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Commentary by blog and social media consultant Josh Hallett on the use of blogs for public relations, media, marketing, communication & branding and from time-to-time the unsolicited opinion.
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Jackie Huba posts a recap of their recent book tour to promote Citizen Marketers. She lists a number of stats, two of which are shown below:
- Number of books sold: 7,445
- Blog subscriber increase from 15,735 to 47,798 during tour, via Feedburner. (The jump in subscribers on 2/18 is due to Feedburner adding Google Reader subscribers.The hiccups in May are due to a Google problem in reporting subscriber counts to Feedburner.)
Jackie notes that the increase might be related to the Google Reader. Even if the under-reporting at first was 100%, i.e. instead of a baseline of 15K it was 30K, that's still an 18K increase in subscribers. On the low end Jackie and Ben now have 18K new readers/potential customers. On the high end it's 32,000.
While the primary goal of a book tour is to sell books, I think the increase in RSS subscribers is a more important result.
I learned an important lesson yesterday at the Atlanta airport. If you are using the paid wifi in the terminal and you open up a desktop-based RSS reader like NetNewsWire, the network assumes your flurry of RSS-grabbing activity is a suspicious event. About 10 seconds after opening my RSS reader I was presented this message in my browser:
Yep, I was blacklisted. The 'system' assumed that my machine was infected with a worm or virus. In the end I was able to experience around a minute of my paid wifi service.
For the past six or seven years we've been going to Highlands, N.C. for Christmas. It's a small, charming town in the western part of North Carolina.
This year while eating lunch at a small cafe on Christmas Eve I was shocked to overhear the table next to me talking about RSS feeds. I tried not to eavesdrop too much, but it was a discussion about using RSS to receive news and even podcasts!
It's funny that I try to use Highlands as an escape from technology and the table next to me it talking RSS.
Christina Wodtke says she is knowingly stirring the pot with her post, Is RSS a bad idea?
- The vast majority of folks can’t use it
- A large majority of those who can, set it up then ignore it
- It doesn’t filter, it just puts all the crap in one place
- It kills a content provider’s ability to survive, if they provide full feeds
- It annoys customers if it only provides teasers
- Adding feeds is typically a painful, annoying process, even with myyahoo, feedburner, etc
I think some of the initial items on her list are due to low adoption, but many of her points can be related to just about any new technology. I remember when I first started on USENET back in the early 90's. Yes, the vast majority of people didn't use it, once I subscriber to a dozen groups I ignored some of them, etc....but there was good content and community there. However USENET is now dead for the most part....so perhaps that's not the best analogy :-)
It's been said before, but it's worth repeating. Be sure you monitor your web address in Technorati in addition to specific keywords. Sure, many PR firms will search for their client names and services but remember to look for the URL.
What do I mean by this? Well, enter the full URL of your site in the Technorati search, i.e. http://www.hyku.com/. When you do this Technorati will show you any blog link to that specific URL. This type of search will uncover some additional conversation around your company/client that never mentions the name or keywords you might normally be looking for.
For example, an unhappy shopper might write a blog post that says, "I hate this store!" and link the word 'store' to your site. If you're just monitoring the basics, i.e. company name, service name(s) and the variants then you would miss this link. By monitoring the URL of the site, Technorati would pick it up.
Of course you can always do the standard link:URL search on Google, but that's a traditional relevance search, but a real-time blog search.
All around smart-guy-pr-blogger Joseph Thornley wisely notes that with the release of Internet Explorer 7 the majority of web users will now start to see that little RSS icon.
With tonight’s release of Internet Explorer 7 the other 85% of the world is about to see that orange icon appear on their browser toolbar. And when they see it change from grey to orange, the clicking will start. And no one will care what RSS means. They’ll just be subscribing.
Will we all see huge increases in RSS subscribers? Probably not right away. I assume that the users who are busy downloading/installing IE7 are the standard early-adopter crowd and probably already use RSS.
