Most relevant news, techniques and tools for authors looking to promote their books inexpensively off and online. We refer to and utilize many of the Guerrilla Marketing techniques and have created some of our own geared specifically to book promotion and marketing. Our website is the ground where we put into practice our marketing efforts. Membership is FREE.
Guerrilla Marketers' Cafe
Free Book Promotion Site
Syndicate IQ just announced their RSS ad serving platform that finally brings RSS advertising closer to what "traditional" online advertiers want.
What they're telling right now is:
a] They're able to insert RSS ads into feeds on a per-user basis, regardless of what article the subscriber is currently reading.
b] They can display different versions/formats of the ad, depending on the RSS Reader the subscriber is using.
c] Their RSS ad server integrates with "traditional" online ad servers, centralizing reporting and stats.
More coming on this soon, but until then also read Syndicate IQ's view on the state of RSS advertising, which indicates why the above features are needed.
| 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. |
Yeah, I blundered.
In a recent article I wrote:
"If you've explored the RSS space in more detail you know that free services like FeedBurner allow you to easily place ads in your feeds and measure the feeds themselves, but they require you to direct your visitors to a republished version of your feed on their server."
Quite wrong, as I was kindly corrected by Traci Hailpern from FeedBurner.
Actually, the premium FeedBurner service MyBrand allows you to do exactly that: use all of the benefits of FeedBurner, but instead of directing your visitors to a republished version of your feed on their server, the MyBrand service allows you to serve your feed from your own domain, retaining all the SEO benefits of RSS.
A big "I'm sorry" to you, the readers, and to FeedBurner.
| 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. |
Since I started receiving e-mail about what happened to this site and why it hasn't been updated since my trip to Chicago, here goes:)
1. Two days after I came back from Chicago I held a 5 day workshop for my internet team from Central and Eastern Europe. Doing lectures half of the day, and providing entertainment the other half.
2. Right after the workshop I had to fly to Poland to find a new internet manager for our operation there.
3. My grandfather was recently hospitilized due to heart failiure, which is near fatal at his age, so things have been pretty hecting on the family side of life as well.
4. I'm working on finishing three RSS books and need to finish up all of them shortly. Long-time visitors will remember that when I was finishing "Unleash RSS" back in the end of 2004 I had to take a short break from the site, since it's difficult to write a book and write for a website at the same time.
5. I'm running on a tight deadline to finish a large webstore that is going to be launched accross 20 countries in Central and Eastern Europe this month and promoted with more than 100 hours of daily DRTV airtime.
So, to make a long story short, life and other RSS related and unrelated projects got the better of me.
But not to worry, I promise to get started again in full force early next month:
| 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. |
Email Reaction is another e-mail vendor following the certain trend of RSS going the way of e-mail marketing ... in terms of direct marketing capabilities of course.
Although they're just entering beta testing with their solution, they promise RSS feed personalization, the holy grail for direct marketers, as well as full RSS integration in their software, to make the move towards RSS easier for e-mail marketers.
The first to offer this type of integration and personalization were SilverPop, although it still remain to be seen how Email Reaction will compete with their feature set.
| 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. |
Pheedo today announced their new service, Ads for Feeds, which allows RSS publishers to easily place ads in their RSS feeds, while at the same time gathering RSS metrics and without redirecting traffic to another domain.
If you've explored the RSS space in more detail you know that free services like FeedBurner allow you to easily place ads in your feeds and measure the feeds themselves, but they require you to direct your visitors to a republished version of your feed on their server.
[Update / 2006-05-02] The above statement is actually not quite true, since FeedBurner does allow you to serve your FeedBurner optimized feeds via your own domain. Terribly sorry for the mistake!
What this means is that while you do get the ability to place ads and measure your feeds, you do lose some of the search engine optimization impact of RSS, since your RSS feeds are no longer stationed on your domain.
Pheedo's service on the other hand allows you to keep your feeds on your own domain and take advantage of the service by simply pasting their code in your feeds.
There's a premium + version as well, with more features and more in-depth analytics.
| 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. |
Online visibility and online traffic are, quite naturally, of paramount importance to everyone and anyone marketing or conducting business online, period.
While RSS will not perform as your key tool to improve online visibility and generate more traffic, its importance for helping you do so cannot be disputed.
It will help you:
Deliver Your News to Where It's Searched For: Generate Traffic From RSS Search and Content Aggregation Sites
The fundamental media shift is not only happening between offline and online, but within online itself as well.
