Bloggoggle

If you're blog is more professional than personal, there's another great way to promote yourself and your blog - Bloggoggle.

Bloggoggle is a customized directory of blogging professionals aimed at building and sharing networks of industry expertise. Categorized and rated by peers, the site tells readers who you are and where to find your industry insights.

Filed In: Bloggoggle, Blog, Industry, Profession, Promotion

Corporate Blogging Survey 2005

Backbonemedia.com offers it's Corporate Blogging Survey 2005, which focuses on why a company would want to start blogging, who should blog, what make a blog successful, and how a company can use blogging to positively impact its business.

The study finds that corporate blogs provide established corporations and obscure brands the ability to connect with their audiences on a personal level, build trust, collect valuable feedback and foster strengthened relationships while and at the same time benefiting sales and marketing.

I particularly enjoyed reading about companies who are blogging including Annie's Homegrown, IBM, iUpload, Macromedia, Maytag and Microsoft.

Filed In: Blog, Corporate, Blogging, Survey, Sales, Marketing, Customer, Relationships, IBM, Microsoft, Macromedia, Maytag, iUpload, Annie's, Homegrown,

The Internet's Impact on PR

Like everything else, the internet is changing the way press releases are published. David Scott's e-book, The New Rules of PR, suggests a new rule of self publishing as replacing the old rule of writing a release and hoping it gets picked up by the media.

There's lot of good content in this e-book including:

• Content strategy
• Publishing through a distribution service
• Publishing on your website with RSS feeds
• Optimizing your press release for searching and browsing
• Links in your press release
• Keywords and phases
• Using gobbledygook or, as I like to refer to it, hype - Review Too Much Hype on creating markeing messages for customers.
• Providing content that drives action
• Driving people into the sales process with press releases
• The new news cycle - web based communication proving to be highly effective
• Media pick-up

Filed In: PR, e-Book, Press, Releases, RSS, Links, Keywords, David, Scott

Guides to Using RSS & Email for Marketing

I'm always interested in "how to guides" and I found a few at MarketingStudies.net that I thought I'd share.

The 7-Step Marketing Plan

• Start using RSS as an end-user
• Plan your RSS feeds
• Create a list of RSS marketing/publishing requirements
• Choose an RSS publishing tool and create your first feed - mentions using SimpleFeed. For more details on an interview with SimpleFeed's CEO, Mark Clarson, refer to Marketing with RSS.
• Promote your RSS feeds through your own channels
• Promote your RSS feeds through external channels
• Other key RSS activities

RSS and E-mail #1: How They Can Work Together?

• Understand the relationships between RSS, e-mail, e-zines and blogs
• Identify how to integrate RSS into your e-mail marketing strategy

RSS and E-mail #2: Delivering Your E-zines via RSS

• Announcing your e-zine via RSS
• The process: e-mail e-zines
• The process: RSS content delivery
• The process: RSS e-zine delivery
• The technology

Filed In: RSS, E-mail, E-zines

Email Postage: AOL & Yahoo

With AOL and Yahoo! partnering with Goodmail, and recently announcing its a per-message fee for commercial e-mail senders to gain certain privileges, it's no surprise that AOL had received much backlash from email senders and other stakeholders on phasing out it's Enhanced Whitelist.

AOL's CertifiedEmail service would require emailers to pay for the automatic display of images and hyperlinks - privileges that had previously been available for free to senders who earned placement on AOL's Enhanced Whitelist for good sending behavior, and who maintained very low complaint rates.

Matt Blumber, Return Path's CEO told ClickZ, "It seems unfair to mailers who have permission relationships with their recipients, have maintained low complaint rates, and have earned their way onto a whitelist. The big issue is the lack of an unpaid way to get those privileges. If Goodmail is a better solution, the market will decide, but the senders who already do everything right shouldn't be punished."

Instead of phasing out the Enhanced Whitelist in favor of the new CertifiedEmail, AOL will offer both, but it has yet to publicly state how much the per-message fee will be other than a fraction of a cent per e-mail and that discounts will be offered to early-adopters in the first year.

