Twitter, twitter

Twitter, twitter

Looking for a fun widget to add to your site? I like the new site called “Twitter.”

On Twitter, you quickly share just a little one liner about what you’re currently up to.� Then it notifies your close friends about what you’re up to.� It’s a nice way to feel connected to someone without feeling like you’re intruding.

Susie has added a Twitter badge to this blog, but your twitter status also gets sent via AIM or GTalk, or can be see on twitter itself.

It’s quick to sign up and fun.� Let me know if you join!

Directly Grabbing RSS Subscribers and Getting Syndicated Through Pheedo RSS Advertising

Pheedo just released a new RSS advertising concept, called FeedPowered Advertising, that helps you generate new subscribers to your RSS feeds using RSS advertising, through Pheedo's RSS advertising network or through other ad networks.

The Key Facts

Their new RSS ad format ...

[a] Displays the latest content items from your RSS feed, including video content with direct "watch" links

[b] Allows the user to also add your content (directly from the ad) to del.icio.us, digg, Reddit, Furl or e-mai it to a friend

How the New Format Integrates DM, PR and Brand

The implications of this are quite strong.

[a] The ad format allows you to syndicate your RSS content to targeted online media, displaying your content there directly to generate more brand awareness, build your credibility and get new readers by actually demonstrating your value

[b] Furthemore, the ad itself contains further syndication options that will virally spread your content through the key social networking sites

[c] The ad functions as a direct subscription generation tool, enabling you to quickly capture new subscribers through other sites ... and actually works towards increasing your conversion rate by first demonstrating the content and so making the subscription decision easier and more educated, thus generating better qualified subscribers/prospects

In essence, the ad format integrates PR, direct marketing and brand advertising.

Is it perfect? While it is an amazing idea, it does need some further refinement.

Further Improvements Needed

[a] Looking at their example on their site using Internet Explorer 7 shows that the feed subscription option in the ad is not highlighted through the IE7 native RSS Reader, making it less intuitive to subscribe

[b] The existing example is clearly targeted to RSS Aware users. But data shows that more than 80% of RSS users are not actually aware of using RSS. The ad format also need to include other subscription options, in addition to the RSS button, such as Add to MyYahoo!

[c] The ad also needs some space at the bottom to better entice viewers to subscribe, using enticing copy and perhaps bribing the viewers to subscribe by offering them a free whitepaper

[d] For direct marketers, the ad format should also allow an in-between data capture window, allowing the direct marketer to capture prospect information prior to being given access to the feed

[e] The next step would be for Pheedo to add additional metrics for advertisers, such as new subscriber retention and long-term customer conversion, and perhaps even the CPO.

If you want to check it out yourself, here's the screenshot (working version available here):

I'm a little biased here, because I've always dug Pheedo work, but in my opinion this is the best RSS advertising development yet ... and finally an RSS advertising tool to generate real results by taking advantage of the power of RSS.

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

Add Video To Web Content Strategy
Online video makes good PR sense

In the wake of  the FCC's issues with VNR's and the growth of YouTube, Internet video is catching on as a way to reachonline viewers.  Witness the launch of Nuance, which got 35,000 views on YouTube from a very targeted audience and MultiVu's work for NVIDIA that got 65,000 viewers off Metacafe, reports PR Week.

Broadcast is not going away anytime soon, but onine video is being seen as an add-on.  And some firms want content specifically for the Internet. 

Travel is perfectly suited for this medium, as research shows  video is driving travel and tourism sales online. Intercontinental hotels just did an innovative series of vidoes with Turn Here using the hotel concierges to talk about the city and the tourist attractions.

What makes a successful Internet video content strategy?

PR week offers these five tips:

• Know your target audience and the outlet that will reach them
• Keep production quality in mind
• Have a strong story
• Don't ignore traditional media
• Post the video on the client's website.

And don't forget to syndicate the video in a media RSS feed.  A media room that doesn't have the press releases, podcasts and videos RSS enabled is fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

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Study Shows Blogs Increase Media Attention for Companies

A Cymfony/Porter Novelli study reports that “the majority of companies surveyed (76%) indicated that they have noticed an increase in media attention and/or website traffic as a result of their blog(s).”

Read more and download the report here.

PR Gets the 'Heads Up' on New Media
Daily 'Dog's survey tips blogs and new media as the top PR trend for 2007

Last year I made the comment that  many PR professionals had their heads in the sand about new media and online PR. 