Just a few years ago the search engines, the largest portals and news sites, were more or less the central hub of where online users got their online information. They still are today, but are now challenged by the growth of new online search engine and content aggregation website categories.
It's quite simple.
Go to Google, Yahoo! or MSN and do a keyword search. What you get are somewhat the most relevant results for what you're looking for but without a timestamp. Search engines provide results based on universal relevancy and not on recentcy.
But what if you're looking for the latest relevant content, instead of just the most relevant content?
Enter the news engines, content aggregation sites and RSS search engines. Instead of providing results by universal relevancy, these sites provide results by actual recentcy, with of course a better or lower level of relevancy.
The point is that these websites are starting to become the central hub of searching for news online and latest content online.
Google and Yahoo! know it too their own news engines are among the top of breed.
But what if you don't want to search for specifically the latest news or the latest general content, but just want to search for the latest blog posts pertaining to your topic of interest?
Enter blog search engines, which will only return results from blogs. And Google has one as well, although this one is not on top.
And so on
Why this matters to you?
If you want your latest content to be found where people are actually searching for the latest news and other latest content, even video and audio content, you need to start using these new search and aggregation site categories to increase your reach and attract new traffic traffic that is interested in what you have to say right now.
And the RSS connection?
Most of these new services, although not all, rely on RSS to receive the latest content just as it becomes available and then offer it to their visitors.
In many cases, RSS is the key tool that will get you indexed and then found and read, being used to get your content from your website to the service, which will then make it available to the world.
And additionally, you can expect to receive extra traffic from RSS directories, used by people who are proactively searching for new RSS feeds to subscribe to.
| 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. |
Since I started receiving e-mail about what happened to this site and why it hasn't been updated since my trip to Chicago, here goes:)
1. Two days after I came back from Chicago I held a 5 day workshop for my internet team from Central and Eastern Europe. Doing lectures half of the day, and providing entertainment the other half.
2. Right after the workshop I had to fly to Poland to find a new internet manager for our operation there.
3. My grandfather was recently hospitilized due to heart failiure, which is near fatal at his age, so things have been pretty hecting on the family side of life as well.
4. I'm working on finishing three RSS books and need to finish up all of them shortly. Long-time visitors will remember that when I was finishing "Unleash RSS" back in the end of 2004 I had to take a short break from the site, since it's difficult to write a book and write for a website at the same time.
5. I'm running on a tight deadline to finish a large webstore that is going to be launched accross 20 countries in Central and Eastern Europe this month and promoted with more than 100 hours of daily DRTV airtime.
So, to make a long story short, life and other RSS related and unrelated projects got the better of me.
But not to worry, I promise to get started again in full force early next month:
| 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. |
Please help us make the RSS Marketing Survey as comprehensive as possible. All participants get the full survey report, and all the key data will be shared publicly.
1. Please take a few minutes and participate by clicking here.
2. Please share this URL (http://rsspoll.marketingstudies.net) with as many people as you can. Post it on your blog, send it out in your newsletter, mention it to your RSS peers ... :)
Really, the more data we get, the better results we'll be able to provide to you.
The goal of the survey is to research the RSS marketing landscape, collect top RSS marketing case studies and best practices, and find which key factors make successful RSS strategies successful.
BTW - the survey is getting alot of support from many marketers, such as Christopher Knight, RSS Ray, Lee Odden and may others (full list will be published after I return from Chicago).
And today we've just been covered by MarketingSherpa as well:
"If you've tested offering RSS and have any results to share, author/researcher Rok Hrastnik is seeking your input for the second edition of his report on the topic. We like Rok -- he's a genuine and enthusiastic researcher on the topic and worth supporting so the whole community can learn together."
Great thanks to everyone that's helping make the survey a success!
| 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. |
Syndicate Your Content to Other Online Media
Yes, traditional search and news search will get you the visitors that are currently actively searching for specific content, no doubt about it. Those are the visitors that need something specific right now and will use the search engines to get it.
But chances are that your website won't be their first destination after their search, especially if you're not well ranked for the specific keywords these people are looking for. But, they might get to a website that at least partially covers the topic you're covering.
And not all online traffic comes from search.
Much traffic is generated by the e-zines that people subscribe to, by frequent visits to favorite online destinations for specific topics and so on.
The point is, every day online users are visiting websites that have something to do with your topics but these websites are not your websites.
Now consider this fact: Content is best served when contextually relevant to the current online environment of the visitor.
How can you take advantage of this fact?
