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There is now an open, international standard for common personal productivity applications — spreadsheet, presentation and word-processing programs — called the OpenDocument Format (ODF). Approved by an independent standards body, ODF has the backing of a broad community of supporters including consumer groups, academic institutions, a collection of library associations including the American Library Association, and many leading high-tech companies, but no single company owns it or controls it. (A “standard” created and controlled by a single company is not a true standard.) Any company can incorporate the OpenDocument Format into its products, free of charge, and tear down the barriers to exit.Imagine being able to open any email attachment, read it and make changes, even if you don’t have the exact program it was created in. That’s the kind of interoperability the OpenDocument Format is designed to foster.
If this standard is to become a reality, we must insist on it. In the U.S., Massachusetts has been leading the way with a mandate that all software purchased by the commonwealth comply with ODF. Globally, 13 nations are considering adopting it. The reason is simple. The data belongs to the people, not to the software vendor that created the file format.
If you don’t think this is an issue, take a look at what happened after Hurricane Katrina. People needing emergency services information found that some government Web sites could only be accessed from a single brand of Web browser. Important, publicly-funded information — in some cases life-saving information — was unavailable unless you used that specific brand. That’s like being told you can’t use the highway because you aren’t driving a Ford truck. It seems to me that this is one of those times when a government mandate makes sense — so that we can all use the road and choose what car we want to drive.
Here are the applications that support the OpenDocument Format (ODF). You won’t see any Apple or Microsoft programs there.  Time for all of us to demand accessibility to our own content.
Think ahead five years, ten years. Don’t you want to be able to read what you wrote today?
No doubt I wasn’t the only Australian blogger to hope that the ‘To Blog or Not to Blog’ segment on the Nine Network’s Business Sunday TV program, February 26, would have something worthwhile to show and say about the state of the Australian business blogosphere. Nothing too profound, mind you. Screened at the decidedly non-peak hour of 8.30am every Sunday in the ratings period, the program is not usually very mentally taxing. In the event, it was quite interesting for me, although I can’t help wondering what corporate executives would have made of it, in terms of the usefulness and desirability of their companies establishing a blog.
There is a link here to the transcript of the program. That is regrettably not a blog permalink, so it will presumably only stay on the web for a limited time. A handy resource for anyone reading the transcript is the post with links to the sites of the people interviewed: this was put up by one of the main interviewees, dedicated Microsoft Aussie Blogger Frank Arrigo, and is a blog permalink.
As the transcript shows, Frank and others, including Trevor Cook, had some very useful comments to make. But what I found a real downer was that the last two people interviewed, before a final comment from Frank, were Australian lawyers from global partnerships, emphasizing the downside risks of corporate blogging and explaining why their firms weren’t blogging. No serious discussion of risk management, just a ‘flick to the too-hard basket’ approach.
Knowing from experience how what is actually said in interviews from such programs can become scarcely recognizable when the program is aired, it may well be that the lawyers – both very knowledgeable in the IT space – actually contributed a more nuanced commentary. Snip! Sorry (not really) about that!
Actually, the final comment from Frank was pretty neat, pointing out that corporates actually can’t afford not to be in the blogging space. But my own feeling is that half-awake corporate execs chomping on their breakfast toast at 8.55am or so would have been inclined to be more influenced by the do-nothing-new, cautious words we heard from the attorneys.
Of course, one Sunday morning television program cannot tell the whole story. I’m tremendously keen for business blogging to kick off in Australia and I’m optimistic about that happening soon. I’ve been encouraged in this by indications such as the invitations I have to present at various events this month and next and then later in the year.
It’s quite possible however that not a lot has changed since Trevor Cook’s excellent State of Australian Blogging post five months ago:
Overall, blogging in Australia lags behind the US and probably behind some Asian and European countries. Why? One reason is that we usually do. Australia’s population is made up of a few thousand people who have a genuine global view and who are very much at the cutting edge but the bulk of the population are followers of international trends (we’ll try something when it becomes the rage overseas).
Trevor concluded that post with an expression of optimism about how things would be this year. So I find it sobering that a conference on blogs, wikis and rss, at which both Trevor and I are scheduled to speak, has now been re-timetabled from the end of this month to a date six months hence.
Are we there yet? I don’t think so.
Hello from the Search Engine Strategies conference in NYC. Tomorrow I’ll be speaking on search engine optimizing blogs and RSS feeds. If you recall a post of mine from last month, I went into some detail on some tweaks I had made to this blog to make it more search engine optimal. I thought I’d continue where I had left off, with some more handy-dandy blog SEO tips:
If you want proof this stuff really works, and that it’s not hard to do, my 14-year-old daughter in 2 days created her first site, a blog, using WordPress, about Neopets. She wisely named it the The Ultimate Neopet Cheats Site, after doing the research (okay, I helped her) to find that “neopet cheats” was a pretty popular term (albeit not as popular as “neopets cheats”) and not very competitive. Lo and behold, just 2 weeks after launching the site, it’s already on page 2 in Google and Yahoo for “neopet cheats” and climbing! And that was just with one link from my blog.
UPDATE: You can now download my Powerpoint slides from Search Engine Strategies on optimizing your blog and RSS feeds. Also, by the way, my daughter’s blog is now on page 1 in Google for her targeted term. 🙂
UPDATE 2: My daughter has now moved her Neopets Cheats site off of WordPress.com because of their policy of not allowing the posting of AdSense ads.
UPDATE 3: My daughter now has a Swicki on her blog which brings in additional AdSense revenue.
If you’ve been in this industry as long as I have (and what’s that? five minutes?) you’re probably dead tired of mainstream media articles that either promote blogging as the next coming or dismissing it as so five minutes ago.
