Nooked conducted a survey that found the "influencer" segment of the market to be highly into RSS. The survey looked at the influencer set, those journalists, analysts and bloggers followed by masses of people. The survey found the majority of them were using RSS as a way to gather their information and keep track of the market.

With Big Media – the likes of ABC, CNN, the BBC – publishing content via RSS, and the blogging explosion of the last few years, it should come as no surprise that 92% of participants are aware of RSS.

87% of Nooked survey respondents use an RSS reader, or news aggregator to keep up to date on content...

These people are important in marketing. They are the mediators of the message now. The consumers whose reviews affect others. They don't just recommend anything. They do their own research. They stay on top of news to break the latest and greatest thing on the market. And they need a way to stay connected. RSS is the way for them to do that. And it will also be the same way their word of mouth gets amplified.

Here is a good example of why influencers are important:

- Two-thirds of sales of U.S. consumer goods are influenced by word of mouth, a McKinsey & Company report indicates.
- Ten percent of Americans hold the power to influence the habits of the other 90 percent, finds a Roper ASW study.
- The value of word of mouth has grown by 1.5 times, on average, since 1977, and, as a result, it is now valued about twice as much as advertising or editorial, suggests a Roper Reports Public Pulse.

Businesses need to reach influencers. It's all about viral marketing. You seed the powerful and they do your marketing for you. Viral marketing is all about leveraging the power of these influential individuals and also leveraging the power of technologies that broadcast this word of mouth: email, RSS and more.

Blogs are like amplified email, in the marketing sense. If you can get an influencers your product or service, and they like it, perhaps they'll email 5 friends and tell another 5 later down the line. Now, not only can you get that email trail going, you also have blogs. That same product review goes online and it has the potential to reach hundreds or thousands - it's not just a stagnant webpage that nobody ever sees. It goes directly to readers who trust the advice of the author, and to hundreds more from searches online.

RSS has the power to propel a marketing message to influencers, who then will use RSS to spread word of mouth in many directions, instantly.

Via Alex Barnett

1. Journalists use blogs as tickler files when researching stories.
2. Journalists use blogs as sounding boards
3. Journalists use blogs as digests of the day's news.
4. Journalists don't "flog the blog" - they see blogs as useful websites.

But there's a bit of a dark cloud hanging over true public relations too, because it's built upon the assumption that the message can be controlled or crafted in the first place. One of the more interesting effects of the rise of bloggers and citizen journalists (and, for that matter, "citizen industry analysts"), is that the message is taking on a life of its own and that it's more and more frequently getting into the public eye before the company is ready.

In a world where messages are born, evolve and disseminate without controls, it does beg the question of what's left for a public relations professional. But that's a question for another article, one that would most usefully begin with a few PR professionals explaining what PR is all about to them and their clients, I think.

I've been thinking a lot about advertising .. contextual advertising, primarily ... and thinking of ways to adress the issues in practical ways that make some sense, at least to us.

It's practically an axiom that everybody *hates advertising*, by and large ... at least there is often a large amount of pushback, with many examples given of intrusive or condescending or patronizing (or .. choose your adjectives) advertising. And I number myself, generally, amongst one of its vocal critics.

However, as I have learned more and observed and worked with colleagues on a business model involving advertising at its core, I have begun to notice more acutely my own behaviour with respect to different types of advertising. I have extrapolated from that and thought quite a bit about the design, use and reactions to advertising, both online and offline ... hence my introduction of the notion of *amateur knowledge mechanics* - back to that a bit later.

I have begun to notice that it is television advertising that annoys me the most .. I think because it is directly broadcast visually and without some mechanism and software like TiVo, I don't have much choice and control (as well, a lot of is pretty damn stupid, condescending, and frankly transparently manipulative).

Next most annoying, for much the same reasons, are radio advertisements.

In both cases, it's somebody screaming or acting strange or trying to be punnishly clever to try to get my attention, often with examples of either radical coolness, super-duper excellence or cynical sarcastic humour.