You can work towards getting your latest headlines, content summaries or even full-text content published on these websites, to increase your online exposure and receive targeted traffic from these websites.
In short, online content syndication is all about delivering your content to other websites and having it re-published there.
Essentially, this is a concept adapted from TV syndication, where TV show producers and TV networks allow other TV networks to run their show for a price. The difference is that in the world of online syndication the coin isn't money, but rather the traffic and exposure you receive by syndicating your online content.
Here are some quick examples:
A cooking website provides an abundance of cooking tips, recipies, reviews and other cooking related content. You on the other hand wrote a book on exotic indian recipies you are now trying to sell online. It's a perfect match. The cooking website is (or should be) looking for new ways to get more credible content for its visitors for free, while you're looking for increased exposure. In this case you could provide that website with your latest selections of exotic indian receipies, perhaps with a new recipe every day. The website would publish your headlines and short summaries of the receipes, and their visitors would need to clickthrough to your site to read more giving you the opportunity to make the sale. Or, the other way to do it, would be to allow the cooking website to display your syndicated content in full, but with an ad at the bottom of your recipies inviting readers to order the book, with a link to the order page.
You're a direct marketing consultancy firm, specializing in direct marketing in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Well, there are dozens of websites covering direct marketing, but none provide direct marketing tips on direct marketing in the CEE region. Although you're not in the publishing business, you could easily provide direct marketing portals with semi-daily commentary on direct marketing in the CEE, tips for marketing in the region, coverage of direct marketing events in the region, legal tips and so on. The portals would better satisfy its visitors by providing them with more unique content, while you could generate new leads from the people that visit your own website after clicking on your headlines.
You're an e-commerce site selling low-priced laptops. What you could do in this case is seek out websites that cover and review low-priced laptops and offer them to re-publish your latest laptop deals and releases, to direct people to your webstore where they can make the order or simply find out more about the laptops promoted, and the website would in turn receive a commission for every product sold through them. This same concept works for any affiliate marketing powered business. If you have affiliates, you can help them generate more sales by providing them with ready made content about your products, such as a list of upcoming seminars and similar.
No matter what industry you're in and what your goals online are, you are almost certain to have your own relevant content that you want re-published in whole or in part on other websites, and you will be sure to find websites that reach the same audience and cover the same or complimentary topics that could be interested in republishing your content.
The key, however, in making all of this work, is contextuallity and relevancy.
The content you wish to distribute must be highly relevant to the audience your prospective syndication partners reach.
The content must be in some context with the website you want it to be available at.
This tactic will not only generate new traffic for you and bring you highly relevant and targeted visitors, but will also help you increase your online credibility, increase your brand recognition and might even help you become established as a thought leader.
But what's the role of RSS in all of this?
RSS has become the de-facto standard for online content syndication.
All you need is to provide an RSS feed with the exact content you want to syndicate, and all the other websites owners need is a way to consume your RSS feed and display its contents on their websites.
Once you update your RSS feed, for example when adding a new news piece, the content on your syndication partners' websites is updated too. If you're syndicating content to a thousand other websites, all of them will receive the same updated version at the same time you update your RSS feed. Easy, simple, cheap and streamlined.
And because this is a standard there are now countless tools available to make this process easy for everyone involved.
| 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. |
Guerrilla Marketers' Cafe
Free Book Promotion Site
Guerrilla Marketers' Cafe
Free Book Promotion Site
Syndicate Your Content to Other Online Media
Yes, traditional search and news search will get you the visitors that are currently actively searching for specific content, no doubt about it. Those are the visitors that need something specific right now and will use the search engines to get it.
But chances are that your website won't be their first destination after their search, especially if you're not well ranked for the specific keywords these people are looking for. But, they might get to a website that at least partially covers the topic you're covering.
And not all online traffic comes from search.
Much traffic is generated by the e-zines that people subscribe to, by frequent visits to favorite online destinations for specific topics and so on.
The point is, every day online users are visiting websites that have something to do with your topics but these websites are not your websites.
Now consider this fact: Content is best served when contextually relevant to the current online environment of the visitor.
How can you take advantage of this fact?
You can work towards getting your latest headlines, content summaries or even full-text content published on these websites, to increase your online exposure and receive targeted traffic from these websites.
In short, online content syndication is all about delivering your content to other websites and having it re-published there.
Essentially, this is a concept adapted from TV syndication, where TV show producers and TV networks allow other TV networks to run their show for a price. The difference is that in the world of online syndication the coin isn't money, but rather the traffic and exposure you receive by syndicating your online content.