Jason Fry of the Wall Street Journal has an article today called “Blog Epitaphs? Get Me Rewrite!” (Read it quickly; this link will expire faster than a Mission Impossible recording.)
One of my favorite lines:
My bet: Within a couple of years blogging will be a term thrown around loosely — and sometimes inaccurately — to describe a style and rhythm of writing, as well as the tools to publish that writing.
Although I’ve been saying for a while that blogs will probably become invisible in the future, I prefer Fry’s prediction that it will be a “style and rhythm of writing;” it makes it sound like jazz: full of improvisation and promise.
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:
Hopefully Google is not starting a trend in underestimating demand and therefore resources/infrastructure for new products and services.
If there’s one vital rule for business blogging, it’s don’t do something so dumb — so alien to the true spirit of blogging — that it’s just going to get you pilloried in the blogosphere. Of course, making fun of bad corporate blogging is so much like shooting fish in a barrel I rarely bother anymore, but I can’t resist with the new GuinessBlog.
Allow me to digress for a moment. At my workplace, a group of us have started a photo club. We meet once a week and discuss techniques and critique each others’ work. A few club members are real experts, including one guy I’ll call Vince (since that’s his name). Vince is a great photographer and a font of knowledge on the subject. He also is not inclined to sugar coat his feedback. He’s become famous for offering the following advice when someone asks how they could have made a picture better: “Don’t take that picture.” What he means is, the photographer took the landscape shot at midday, when the light was invariably going to be unflattering (much better to take all outdoor shots in early morning or late afternoon light, I’ve learned), or the photographer’s lens just wasn’t appropriate for the effect they were going for, or there was no good way to get an angle that wouldn’t include the light pole blocking the cathedral or whatever. The point is, sometimes when you are striving for quality, you just have to recognize that you can’t achieve what you want due to circumstances beyond your control.
So, back to Guiness’s crappy blog. Actually, Hugh, where I first learned of the blog, assures us it’s a good blog. Maybe so, but I’ll never know. That’s because Hugh lives in London and I live in NYC, and due to some legal mumbojumbo, Guiness has decided to put a screener page that blocks users from geographies outside of Great Britain. WTF?? Sure, I could go back to the form and fill it out again and lie about where I’m located (though I suspect it would remember me from my cookies, as I checked yes to “remember me”; and of course I’m clever enough to know how to delete that cookie selectively), but I really can’t be bothered. Like I care that much about Guiness’s blog. (A large number of commenters on Hugh’s post agree with me.)
Oh, I’m sure it has something valid to do with liquor export regulations that has their lawyers’ panties all in a twist, and possibly for some good reason. But in that case, I’d counsel, “don’t take that picture.” If you can’t do a blog right, better not to blog at all. Otherwise you risk a bunch of nasty blog posts calling you a clueless git, like this one.
Call this post “an observation” about comments & trackbacks. – Guy Kawaski recently posted about The Art of Creating A Community. A lot of people must have thought it was interesting. There were 36 comments and trackbacks.
Not a surprise, in true social networking / blog style, the post also received buzz that wasn’t in comments or trackbacks. One of the bloggers who picked up on the topic was “A*List” blogger Robert Scoble. Robert added his take on the topic and posted on his blog. A lot of people must have thought it was interesting. There were 31 comments and trackbacks.
Comments on the Bona Tempura Volvant blog and the Scobleizer blog took slightly different directions. Feedback on Guy’s blog focused exclusively on the topic. However, many of the Scobleizer comments took point with Robert as an “A*List” blogger – moving the conversation off topic. Guess that’s one of the perils of being an “A*List” blogger.
Dave Winer, the founding father of RSS, has a lucid essay on putting valuation on the current state of RSS investment in the world. Given the VC investment, the number of companies doing RSS and podcasting that have invested in RSS, and even the companies like Pheedo and FeedBurner that have hired and entire staff devoted to RSS, there’s a pretty substantial chunk of capital that’s decked against this technology.
I analogize it to CRM (Customer Relationship Management). I’m not sure who is the ‘arguable’ father of CRM – perhaps Tom Siebel plays a role. CRM is essentially the ‘plumbing’ of customer data & customer interactions inside most major companies. As of 2003, the CRM market was around $8.8 billion. It’s only grown from there. But if only 19% of user licenses of software like SAP are deployed, then I guess they’ve got issues greater then market size to contend with.
Back to RSS. The investment, however large, is real, and it’s alive. RSS is not a technology that sits on the shelf. RSS, once implemented, lives, breaths and connects content to customers, just by the nature of its very being.
In some ways, RSS is changing the ‘plumbing’ of the Internet and its effects are profound. The RSS investment trend illustrates just how powerful blogging and social media are in this web 2.0 world. Something CRM didn’t have in it’s favor.
To that end, Dave puts it this way.
Here’s one way to visualize it. Let’s assume the average home price in the U.S. is $400K. So $8.2 billion is about 21,000 houses. Now imagine you wanted to change the way the plumbing worked in all of those homes. You get the idea. There’s no way 4 or 5 random people on a Yahoo mail list, people of ordinary means, can move that much capital without having a pretty compelling argument and making it an incredibly compelling way.
Dave has a great point there. However, his next point is even more important.
Viewed another way, given that Scripting News, for years, was the central if not primary means of distributing information about RSS, it gives you a sense of how powerful blogging is. It can’t move that much capital overnight, but given enough time, and persistence, and a high-quality idea, you can create quite an economic effect.
That’s the mantra on RSS. Focus on the vision, persist in “changing out the plumbing”, and pushing for the constant incremental economic effects for and from RSS advancement.
Shamelessly cross-posted at the Pheedo blog.
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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.
Looking for a company that offers consulting on corporate and business blogging, including design, development and strategy? Consider Netconcepts.
Other stuff? Email us.
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
