As re-published on News.com, the NYT articles talks about how business travelers don't really blog, and should.  But in all the reasons why the missed the best one ... keeping the team back home (or around the country) up to date.  Now you might be thinking ... "Hey blogs are public ... we can't do that!"  Ah, but blogs don't have to be public.  In fact you can have a blog that is both public and private.

Think about it ... a secure blog, post last-minute proposal changes.  Updates on clients, new selling strategies.  And all available to you and your colleagues with a couple clicks

Tags: business blogging

Powered by Qumana

John Stith of WebProNews and BL Ochman talk about services to monitor the blogosphere for your company that cost ungodly amounts ... like $60,000 a year.  Monitoring the blogosphere is very important (critical IMHO to some business) for companies today.  But ... look this isn't rocket science.  I do it everyday and combinations of free tools make it pretty darn easy.

Yes, I am a techie and geek ... but I'm also busy and I don't have time to mess around.  While I respect the businesses trying to make a business from this and I'm sure they provide a value in writing up reports and giving clients easy to absorb info ... I think there is a lot you can do yourself.

How?  Well I'm going to talk about this at the upcoming RSS conference in depth and give a workshop on this as well at the end of the conference proper ... but here's a top line toolkit:

Search engines:

• Feedster
• PubSub
• Technorati
• IceRocket
• Gada.be

RSS reader:

• Lektora (we have almost fixed the Firefox 1.5 compatibility issue ... I have a Windows version available if you'd like to test it)
• Bloglines

That's all you need to get going.  Essentially, what you are doing is searching for a term or website, saving the search in a way the RSS reader can check and you're done.  Now ... fitting this into your business is not too hard.  Using existing staff resources can make it very time efficient.  Couple this with an internal blog and Qumana (Qumana and Lektora will soon be fully integrated allowing you to go from RSS reader to blog post or e-mail with a couple clicks) and you're a couple steps away from a self-contained and dynamic competitive intelligence system.

Sound easy?  Yeah it actually is.  What often is hard is companies making it part of people's jobs to do this and having them realize that this is just as important following commentaries in the press.

Powered by Qumana

Hat tip to Steve for this link to the Technorati blog about the spiffed up charts.  I've put a couple charts below to show you the easy blogging of them ... there is a simple "Blog this chart" below the chart that lets you copy and paste the code for it.  Unfortunately the code doesn't allow you to show anything more than the default 30 days on your blog ... if you click the links you can expand and contract to search to as little as 7 days to as many as 360.

Examples:

Posts that contain Qumana per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Posts that contain "tris Hussey" per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Now the big question ... so what? Yeah exactly.  I can't see too many day-to-day uses for this.  You could illustrate the explosion of an issue on the scene.  I guess you could ad it to your side bar as a kind of on the fly ego-feed.  Not to diss Technorati, this is interesting, and being a data wonk I had to play with it.  Implications?  We're getting more and more interested in looking at blog information.  While many might use it to track a celeb ... companies should be using this to track their brand.  Visuals are always good and this chart makes for good visuals.

Tags: Technorati

Powered by Qumana

Technorati is celebrating its first Tagiversary:

It was one year ago that we introduced Tags to Technorati, and what a year it's been! We're now tracking 4.6 million tags on over 75 million posts. Over half of all new posts are now tagged (using categories or rel links), which means they're easier to find and enjoy.

Tags have become an integral part of how blogging occurs. Of how people find information and how they disseminate it. The tag space is ever evolving, and yet has come far in a single year span for Technorati. It's amazing to think of tags as being a relatively 'new' concept.

Of course, what is a celebration of tags without improvements? Well, Technorati made a few nice upgrades. The tags homepage has a "hot tags" section:

Also new: language filtering, tag trend charts, and toggle features to customize your page.

The improvements show a number of things. The increased ability to follow topics by tags alone, and the ability to guage tag/search popularity. We can search Qumana and see the trends on our tag, which is an important metric that we can now use.

Happy Tagiversary to Technorati, and all the best for a productive new year in this very interesting space!

Tags: tagiversary, technorati, tags, tagging, tag space

Powered by Qumana

One major point to developing a successful blog strategy is to keep it simple. A simply blog strategy is easy to understand and follow. It lays out what you can and cannot say, and encourages you to share your voice.

One great example of such a policy is for Opera, a web browser company:

1. Share your thoughts
2. Be active
3. We're not your mama
4. Don't give away the farm
5. Check your sources
6. Our friends are your friends

"Remember to use common sense. If you need help in a situation, don't hesitate to ask your manager. Your blog is meant to be an open window, but remember there are legal obligations."

It's all about enjoying the opportunity to speak about the company, not about mistrusting employees. That kind of trust speaks very clearly, and positively, about the company.