Here are some quick examples:
A cooking website provides an abundance of cooking tips, recipies, reviews and other cooking related content. You on the other hand wrote a book on exotic indian recipies you are now trying to sell online. It's a perfect match. The cooking website is (or should be) looking for new ways to get more credible content for its visitors for free, while you're looking for increased exposure. In this case you could provide that website with your latest selections of exotic indian receipies, perhaps with a new recipe every day. The website would publish your headlines and short summaries of the receipes, and their visitors would need to clickthrough to your site to read more giving you the opportunity to make the sale. Or, the other way to do it, would be to allow the cooking website to display your syndicated content in full, but with an ad at the bottom of your recipies inviting readers to order the book, with a link to the order page.
You're a direct marketing consultancy firm, specializing in direct marketing in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Well, there are dozens of websites covering direct marketing, but none provide direct marketing tips on direct marketing in the CEE region. Although you're not in the publishing business, you could easily provide direct marketing portals with semi-daily commentary on direct marketing in the CEE, tips for marketing in the region, coverage of direct marketing events in the region, legal tips and so on. The portals would better satisfy its visitors by providing them with more unique content, while you could generate new leads from the people that visit your own website after clicking on your headlines.
You're an e-commerce site selling low-priced laptops. What you could do in this case is seek out websites that cover and review low-priced laptops and offer them to re-publish your latest laptop deals and releases, to direct people to your webstore where they can make the order or simply find out more about the laptops promoted, and the website would in turn receive a commission for every product sold through them. This same concept works for any affiliate marketing powered business. If you have affiliates, you can help them generate more sales by providing them with ready made content about your products, such as a list of upcoming seminars and similar.
No matter what industry you're in and what your goals online are, you are almost certain to have your own relevant content that you want re-published in whole or in part on other websites, and you will be sure to find websites that reach the same audience and cover the same or complimentary topics that could be interested in republishing your content.
The key, however, in making all of this work, is contextuallity and relevancy.
The content you wish to distribute must be highly relevant to the audience your prospective syndication partners reach.
The content must be in some context with the website you want it to be available at.
This tactic will not only generate new traffic for you and bring you highly relevant and targeted visitors, but will also help you increase your online credibility, increase your brand recognition and might even help you become established as a thought leader.
But what's the role of RSS in all of this?
RSS has become the de-facto standard for online content syndication.
All you need is to provide an RSS feed with the exact content you want to syndicate, and all the other websites owners need is a way to consume your RSS feed and display its contents on their websites.
Once you update your RSS feed, for example when adding a new news piece, the content on your syndication partners' websites is updated too. If you're syndicating content to a thousand other websites, all of them will receive the same updated version at the same time you update your RSS feed. Easy, simple, cheap and streamlined.
And because this is a standard there are now countless tools available to make this process easy for everyone involved.
| 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. |
Would you like to compare your RSS marketing results with those of your peers?
Are you interested in the RSS industry average benchmark metrics?
Would you like to get top RSS marketing tips from those that are actually doing it?
Participate in the 2006 RSS Marketing Survey, share your own insights, experiences and data ... and then receive a free copy of the report with all the data to compare your numbers, as well as receive RSS marketing best practices.
Also, if you care to share your own RSS marketing case study, it will be featured in the 2006 edition of Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS, critically acclaimed as the "best and most comprehensive guide on RSS for marketers".
For more information and to participate, please click here now.
And, if you can, please share this survey with as many marketers as you can, since that will provide us with a much better research sample ...
... and at the same time provide you with much better benchmark metrics, as well as more comprehensive RSS marketing tips and experiences.
Simply share this URL:
http://rsspoll.marketingstudies.net
Participate by clicking here now.
| 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. |
In terms of delivering content to your subscribers, RSS is best used as a supplementary channel to e-mail, making all of your e-mail content available via RSS as well.
It's no surprise that e-mail marketing vendors are starting to work with RSS vendors to help bring these two channels closer together.
The latest comes from Nooked, one of the higher-end RSS marketing tool vendors, and Infacta, vendors of GroupMail, a great desktop e-mail marketing tool.
Their integration ...
a] allows GroupMail and Nooked users to insert RSS feed items into e-mail messages,
b] insert e-mail messages via GroupMail into Nooked,
c] generate and deliver unique subscription links to Nooked-generated RSS feeds via GroupMail, to allow for full user tracking.