Then , there's magazine and newspaper advertising .. here I can interact a little more. I have more control on the continuum from passive to active, in terms of ignoring (as a part of a blur) most everything that skims past my eyes. I can focus when some interest or thought that I have coincides with something I see .. or sometimes actually look for (mainly in local community newspapers or journals that focus on a specific interest.

And then there's blogging .. advertising has sprouted on blogs via Google AdWords and spread quickly and widely, but it requires a lot of work and an elaborate strategy (or really a lot of traffic) to be anywhere near effective. And more recently some small or smallish new blog-intended services that have sprung up over the past couple of years that have offered rudimentary approached to matching content to context, and thus enhancing pertinence, relevancy and attention - and click-through rates.

Advertising on blogs has been all about context, and everybody knows that .. but / and the tools are still rudimentary. Many of the ads delivered by automated contextual services are only an indirect match, at best. And where there's a better match, it may often be because of a highly focused blog and enough resources to afford a reasonably sophisticated content management system, and someone who knows what they're doing within that system.

But what I've also noticed is that as the ability to advertise with better context and at more granular levels increases .. what we here at Qumana feel is an important aspect of a blogger's choice and control (a blogger who wants to use advertising, please note) .. the click-through rates increase.

The ability to do a good job of *pulling and placing*, as I think it's termed, is largely a function of the inventory of advertising available, and (I believe) the understanding of online advertisers about how to design advertising parsing for context, or using keywords to pull advertising choices out of a database.

As the inventory increses, and as both advertisers and bloggers understand how audiences may or may not appreciate the intelligent placement of online advertising ... in context ... the usefulness of online advertising and the click-through rates (the measure of whther there is any *attention* being paid) should increase.

Here's where *amateur* and *knowledge mechanics* comes in .

Amateur comes from the French aimer, and essentially means *one who loves something* .. for example, a hobby, an activity, a field of study, a discipline or profession ... but is not a *professional*.

Bloggers are amateurs, by and large ... they typically blog about subjects or issues about which they care .. they exercise curiosity, passion, authority, extroversion or introversion, and collaboration in the process. Much is made of all the connecting, and distribution through hyperlink-based pointing to this or linking to that. People are using information to build, to contruct ... together .... a very wide range of useful knowledge in many areas.

While thinking about the process of constructing knowledge, i was struck by Doc Searls' (and others) metaphor of of a DIY Garage. I pictured the blog as the workbench, and the many information manipulation tools people use as the tools humng on the wall of the garage or off the edge of the workbench, etc.

As I stated, bloggers who focus on one or more areas are *amateurs*, typically .. people who have passion or love (or at least care about) what they are blogging about. That much is at least clear. The blogosphere is littered with stories of failed blogging initiatives when they have been too blatantly artificial, or manipulative .. like television advertising (Donald Trump ?). And many bloggers are now part of information and knowledge eco-systems online (let's call them wired tribes) in which they share information, and build knowledge by scaffolding, building layers of meaning through interaction and discourse.

Advertisng on blogs may prove to be an interesting early view of how, online, people will provide, look for and share information about products, services and issues that are meaningful to them. And the better the capabilities in that area ... more inventory, better ways of matching content to context through intelligent parsing and good choice of keywords by bloggers, understanding and respect for audiences ... the less intrusive, less annoying and more effective the advertising will be, for all parties concerned.

This is one of our preoccupations at Quman, and we are hot on the trail of providing as much choice and control to the individual blogger working with her or his voice, content and audience(s).

Wish us well ... please.


.