However, it will be interesting to watch/compare RSS subscription rates with the adoption curve of IE7. FeedBurner, did you get that?
A long time ago I asked why FeedBurner didn't buy/merge with a traditional stats firm so I could get my RSS and blog stats in the same place. Well our prayers have been answered. FeedBurner just bought out Blogbeat. You can read the FAQ over at Blogbeat's site.
Neville posts a round-up of notes about PubSub.
Perhaps one indicator, here at Gnomedex Bob Wyman has scratched out PubSub.com from his name badge and has written in wyman.us.
Just trying to access PubSub.com this morning and getting nothing. So are they gone for good?
Update: I've IM'd a few friends, some can get to it, others can't?
Over at the Technorati blog Peter Hirshberg writes about the partnership between Technorati and Edelman to develop localized language versions of Technorati. Richard Edelman briefly mentioned this on his panel at Syndicate last week.
Technorati is accelerating the development of fully localized versions of our service in Chinese, Korean, German, Italian and French. These will be moving through development and testing over the coming months and will be complete, public products in early 2007. (Technorati today can show posts in 20 languages, but so far we've only done completely localized versions in English and Japanese).
Edelman is providing support for this accelerated development effort and will have access to these new sites as they are in development and testing this year. They will be working with their international clients on how to listen to and engage the blogosphere.
Update: Richard Edelman posts about the announcement.
Here is the audio from the breakout session on Structured Blogging.
Syndicate-Structure.mp3
On the panel were:
Jen Consalvo - AOL
Eli Chapman - Mediatronica
Constantine Gus Spathis - PubSub
Chad Dickerson - Yahoo
Scott Abel - The Content Wrangler
Here's the audio from the morning keynote by Steven Schwartz of Reuters.
Syndicate-Reuters.mp3
Do you use NetNewsWire? Do you know how it works? No?
Don't worry Brent Simmons has posted a behind-the-scenes look at how NNW reads feeds.
Here is the audio from the Syndication and Community Development session.
Syndicate-Community.mp3
On the panel were:
Pete Blackshaw - Nielsen BuzzMetrics
Bill Schreiner - AOL - AIM
Jason Levitt -Yahoo
At Syndicate Jason Levitt from Yahoo just mentioned this URL: http://developer.yahoo.com/rss/
It's a complete list of every RSS feed that Yahoo publishes. It's quite a comprehensive list.
Update: Turns out I do have the audio, here it is.
Syndicate-SMS.mp3
I jacked into the audio panel to record this session, but the line level was nill so I have no audio from this session. I didn't take any notes since I was intent on listening/participating.
On the panel were:
Dave Panos - Pluck
Peter Negulescu - San Francisco Chronicle
Peter Horam - AllBusiness.com
Here is the audio from the final morning keynote from Syndicate. It was a spirited discussion about the future of RSS.
Syndicate-Grokking.mp3
On the panel were:
David Geller - WhatCounts
Mike Davidson - NewsVine
David Sifry - Technorati
Eric Ella - Brightcove
As David Sifry is on stage at Syndicate, a search for 'syndicate' on Technorati returns nothing.
I know David gets tired of providing tech support/apologizing for his product, but it's sometimes tough for us lovers or Technorati to constantly pimp their service when things like this happen.
Update: I've posted audio from Jeff's session.
For the next two days I'll be posting short items from Syndicate Conference in New York City. First up this morning is Jeff Jarvis. I've got a photoset going. Or you can check out other stuff here.
Jeff is opening up his keynote focus to a vote. He presented four ideas and had the audience vote, Money and Syndication won out.
Part of measurement is not the tracking of links, it's the tracking of the knowledge of the crowd. Why are people linking? Is it linking to friends or knowledge?
Towards the end of the session it has devolved into a Technorati love/bash fest, not very productive and much like the AV kids arguing. I've posted the audio from the session.