Here at Qumana we have our own blog policy. It's not a written one, but it's understood what can and cannot be said, on our own blogs and here on the Qumana blog. If we're building to a launch, we have team discussions about what we say and when. We're careful to be coordinated in our efforts to respond to comments. And we try to bring our insight and perspective into what we do. It's created a positive and dynamic blog that we feel is open, honest, and interesting to read.

Via Jeremy @ Blog Marketing ; Tags: blog, blogging, blog policy, opera, qumana

Powered by Qumana

Michael gets the coolest tips. He got an idea about 1000tags.com and did a quick review on Techcrunch.  So here's the skinny.  Tagging is cool, right?  Search engines love them.   People like use them.  Now you can buy them.  Yeah, buy them.  1000tags.com is going to sell 1000 tags and link them to the site of your choice.  Cool deal.  How much?

How much does it cost?
The price goes like this (in US$):

* For shared tags, the price is $5 per character, but with a minimum of $25 even if your tag is less than 5 characters, which is ok since most tags will use at least 5 characters. Also, since the maximum tag size is 20 characters, the maximum price for a shared tag is $100

* Exclusive tags cost $250 upfront just for making them “exclusive”. Then, the price goes up depending on the number of characters and font size. It can get expensive if you use up lots of characters and a very large font size. Remember, exclusive tags are expensive not because we’re greedy but because we’d rather people book shared tags.

I guess this is a tag cloud that really does have a silver lining, heck maybe even gold.

Tags: 1000tags.com, Techcrunch, milliondollarhomepage, tags, tag clouds

Powered by Qumana

The BlogBusinessSummit blog has this great headline today:

BrandWeek Says Blogs are a Bad Marketing Idea. We Say BrandWeek is a Bad Marketing Idea

Ouch.  Harsh?  Actually no.  Read the whole report here (PDF).  The short paragraph is more than condescending and dismissive, it just plain misses the point.  Blogs aren't as much as a "marketing tool" as an information tool.  Blogs are important for marketers because the information can travel so fast.  Bad product reviews and good ones can take off like lightening.  So we're not saying all products need a blog or that all marketers need to blog, we're saying you can use blogs to your advantage, even passively, but you have to be aware and tuned in ... or else.
Just like they said on BBS:

The blogosphere is mistaken if they think businesses owe them something. But on the other side of the coin, businesses - particularly those that rely heavily on buzz marketing and word of mouth - ignore the blogosphere at their extreme peril. BrandWeek may not remain relevant to the conversation if it doesn’t figure that out.

Also seen on BloggersBlog

Tags: blogs, blog marketing, buzz marketing, word of mouth marketing

Powered by Qumana

Before the holidays Jon wrote about a post of Seth Godin's on his blog.  The holiday season got in the way of me writing about it then so getting back on track here (oy the unread feeds to plow through ...) ...

Reading Seth's post I was drawn to the last part ...

Magazines run ads.
Books don't.

What are blogs?

I see any given blog as a moving target ... moving and morphing as the author wishes.  In the last 24 hours I've written some short posts, long posts, and a recipe (you gotta try it ... it's really good).  So what is my blog?  A blog.

Recent research on RSS conducted by Yahoo! and Ipsos reveals that awareness of RSS is still low among overall Internet users. 31% of Internet users use RSS, but most (27%) do not realize they are using RSS. Most, in fact, read RSS via start pages not wholly dedicated to RSS reading such as My Yahoo! or My MSN.

This states that while the technology is proving useful to web users, it remains a grey area and therefore it is not being used to its full potential. It also means that when awareness and consumer acceptance fully take hold, the perceived usefulness of the technology will spur on a big industry growth spurt.

Blog Herald has it right. It's not that people don't like RSS, or that it's too techie, it's about marketing. If people don't know what RSS is, have no awareness or exposure, then they cannot be expected to use it. Using it is simple - as simply as checking email or reading a website. Using it is useful - no more checking multiple websites. But marketing has not even touched RSS in its most basic form, let alone to tout its usefulness.

When will RSS be truly useful? We're still in the midst of growing this "online culture" that has been emerging for some years. A culture where people read news, interact, and communicate online. RSS becomes a useful tool for this culture of Internet users, and more and more this is becoming part of everyday life or a vast part of the population.

RSS will also truly gain awareness when it is consistently covered in mainstream media. We're just beginning to see mainstream press cover blogs... What you don't see is how people really use blogs: how they gather news via RSS, how they interact with people around the world, and how blogs become the medium for communication. We have to remember the same learning curve was experienced with the web, with email, and this is only an evolution of that change.

Read the full PDF on RSS here

Via Blog Herald

Tags: rss, blogs, blogging, awareness+of+rss