This is just another step in the movement towards permission based marketing and supports the importance of seeking out-in communication like RSS.

Filed In: Goodmail, AOL, Yahoo!, Email, Postage, Enhance, Whitelist, CertifiedEmail, ClickZ, RSS, Permission, Based, Marketing

Tracking Your Comments with coComment

One of the necessary actions in promoting your blog is commenting on other blogs, but leaving so many comments or even just a few -for the forgetful like myself - can be difficult to remember. coComment is a web application that keeps track of all the comments you leave across blogosphere.

You add a bookmarklet to your browser, and whenever you make comments on another blog, you'll do so using the bookmarklet. The service focuses on three main areas:

Capture
In "Your Conversations," you'll find a centralized list of all the comments you've made on other blogs with a link back to the original blog where you made the comment. Additionally, you'll find all comments posted by other coComment members which are related to your original comment - creating a flowing conversation.

Share
Use "Blogbox," a display a window on your blog, that displays a miniaturized version of "Your Conversations." You don't have to go to coComment's web page to view your conversations, and it brings the value of your comments on other's blogs back to your blog. Lastly, it allows readers of your blog to see your comments, conversations and topics of interest from within your blog.

Alert
The comment stream generated by your conversations are available to you not only in your blog box, but also as an RSS feed, so you can track your conversations on your favorite RSS reader.

Sounds like a great idea. Is anyone using this, and if so do you like it?

Filed In: coComment, Tracking, Comments, Blogs, Promoting, RSS

State of the Blogosphere

The blogosphere continues to grow at a quickening pace, according to David Sifry of Technorati. The site currently tracks 27.2 million weblogs with that number continuing to double about every 5 1/2 months.

New blog development continues to grow with Technorati tracking over 75 million new weblogs each day, and 13.7 million bloggers still posting 3 months after their blogs are created.

Beyond just the blogosphere is in a tremendous growth phase, the report also highlights:

• Dealing with spam
• A news cycle measured in megahertz
• The continued rise of tagging
• Tags for blogs

Filed in: Blogosphere Blogs Weblogs Technorati Spam Tagging Megahertz

Too Much Hype

Michael McLaughlin, author of the Guerilla Marketing blog, provides good information on what does and doesn't work in ads in his Words Are Worth a Thousand Pictures post.

Key items worth noting:

• "I don’t doubt that people fail to read most of the advertising copy they come across, but that’s because of the hype that’s part of most ad copy, not people’s lack of time to read."
• Your clients are interested in reading about your services, but you must grab their attention. What’s new about your offering? What’s your story? Is there news?
• What’s most important is that the fluff be ruthlessly eliminated from your ad copy, web page or other marketing communication.
• Ten different studies have shown that when the bull is stripped from ads, consumer interest skyrockets.

This just goes to show that as consumers become more savvy, they're less tolerant of hyped up marketing messages. Looking at ad copy with the perspective of what’s new, what's the story and is there news reminds me a lot of pitching a news story to the media, and they too aren't isn't interested in the hype.

Filed In: Guerilla, Marketing, Advertising, Copy, Writing, Graphics,

Ice Cream Company Provides Financial Advice?

John Nardini, executive vice president of marketing at Wayland-based Denali Flavors Inc. (the company that sells the Moose Tracks ice cream), is blogging, not about ice cream, but finance. By offering financial advise, this company has seen a 30 percent spike in visitors to its company web site.

Not sure what ice cream has to do with financial advice, and I'm not sure how comfortable I'd feel about using an ice cream company as a financial resource, but it seems to be working for them.

However, one has to ask the more important question, how many of those visits have translated into sales?

On a more personal note, stories like this scare me. I have a Masters in Marketing from Johns Hopkins University, and I'm left wondering if everything that I learned about target marketing has been a waste.

Filed In: Ice, Cream, Blog, Finance, Sales, Websites, Visitors, Target, Market