For now Rick Klau's has some good notes on Jeff's session. Other notes:
- David Weinberger
Rex asks: Have you still not set up a newsreader? Good point. When I deal with a web development firm (or any tech outfit) for a project and they don't know/use RSS then they lose a ton of credibility in my book. Am I alone in thinking like this?
David Sifry has posted his latest State of the Blogosphere update. You all know the drill, go check it out.
- Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
- The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
- It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
- On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
- 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
- Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
Matt Certo from Websolvers has an interesting idea about prioritizing content within RSS.
It occurred to me that RSS needs to 'deepen.' Perhaps it already has, but noone's bothered to tell me. Let me explain what I mean...
RSS should enable a content creator to prioritize his/her content. For example, Steve's post that IceRocket has been acquired is probably higher priority than his quick tip about Flickr. Why not allow a content author to prioritize posts (ranging from urgent to trivial). This would allow me, as a reader, to be able to cut to the chase after a long vacation. To some degree content categories allow me to segment my subscriptions, but I'm not sure that most authors (or subscribers) think of it this way.
In response to my post yesterday about the candidates for Florida Governor needing to track social media I set up a Blogdigger page to aggregate all blog and news content that mentions their names.
For some reason though, the Blogdigger account is not updating often enough so I created a NewsGator account that features the same information. Go to: http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/WebEd2.aspx and use the following information to login: U: FloridaGovernor P: fl2006
If you want to subscribe to the individual RSS feeds here they are:
Charlie Crist - Technorati / Google News
Jim Davis - Technorati / Google News
Tom Gallagher - Technorati / Google News
Rod Smith - Technorati / Google News
Head on over to Technorati and do a search for "Charlie Crist" (Charlie is a candidate for Governor in Florida). Scroll down a little bit and you'll find a few interesting posts. One of which is from a girl that claims to be a regional data coordinator for Charlie's campaign. Please note that some of the content is Not Safe For Work (NSFW). Charlie's opponents will probably want to get some screen captures of this since it will most likely be gone very shortly.
Ever since Technorati started to index MySpace blog posts the results have been pretty interesting for a number of searches. Like I've said before any campaign that isn't using blog/CGM monitoring tools is going to always be behind the curve.
Reading Steve's recent post about the future of newswire services such as PR Newswire and BusinessWire I can't help but think of Bob Wyman's recent post about edgeio and structured blogging. In his post Bob talks about how edgeio is differentiating itself from 'walled garden' services such as Craigslist by collecting public data and aggregating it.
This is very similar to what Steve was referring to, a new PR wire service that collects data from corporations and other sources and then aggregates/pushes it to end users. If users started tagging each release and pinging the appropriate server it could easily be done. But how is that different or any more difficult than what we can do now with Technorati or PubSub and a few good watchlists? It's not, that's the thing. If somebody would just focus some resources to made it dead-easy to use then they'd have something.
The big issue is trusting the source, we can't just have everybody issuing a corporate press release can we :-) Just ask Emulex about that. That technical issue should be a small hurdle though. The big hurdle is getting more journalists and newsrooms to use RSS.
Technosailor points out that Technorati is now indexing MySpace blogs. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? As Aaron points out it will add some clutter to the results from Technorati, but hasn't there always been clutter?
Overall, I think the ability for businesses to monitor this large social network will have some benefit (aside from the Big Brother aspect). MySpace has always been somewhat nebulous to the corporate world, but they could learn a great deal from the kids.
(Hat tip to Steve)
I've been using the new beta of NetNewsWire for a few weeks now and haven't discovered a single issue. As many others have noted there is a significant speed increase which helps when you refresh 500+ feeds. So far the syncing with NewsGator Online is awesome (granted the first sync took some time).
In other 'NewsGator News', the company has restructured their pricing and product offerings. The new model pushes the purchase of their stand-alone readers such as NewsGator Inbox (for Outlook) $29.95, FeedDemon $29.95 and NetNewsWire $19.95. All of these products now offer synchronization with a web-based RSS reader, NewsGator Online.