On the surface, these 3 benefits help e-mail marketers save time when duplicating their efforts to RSS, and even more importantly, allow them to easily promote trackable RSS feeds to their e-mail subscribers.
| 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. |
Online visibility and online traffic are, quite naturally, of paramount importance to everyone and anyone marketing or conducting business online, period.
While RSS will not perform as your key tool to improve online visibility and generate more traffic, its importance for helping you do so cannot be disputed.
It will help you:
Deliver Your News to Where It's Searched For: Generate Traffic From RSS Search and Content Aggregation Sites
The fundamental media shift is not only happening between offline and online, but within online itself as well.
Just a few years ago the search engines, the largest portals and news sites, were more or less the central hub of where online users got their online information. They still are today, but are now challenged by the growth of new online search engine and content aggregation website categories.
It's quite simple.
Go to Google, Yahoo! or MSN and do a keyword search. What you get are somewhat the most relevant results for what you're looking for but without a timestamp. Search engines provide results based on universal relevancy and not on recentcy.
But what if you're looking for the latest relevant content, instead of just the most relevant content?
Enter the news engines, content aggregation sites and RSS search engines. Instead of providing results by universal relevancy, these sites provide results by actual recentcy, with of course a better or lower level of relevancy.
The point is that these websites are starting to become the central hub of searching for news online and latest content online.
Google and Yahoo! know it too their own news engines are among the top of breed.
But what if you don't want to search for specifically the latest news or the latest general content, but just want to search for the latest blog posts pertaining to your topic of interest?
Enter blog search engines, which will only return results from blogs. And Google has one as well, although this one is not on top.
And so on
Why this matters to you?
If you want your latest content to be found where people are actually searching for the latest news and other latest content, even video and audio content, you need to start using these new search and aggregation site categories to increase your reach and attract new traffic traffic that is interested in what you have to say right now.
And the RSS connection?
Most of these new services, although not all, rely on RSS to receive the latest content just as it becomes available and then offer it to their visitors.
In many cases, RSS is the key tool that will get you indexed and then found and read, being used to get your content from your website to the service, which will then make it available to the world.
And additionally, you can expect to receive extra traffic from RSS directories, used by people who are proactively searching for new RSS feeds to subscribe to.
| 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. |
Just a quick update for existing Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS customers ... if you haven't received the message yet.
We just released the preview of the 2006 edition, with the first two sections. The preview (and the full version, once it comes out) is available to you for free, of course.
Just drop me an e-mail at rok.hrastnik@marketingstudies.net --- if you haven't received it yet.
And you'll certainly want to do so, since this isn't simply an upgrade, but a whole new e-book, with more easy-to-follow RSS marketing instructions than ever before.
| 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. |
Guerrilla Marketers' Cafe
Free Book Promotion Site
Guerrilla Marketers' Cafe
Free Book Promotion Site
Since I started receiving e-mail about what happened to this site and why it hasn't been updated since my trip to Chicago, here goes:)
1. Two days after I came back from Chicago I held a 5 day workshop for my internet team from Central and Eastern Europe. Doing lectures half of the day, and providing entertainment the other half.
2. Right after the workshop I had to fly to Poland to find a new internet manager for our operation there.
3. My grandfather was recently hospitilized due to heart failiure, which is near fatal at his age, so things have been pretty hecting on the family side of life as well.
4. I'm working on finishing three RSS books and need to finish up all of them shortly. Long-time visitors will remember that when I was finishing "Unleash RSS" back in the end of 2004 I had to take a short break from the site, since it's difficult to write a book and write for a website at the same time.
5. I'm running on a tight deadline to finish a large webstore that is going to be launched accross 20 countries in Central and Eastern Europe this month and promoted with more than 100 hours of daily DRTV airtime.
So, to make a long story short, life and other RSS related and unrelated projects got the better of me.
But not to worry, I promise to get started again in full force early next month:
| 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. |
Online visibility and online traffic are, quite naturally, of paramount importance to everyone and anyone marketing or conducting business online, period.
While RSS will not perform as your key tool to improve online visibility and generate more traffic, its importance for helping you do so cannot be disputed.
It will help you:
Deliver Your News to Where It's Searched For: Generate Traffic From RSS Search and Content Aggregation Sites
The fundamental media shift is not only happening between offline and online, but within online itself as well.
Just a few years ago the search engines, the largest portals and news sites, were more or less the central hub of where online users got their online information. They still are today, but are now challenged by the growth of new online search engine and content aggregation website categories.
It's quite simple.