According to the Daily 'Dog Pulse of PR survey, that's changing..Seems the heads are not only up, they regard this as the number one PR trend for 2007.

What will be the most impacting PR trend to take hold in 2007, asks the current Daily 'Dog survey.

So far the results are:

• 54% - Blogs and other new media will supplant mainstream media as consumers' primary information source                       
• 27% - Online media will continue to splinter into micro-focused granular niche outlets                                       
• 10% - Environmental reputation will become a key PR initiative in the U.S., as it is in Europe                                       
• 9 % - Companies will begin to hire PR for individual projects (rather than as AORs), like in the UK

Is SEO and Online PR training on your agenda this year?

Examples of Yahoo! Pipes in Action to Wet Your Appetite

Yahoo! Pipes is finally back online, and it's certainly something to fall in love with instantly.

I've always been a supporter of NewsMastering for business intelligence and enriching your website, but Pipes simply brings this concept to a whole new level.

The small applications it creates for you can be easily used by any end-user, while the actual "creation" interface still leaves much to be desired. While the interface is relatively easy to grasp and use, and especially powerful, it is not something for people without at least some relational database logic/experience.

Will it be used by end-users to create new content streams on a mass level? Most certainly not. And if the bloggers are calling this a victory for Yahoo!, finally beating Google at being first at something, the entire concept is really waiting here for someone with Google's muscle to take it and make it more user friendly.

But that's not really the point right now. To really understand the power of this service, it's enough to test just a few of the different pipes its users have been creating yesterday.

Here's a quick selection to wet your appetite. To see how they work just click on the pipe name.

Merging all the Official Yahoo! Blogs
Let's start with a simple one. This pipe combines all the official Yahoo! blogs, by tapping into their RSS feeds, and creates a new combined stream of content featuring the latest posts in all of the blogs. This is as basic as it gets, simply combining multiple content sources, without applying any kind of advanced filtering.

Hedge Fund News
This pipe really nicely demonstrates the 101 concept of NewsMastering, tapping into various content sources to bring you the latest news on hedge funds. Either subscribe to the output with your RSS Reader to be constantly updates on latest hedge news, or display this content on your website to enrich it for your visitors and the search engines.

Aggregated News Alerts
Various news engines, like Google News, Yahoo! News, Technorati and others either search through different sections of the internet, or provide different results due to how they capture and rank the content. Using this pipe you can tap into all of them at the same time, performing a keyword search for the latest news and getting the results from all of the sources in a single stream of content.

Latest Blog Mentions Search
This pipe will allow you to search for a keyword in the latest blog mentions around the blogosphere.

Apartment Near Something
Want to find an appartment near a certain location, like the park, opera or similar? This pipe lets you specify which location you would like to find an appartment near, minimum distance from location and the city you're interested in. The pipe gets its content from a single source list, but manipulates the data to help you better reach your objective.

eBay Price Watch
Want to watch a product at eBay, above and under a certain point? With this pipe you can.

Example: Using the Babelfish Module
Yahoo! Pipes is not only about taking existing content and remixing it. This example shows how you can tap into the Bablefish translation service to automatically translate the output you just created to any language supported by the service. My experience with Bablefish's translation accuracy isn't exactly favorable, but it's a good demonstration of the things you can do with Pipes.

Two more things:)

• Thanks to Marjolein Hoekstra of CleverClogs for the pointer. I was so busy with other stuff that I totally missed all the "hype" that was going on around Yahoo! Pipes. Thanks Marjolein!
• Robin Good just did an extensive analysis of Yahoo! Pipes.

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

The Use of the Internet by America’s Newspapers

According to a study of 100 newspapers done by the Bivings Group, “80 of the nation’s top 100 newspapers offered reporter blogs. On 63 of these blogs, readers could comment on posts written by reporters.”

Get the full report. (PDF)

Found this at the Online News Association’s CyberJournalist.net site.

Will Yahoo! Pipes Increase Content Theft?

First of all, I was want to emphasize again that I strongly believe that Yahoo! Pipes is a dream come true for marketers, finally offering us a tool to easily conduct business intelligence and create RSS Radars.

However, the more you think of it, the more obvious all the dangers become obvious.

Sure, these were here before, but never before have they been accessible on a mass scale, for free, and with such ease of use.

Just consider it ...

Yahoo! Pipes gives anyone, with some time on their hands to learn how it works, the power to remix, filter and manipulate third-party content. In essence this means that you can easily take someone elses RSS feed and repurpose their content to best suit your needs and at the same time ignoring the needs of the publisher who is investing time, money and other resources into his content creation.