Update Aug 24:  I decided to repost this with today's date to reflect two things.  First, Arieanna did a great job of putting the Qumana vs Word features in a table.  Second, since this week we released our latest version of Qumana that fixes the nagging Blogger titles problem and allows Blogger users to edit previous posts (just like the other blogging platforms), I think this puts this review in a new light.  When this was written the Blogger titles fix was in the queue.  We couldn't discuss when it might become available—doing so is the classic blunder to curse any release date—and it was a major gap and flaw.  It was then at the top of the queue, but still.  Now it's fixed.  So, I suggest try both apps.  See which one you like better.  And please if you have any more feedback, send it along, I love to hear it.

From Aug 16: Imitation is a sincere form of flattery, isn't it?

Today Biz Stone of Blogger announced a new add-on for MS Word that lets you post directly to Blogger. Bravo!

We've downloaded the add-on and tried it on a few posts on a little test blog I have on Blogger. The install was simple and straight forward; I didn't even need to reboot! Very nice touch.

Launch Word, and there are a few new buttons on the Toolbar (I'm using Word 2003, btw). A Blogger settings button, Open post ... , Save as draft, and Publish ... Simple, clean, straightforward. The Open post and Publish dialogs give you a pull-down menu of your Blogger blogs. Nice.Using this to cross-post to another Blogger blog looks easy. Blogger is certainly trying to make posting easier, but .. .
… it's only for Blogger. And, let's face it, while the HTML sent to Blogger isn't bad, you probably don't want to get too fancy with it. Also, the image I dropped into Word wasn't included in the post and there doesn't seem to be an option to upload one.

Congratulations to Blogger and Google on the effort. But we don't see this as a work-horse for most bloggers.. Word isn't really a simple, light application, and so might represent a degree of overkill when it comes to blogging. Blogger users, even new ones, may grow tired of using Word, whereas something that uses the best features of Word as they pertain to blogging .. and that’s all .. would be more blogger-friendly, if you will.

However, it does have it's place if you have a long Word doc you'd like to publish to Blogger.

Qumana does much of what Word does in terms of the text of a blog post, but has been designed to interact between the Web and the individual blogger’s style of writing and composing in ways that add to and support the individual’s blogging. It may be a better choice for many bloggers, and almost certainly gives you most or all of the functionality Blogger has offered with this new feature ... but for most other blogging platforms as well as Blogger.

Here are some additional things that Qumana does that add value to or support your blogging.

	Blogger for Word	Qumana
Drag n’ drop gathering of microcontent	No/maybe	Yes
Multi-blog publishing	No	Yes
Multiple windows for multiple posts	No	Yes
Image uploading	No/maybe	Yes
Image resizing	No	Yes
Save drafts	Yes	Yes
Edit old posts	Yes	Yes
Light	No/maybe	Yes
Fast	Yes	Yes
Free	Yes	Yes

And don’t forget … we have a number of other easy-to-use and versatile new features coming along that add value specifically to the process of writing and composing blog posts.

Stay tuned.

Update: Tris has posted an update to this post, talking about some more of the conversation going on in the blogosphere surrounding this release. The conversation is turning more critical about the choice to use Word, since it is not overly good at HTML.

Like we state - it's a move in the right direction... but it's only a baby step towards simplification in self publishing. Hopefully our step is a little bit larger.

Technorati Tags: Blogger, Word, Qumana, Blogging

This post by venture capitalist Fred Wilson is pretty much a direct support and affirmation of the core of Qumana's business model.  While the excerpt below doesn't contain the explicit confirmation, elsewhere in the post Fred gets into the effective increases in click-through rates due to placement of adverts, etc.

 

That is all that Word of Blog does rigt now.

I thought it was neat and during our meeting, I posted an ad for Grameen Foundation on this blog via Word of Blog. It's in the upper right side column.

Neither Matt nor I had planned it, but we launched World of Blog that morning because within days, the service was spreading virally.

I have had 499 click thrus on my Grameen ad since then which is 10.4 clicks per day.

For comparison, Adsense has only generated 399 clicks over the same time period.

And there is no fancy contextual targeting engine working at Word of Blog.