Go to Google, Yahoo! or MSN and do a keyword search. What you get are somewhat the most relevant results for what you're looking for but without a timestamp. Search engines provide results based on universal relevancy and not on recentcy.
But what if you're looking for the latest relevant content, instead of just the most relevant content?
Enter the news engines, content aggregation sites and RSS search engines. Instead of providing results by universal relevancy, these sites provide results by actual recentcy, with of course a better or lower level of relevancy.
The point is that these websites are starting to become the central hub of searching for news online and latest content online.
Google and Yahoo! know it too their own news engines are among the top of breed.
But what if you don't want to search for specifically the latest news or the latest general content, but just want to search for the latest blog posts pertaining to your topic of interest?
Enter blog search engines, which will only return results from blogs. And Google has one as well, although this one is not on top.
And so on
Why this matters to you?
If you want your latest content to be found where people are actually searching for the latest news and other latest content, even video and audio content, you need to start using these new search and aggregation site categories to increase your reach and attract new traffic traffic that is interested in what you have to say right now.
And the RSS connection?
Most of these new services, although not all, rely on RSS to receive the latest content just as it becomes available and then offer it to their visitors.
In many cases, RSS is the key tool that will get you indexed and then found and read, being used to get your content from your website to the service, which will then make it available to the world.
And additionally, you can expect to receive extra traffic from RSS directories, used by people who are proactively searching for new RSS feeds to subscribe to.
| 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. |
Syndicate IQ just announced their RSS ad serving platform that finally brings RSS advertising closer to what "traditional" online advertiers want.
What they're telling right now is:
a] They're able to insert RSS ads into feeds on a per-user basis, regardless of what article the subscriber is currently reading.
b] They can display different versions/formats of the ad, depending on the RSS Reader the subscriber is using.
c] Their RSS ad server integrates with "traditional" online ad servers, centralizing reporting and stats.
More coming on this soon, but until then also read Syndicate IQ's view on the state of RSS advertising, which indicates why the above features are needed.
| 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. |
Syndicate Your Content to Other Online Media
Yes, traditional search and news search will get you the visitors that are currently actively searching for specific content, no doubt about it. Those are the visitors that need something specific right now and will use the search engines to get it.
But chances are that your website won't be their first destination after their search, especially if you're not well ranked for the specific keywords these people are looking for. But, they might get to a website that at least partially covers the topic you're covering.
And not all online traffic comes from search.
Much traffic is generated by the e-zines that people subscribe to, by frequent visits to favorite online destinations for specific topics and so on.
The point is, every day online users are visiting websites that have something to do with your topics but these websites are not your websites.
Now consider this fact: Content is best served when contextually relevant to the current online environment of the visitor.
How can you take advantage of this fact?
You can work towards getting your latest headlines, content summaries or even full-text content published on these websites, to increase your online exposure and receive targeted traffic from these websites.
In short, online content syndication is all about delivering your content to other websites and having it re-published there.
Essentially, this is a concept adapted from TV syndication, where TV show producers and TV networks allow other TV networks to run their show for a price. The difference is that in the world of online syndication the coin isn't money, but rather the traffic and exposure you receive by syndicating your online content.
Here are some quick examples:
A cooking website provides an abundance of cooking tips, recipies, reviews and other cooking related content. You on the other hand wrote a book on exotic indian recipies you are now trying to sell online. It's a perfect match. The cooking website is (or should be) looking for new ways to get more credible content for its visitors for free, while you're looking for increased exposure. In this case you could provide that website with your latest selections of exotic indian receipies, perhaps with a new recipe every day. The website would publish your headlines and short summaries of the receipes, and their visitors would need to clickthrough to your site to read more giving you the opportunity to make the sale. Or, the other way to do it, would be to allow the cooking website to display your syndicated content in full, but with an ad at the bottom of your recipies inviting readers to order the book, with a link to the order page.
You're a direct marketing consultancy firm, specializing in direct marketing in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Well, there are dozens of websites covering direct marketing, but none provide direct marketing tips on direct marketing in the CEE region. Although you're not in the publishing business, you could easily provide direct marketing portals with semi-daily commentary on direct marketing in the CEE, tips for marketing in the region, coverage of direct marketing events in the region, legal tips and so on. The portals would better satisfy its visitors by providing them with more unique content, while you could generate new leads from the people that visit your own website after clicking on your headlines.