1. Creating Third-Party RSS Feeds with Your Standalone RSS Ads

Let's get started with something easy. Yahoo! Pipes allows you to combine any amount of XML data sources and filter them to create an output that best matches your needs.

For example, you could take 100 RSS feeds that talk about search engine marketing, combine them, deduplicate the posts, and filter the posts by various keywords to really create a highly focused content stream, for example on optimizing your site for Google.

With the power that Yahoo! Pipes gives you, you could now add your own content, via your own RSS feed, and create an output that mixes all the above feeds on SEM with standalone ads for your SEM services.

Now just promote the RSS feed on your site and start grabbing subscribers. If the RSS feeds you're using as inputs are offering full-text content, your subscribers will be able to read third-party SEM tips from your RSS feed, directly from their RSS Readers, without even taking notice that these articles weren't written by you. But at the same time they would be exposed to your ads, offering your own SEM services.

In essence, using this approach you could leverage the content written by third-party experts, without their permission, to directly build your own brand as an expert and directly generate sales.

The other possibility would be to use the same third-party content, but instead of also publishing ads for your own services, rather publishing paid ads. Again, you would be using third-party content to fuel your own revenues, without the publishers' permissions ... actually directly stealing from them.

2. Adding Ads into Content Items / Removing Native Ads in Content Items

Now, I'm not really 100% certain this is doable (haven't played with the service enough yet), but articles floating around the internet seem to indicate so.

Again, imagine taking the same SEM feeds and creating a new remixed output using them. But this time, you also use Yahoo! Pipes to remove the ads their content items already contained, replacing them with your own.

The result would be a full-text article from an SEM expert, with your SEM services ad directly below the article, taking direct advantage of the article to sell your services ... perhaps even miss-leading the reader that you are the author of the article.

3. Creating Spam Sites

Spam sites are becoming an increasing problem, with unethical webmasters taking advantage of third-party RSS feeds to fully fuel their own sites, in the hopes of targeted content increasing their search engine rankings and serving as a vehicle to drive Google AdSense clicks and revenues.

Yahoo! Pipes now makes this even simpler, actually enabling these webmasters to build full websites of highly relevant and smartly remixed content that will actually provide their visitors with some value and thus even further increase their AdSense revenue potential.

How Can Your Protect Your Content?

Yahoo! Pipes lists 3 ways for publishers to protect their content:

• Configure your web server to block the user agent "Yahoo Pipes"
• Add a "noindex" meta to your RSS feed:
• E-mail pipes-optout@yahoo-inc.com with a list of the feed URLs you want blocked

Of course, the dillema here is that by blocking Yahoo! Pipes in fear of unethical practices you are also blocking acceptable uses of your content by legitimate users and are thus decreasing your content syndication opportunities.

Is It the Tool or the Users?

The four examples are just the tip of the iceberg. With the power of Yahoo! Pipes the "opportunities" for content theft are becoming nearly unlimited.

Of course, this isn't the fault of Yahoo! Pipes. It's just a tool ... and it's in the hands of users what they do with the tool.

Unethical webmasters have actually been doing this for quite some time now even without Yahoo! Pipes. But now they have a stronger tool in their hands, and it's only a question of time when this will hit "the black market mainstream".

What Can Yahoo! Do?

Yahoo! Pipes isn't a problem yet, but when it reaches "the black market mainstream", publishers will start taking notice, and that my create a backslash against Yahoo.

But what can they really do?

• Somewhat limit the level of manipulation you allow with third-party feeds, at least preventing the removal of inline ads
• Create a new RSS element that will allow the RSS feed publisher to request an e-mail notification of Yahoo! Pipes use of his feeds, by simply placing that element in the RSS feed
• Allow the RSS feed publishers to mark their feeds as "Yahoo! Pipes syndication available only on-request", enabling them to authorize the use through the Pipes user interface [this one might be going a little far:)]
• Implement a stringent "no unfair use" policy, immediately blocking users that exhibit such uses

On the other side, adding all of these administrative hurdles to the pipes creation process for the user would greatly dimish the service's mass appeal.

So what's the right way to do it?

Please comment below ...

[you can now post comments, but you will receive an error message after you submit them ... but they will still be published]

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

Why Blogs Are Better Than Email (Part 1)

Instead of spamming all your friends, family, colleagues and enemies with that inspirational message, chain letter, urban myth, or warning about breast cancer you can just post it to your blog. Then we can all just skip that entry instead of having to download and then delete the email message.