The reason this works is that I selected my ad because I believe in Grameen and I give it really good placement on my blog.

Anyone who wants me to promote their cause should post an ad at Word of Blog and I'll run it if I like the cause.

I was curious to see if this would work for commercial ads as well.

 

Here he gets more deeply into the mechanics. 

 

Word of Blog works best for now in the non-profit world because their is no commerce mechanism to get paid for click thrus.

But I am certain that they will build that if the market demands it.

 

This is being built .. we are working hard on it.  He seems very interested in all this, but wasn't so when we contacted him several months ago by email.  Too small a deal and way up there in Canada (never mind that Vancouver has become a real blogging hotspot, with some interesting stuff coming out of here ...  Flickr, Bryght, Qumana, mezzoblue, etc.)

And even more clearly ...

 

I wrote a piece several weeks ago called posting, subscribing, and tagging.

That's what I see Word of Blog doing over time.

Advertisers will post ads.

Bloggers and other publishers will subscribe to them by placing them on their sites.

And people will tag them to make them relevant.

 

What he said .. what we are working towards.

 

Technorati Tags : contextual+advertising, business+models

Thanks to Roland Tanglao for pointing to this.  It's dawning on more and more business people who have thought blogging is just *personal diaries* (as irving points out in his post) that this hyperlinked interconnected environment is not going away any time soon, and that through blogging much expertise is shared, relationships built and (soon) more and more purposeful activity gets done.

Qumana is squarely aimed at making it easy for people to do what they want, and to work easily with content.  An earlier, jargon-y business plan of ours talked about content gathering, assembly, management and publishing ... this is still pertinent, but what we will continue to design and build (with our users' active feedback)  is greater choice and control while enabling bloggers to build relationships with others and make money more easily.

Build relationships, you say ?  Watch for an upcoming release where in addition to the rapid creation and publishing of blog posts (to multiple blogs, of course, the Qumana user will be able to drag and drop content into ... an email message that they can send on its way.

From irvingWladawsky-Berger's blog post titled Blogging, the Web and the Emergence of Collaborative Knowledge

I was honestly taken by surprise by the rise of blogging. My friend John Patrick , with whom I worked very closely at IBM in organizing our Internet initiative, had been telling me for years that blogging was one of the major next big directions for the Internet, right up there with ubiquitous wireless access. I honestly thought that John had lost it, but I now realize I was looking at blogging all wrong and asking all the wrong questions. I thought: "Who wants to read what I have to write when there are so many professional writers, experts in their subjects, publishing countless articles in newspapers, magazines, academic journals and books, let alone all the other stuff appearing every minute on the Web itself?" To me this all felt like an exercise in narcissism, with people writing on whatever subject they chose just to see their name in (electronic) print and get their 15 minutes (or hopefully longer) of fame.

What I had totally missed is that blogging should be viewed as one of the major natural next steps of the Web. The Web's appeal, as we were recently reminded in a very good article by Kevin Kelly in Wired Magazine is bigger, much bigger, than any one web site or web page. It is all about the content. The more content there is on the Web, and the more people access and interact with the content, the more valuable the Web is for everyone. In the early days of the Web, content was expensive to store, hard to find, and relatively difficult to produce, so web sites were put up primarily by businesses and other institutions. But, as computer storage has gotten ridiculously inexpensive, as search capabilities -- enabled by equally inexpensive computing technology -- make it easy to find whatever is out there, and as good tools for creating content become available to everyone, more and more of the content is now being contributed by individuals.

 

Technorati Tags : information+democracy, wirearchy

 

A new player is Blogbeat. Rubel says it "offers a simple way to get your hands on data such as your most popular posts, links/refers, RSS clicks and more." For the moment (and I do mean for the moment) it's free, but the offer is limited to a specific number of users and that number is dwindling fast. (There's a counter on the site showing how many spots are left.) It's also free of ads too!

Via:Business Blog Consulting- Blogbeat, New Analytics