You're an e-commerce site selling low-priced laptops. What you could do in this case is seek out websites that cover and review low-priced laptops and offer them to re-publish your latest laptop deals and releases, to direct people to your webstore where they can make the order or simply find out more about the laptops promoted, and the website would in turn receive a commission for every product sold through them. This same concept works for any affiliate marketing powered business. If you have affiliates, you can help them generate more sales by providing them with ready made content about your products, such as a list of upcoming seminars and similar.
No matter what industry you're in and what your goals online are, you are almost certain to have your own relevant content that you want re-published in whole or in part on other websites, and you will be sure to find websites that reach the same audience and cover the same or complimentary topics that could be interested in republishing your content.
The key, however, in making all of this work, is contextuallity and relevancy.
The content you wish to distribute must be highly relevant to the audience your prospective syndication partners reach.
The content must be in some context with the website you want it to be available at.
This tactic will not only generate new traffic for you and bring you highly relevant and targeted visitors, but will also help you increase your online credibility, increase your brand recognition and might even help you become established as a thought leader.
But what's the role of RSS in all of this?
RSS has become the de-facto standard for online content syndication.
All you need is to provide an RSS feed with the exact content you want to syndicate, and all the other websites owners need is a way to consume your RSS feed and display its contents on their websites.
Once you update your RSS feed, for example when adding a new news piece, the content on your syndication partners' websites is updated too. If you're syndicating content to a thousand other websites, all of them will receive the same updated version at the same time you update your RSS feed. Easy, simple, cheap and streamlined.
And because this is a standard there are now countless tools available to make this process easy for everyone involved.
| 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. |
In terms of delivering content to your subscribers, RSS is best used as a supplementary channel to e-mail, making all of your e-mail content available via RSS as well.
It's no surprise that e-mail marketing vendors are starting to work with RSS vendors to help bring these two channels closer together.
The latest comes from Nooked, one of the higher-end RSS marketing tool vendors, and Infacta, vendors of GroupMail, a great desktop e-mail marketing tool.
Their integration ...
a] allows GroupMail and Nooked users to insert RSS feed items into e-mail messages,
b] insert e-mail messages via GroupMail into Nooked,
c] generate and deliver unique subscription links to Nooked-generated RSS feeds via GroupMail, to allow for full user tracking.
On the surface, these 3 benefits help e-mail marketers save time when duplicating their efforts to RSS, and even more importantly, allow them to easily promote trackable RSS feeds to their e-mail subscribers.
| 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. |
Just a quick update for existing Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS customers ... if you haven't received the message yet.
We just released the preview of the 2006 edition, with the first two sections. The preview (and the full version, once it comes out) is available to you for free, of course.
Just drop me an e-mail at rok.hrastnik@marketingstudies.net --- if you haven't received it yet.
And you'll certainly want to do so, since this isn't simply an upgrade, but a whole new e-book, with more easy-to-follow RSS marketing instructions than ever before.
| 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. |
Pheedo today announced their new service, Ads for Feeds, which allows RSS publishers to easily place ads in their RSS feeds, while at the same time gathering RSS metrics and without redirecting traffic to another domain.
If you've explored the RSS space in more detail you know that free services like FeedBurner allow you to easily place ads in your feeds and measure the feeds themselves, but they require you to direct your visitors to a republished version of your feed on their server.
[Update / 2006-05-02] The above statement is actually not quite true, since FeedBurner does allow you to serve your FeedBurner optimized feeds via your own domain. Terribly sorry for the mistake!
What this means is that while you do get the ability to place ads and measure your feeds, you do lose some of the search engine optimization impact of RSS, since your RSS feeds are no longer stationed on your domain.
Pheedo's service on the other hand allows you to keep your feeds on your own domain and take advantage of the service by simply pasting their code in your feeds.
There's a premium + version as well, with more features and more in-depth analytics.
| 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. |
My greatest gripe against RSS marketing initiatives is that they're just poorly done.
You have a great company with an amazing product database that just calls for customized feeds ... and all you get from their RSS feeds are one-size-fits-all packages.
Really a waste. No one wants to receive updates on all US flights ... they just want to receive updates on the flights that really interest them. And here's the real power of RSS: bringing the most relevant content.
Expedia seems to understand that, at least based on their new RSS offering.
They allow you to customize your feed with Trip Type, your originating city, your destination and your package type.
Well, they could still do alot more, such as providing the option of selecting a price range, but it's a good beginning.
| 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. |
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The digital PR space is hot right now. You see articles about online PR, blogs and social media in practically every mainstream newspaper and trade magazine.