The biggest change is the simplification of online offerings with NewsGator Online. Previously they sold a number of different levels of online services. Some included synchronization or mobile versions of the reader plus some other 'premium content'. In total I think there were around 6-8 different price points, and it was very confusing since they also offered personal and business flavors as well.
There are now two price points for the online RSS reader: Free and Premium. Free is well you guessed it, free and offers a basic, yet very functional web-based reader that will satisfy most users. The premium version adds a number of features such as mobile readers (Blackberry/Cellphone) and e-mail alerts. The cost for the premium service is $19.95 per year.
I'm signing up for the premium service, you really can't beat a one-time cost of twenty bucks to get a mobile based reader that is synchronized with all your other RSS readers. It is ironic though that they display a 'box' for the online service :-)
Last week I was at a client meeting, during my presentation I asked, "So when are you planning to launch X?" I received a quick response from a few members of the audience, "How do you know about X?" How do you think?
I pulled up a few blog posts that were talking about the launch of this new product. This of course shocked the client, but it happens all the time. In preparation for my meeting I had been monitoring the company name via watchlists in: PubSub, Technorati and Google News.
One new element that is appearing in my watchlists are job listings from Monster.com. Now I know what new markets they are expanding into..."Why are you hiring an account rep in X city?"
Need any more reasons to start using RSS to monitor your company/brand/client/competitor names? Many moons ago I wrote up this guide to media monitoring via RSS. It's badly in need up an update (on the to-do list), but the general information holds true.
Greg Hoffman is learning all about spam blogs to protect his company from them.
The $300 software looks for datafeeds and automatically publishes the digests to a blog with related content so the owner can sell Google Adwords based on that content. You see, we lose money when people go to search for our company name and they are redirected to other sites with similar products. This does not make me happy. That's why I'm on this crusade.
You learn by doing.
Here's an interesting example of why you need to create watchlists in RSS. Last week I discovered the web stats for Florida gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis. It took the campaign 41 hours and 3 minutes to discover their snafu via another local blog.
Had they been using a watchlist via PubSub or Technorati they would have known within a few minutes. Which is better, 41 hours or 5 minutes?
You can add these RSS feeds to your reader:
- Technorati watchlist for any blog post that mentiones "Jim Davis"
- Technorati watchlist for any blog that links to http://www.jimdavis2006.com/
- PubSub feed for any blog post that mentions "Jim Davis"
If you run a political campaign contact me. I can give you quite a few more tips.
I am getting tired of Blogger-based RSS feeds. Not a day goes by that a few of them 'rebuild' and show up as completely unread in my newsreader. One repeat offender normally had 30-40 items in his RSS feed and not a week went by that they would all become 'unread'. Unsubscribed!
I put this on the same level as sending me 3-4 versions of the same e-mail newsletter. I can only assume that the blog authors do not know this is happening.
Anybody else seeing this?
Here is another round-up of Florida-based Hurricane Wilma blogs:
Bloggers:
Media:
Other media outlets that don't have blogs, but are posting updates:
The Naples News has switched to a Storm Edition in advance of Hurricane Wilma. The newspaper staff explain the switch:
For the next few days, the Naples Daily News and Bonita Daily News will be publishing their online content only on BonitaNews.com in order to have one source for all Hurricane Wilma information. BonitaNews.com is more capable of providing our readers quick, accurate and detailed information about the approaching storm and its effects on Collier and south Lee counties.
The new site is being run by some type of blog software a web framework by the name of Django and features a RSS feed of headlines. The Daily News is also producing a podcast (RSS) of hurricane coverage.
The finishing touch? They have a Wilma favicon: 
I've updated my list of local media Hurricane Wilma blogs.
The Orlando Sentinel have fired up their Hurricane Blog. Six posts in the past hour. They're off to a good start.
I am watching the Orlando Sentinel feed and NOAA's Hurricane Wilma feed.
Om Malik posts that his sources tell him that NewsGator is going to annouce a deal to buy Ranchero Software, the makers of NetNewsWire. As Om says, NNW is the RSS reader of choice for Mac users. And like Om, I am excited at the prospect of Mac/PC/Online syncronization of my feeds.
I wonder what will become of MarsEdit, Ranchero's simple blog editor?
Scoble lists the platforms that NewsGator works on.
Update: It's a done deal.
FeedBurner has launched a new e-mail subscription service for RSS feeds. The new product is a partnership with FeedBlitz.
Blog readers that are confused by RSS and the whole 'feed' thing can now receive e-mail updates from your blog. While this service is nothing new (many services offer the ability to receive e-mail updates) the consolidation within FeedBurner is nice. If you remember a few weeks ago they launched their PingShot service. FeedBurner is doing a good job of providing all the services that RSS provider would want/need. Now if only FeedBurner would offer traditional stats....hmmmm.
Update: FeedBlitz has an FAQ about the service on their blog.
Continue reading "FeedBurner Partners with FeedBlitz on E-mail Subscriptions" »
AdRants reports that 29 percent of traffic to a site created as part of a recent Audi A3 campaign was generated by advertising on the BlogAds network.
The kicker is that 29 percent was achieved with just one half of one percent of the overall media budget. Let's say it again, advertising on weblogs deliver Audi 29 percent of all responding yet took just on half of one percent of the budget to do so. To drive the point home even further, Mickinney-Silver, on its A3 timeline site states, "The media cost for the entire blog ad buy was less than the cost for one banner ad on a mainstream site such as Yahoo!"
I guess I should balance this out with a story about an amazing blog advertising failure. Anybody got one?
Elizabeth is fed up with tagging. She says, "Tagging is too much work." In the past few weeks I have had a number of conversations with people who share the same opinion.
Like many TypePad users, Elizabeth is limited in tagging solutions. Yes you can use your categories to tag your content, but anything further requires inserting the proper HTML into your posts.
Moving to MovableType or WordPress is the best option, but not always feasible. A few months ago I documented how I can easily tag my posts within MT.
I know that tagging my posts has led to increased traffic from Technorati and other search tools that support tags. Granted it is very easy for me include them in my posts.
Over at the Burning Door, FeedBurner has announced PingShot a service that notifies aggregators and search engines when your feed has been updated. On the post there is an FAQ about the new service.
A quick check of my FeedBurner account shows the new option (click image for larger version):
The default services listed are Technorati and My Yahoo. You can check: PubSub, Ping-o-matic and NewsGator and then add up to three other services which include: Feedster, Icerocket and Weblogs.com
If you have a FeedBurner account you will need to activate this service via your control panel. Outside services such as web directories and search tools may submit their name to receive notifications of updates.
Don't think you need to publish full-text RSS feeds? Think again.
Looking at the Search Engine Watch review of Google Blog Search:
Google's blog search indexes all of the content it finds in feeds, but does not attempt to access and index the full content available on a publisher's web server.
One more reason why you should publish full-text feeds.
Niall Kennedy writes that RSS reader, NewsFire is now blocking RSS ads from Google and FeedBurner as part of the default install.
In November of last year I predicted that this would come about:
I see a few things happening in the coming months regarding RSS advertising (many of these items mirror the battle between consumers and banner advertisers):
- First and foremost, newsreader application developers will release new versions that will disable or block advertising. I would be willing to pay an extra $5-10 in cost for an application it if blocked advertising (works for Tivo). For web-based readers, perhaps a Firefox extension will be developed to block ads.
- This will lead to feed services such as Feedburner to begin blocking feeds sent to known newsreader applications that are blocking feeds. The battle is on
Now we'll see what the next step will be.
Update: Looking at the comments from Niall's blog here are a few items:
Will NewsFire now mysteriously drop out of Google's search listings?
Not quite the first. We've had that functionality in the (free) CITA RSS Aggregator since April. Our implementation is tailorable and can be switched on and off on a per feed basis.