One of the reasons is that it is a fast paced environment and there are always new ideas to report on - two years ago there was no YouTube or Del.icio.us And two years ago PR people were not as interested in finding out about the shifts in media consumption.
Bulldog Reporter's PR University has been plotting a course through this morass for PR practitioners and their Advanced PR tech workshops this week really got to the heart of online PR.
The New York seminar on Friday was filled to capacity, with both young PR people and old school stalwarts.
The sessions covered blogging, social media (tagging, sharing content, RSS. content syndication and bookmarking), online news and search, and how to measure these new online PR practices.
The recent high profile online PR and blogging debacles have shown that it is vital to get as much data about how to do digital SEO-PR as you can. Find someone who can demonstrate that they really know what they are doing and get your staff up to speed on these new ideas.
Many of the rules remain the same, but some are radically different. And if you violate those rules the backlash is instant and lasts far longer than in any other medium.
One analyst interviewed on TV about the John Kerry comments in San Diego remarked that with the advent of social media, and the ablity to post online immediately from a cell phone, a politcal blunder will be on YouTube before the speech is even finished. ValleyWag showed this comparison of the traffic on YouTube and MySpace
Mainstream media cannot work that fast. And instead of being seen by thousands it is now seen by millions.
While the online PR world may look like a very scary place, there are just as many opportunities for positive PR - if you know how to do it.
econsultancy wrote a great article about why so few businesses in the UK use online PR. Their conclusion?
"The fact is that most PR agencies are not even vaguely qualified to advise you on blogging, or even about online PR."
If you are in the San Francisco area, don't miss next Friday's workshop.
You know you're making your mark when a media stalwart like Reuters pays millions of dollars for a share in a blog distribution start up. Social media could ask for no better endorsement .
Reuters has invested $7 million in Pluck, the world's biggest blog syndication network, called BlogBurst. BlogBurst connects newspapers and other media sites to 2,800 selected blogs, helping traditional media supplement their journalism with blog viewpoints, says the official announcement.
Web logs, or blogs, have become a major source of commentary and reader feedback on the Internet. Traditional media have increasingly turned to blogs for insight and analysis, says Reuters.
If you're still wondering whether a blog could be a good media relations and PR tool, perhaps this is the final push you need.
Of course Reuters won't be indexing just any blog. "Selected blogs" is the key phrase here. Technorati indexes millions of blogs and the number doubles every 6 months.
Pluck syndicates 2800.
In real estate the mantra is location, location, location. You need to think content, content, content.
They want blogs that offer insight and analysis - interesting content their readers will want to consume.
Keep in mind the eMarketer findings on why people read blogs - the number one reason is "to get news and information I can't find elsewhere."
Provide that in your blog and you'll have a good chance of making the cut.
Like Americans, Europeans and Asians have become fervent bloggers, says the International Herald Tribune.
Many American brands, and some brands of other countries, are starting to include blogs in their marketing plans, using PR at a much earlier stage. By the time of the official "launch," a product may already have been slipped into the hands of bloggers several months before. Feedback from their online discussions with other devotees can help inform a marketer's subsequent advertising and media strategy.
One example of a soft launch using online content and bloggers is SkinMD Natural, a shielding lotion. The results caught the attention of PR Week.
But other companies are not as blog savvy. When Olay launched their Life in Close Up campaign for Olay Definity, the media bash did not include any beauty bloggers.
A search in Blog Pulse shows a few bloggers offering their free sample of Definity. With a better online brand strategy they could have had much more buzz in the bogs.
"A year ago, brands were saying, 'Oh no, not the blogosphere,'" said Peter Hirshberg, chief executive of Technorati."Now they re saying, this is a great opportunity."
Inclue!, just released a couple of days ago, is a new breed of mass-market branded RSS Reader ... which integrates into Outlook (to consume RSS content), as well as Internet Explorer and FireFox (to directly subscribe to RSS feeds while surfing).
But why a new breed of branded Reader?
a] It integrates with Outlook, which most other branded RSS Readers don't (usually either web-based or desktop applications)
b] Publishers can create their own branded version (unfortunatelly only with their own feeds right now) in 5 minutes, and then distribute it via their Inclue! landing page, which is also automatically generated.
c] Publishers that sign-up for their affiliate program receive a commission when end-users decide to upgrade their Reader to the premium version.
d] The Include! Reader is based on viral methods to further spread your RSS feeds and help you get new subscribers, for example using the FeedBurner Flare tool to entice your RSS subscribers to get your branded Inclue! Reader. Similar links are also displayed when a user forwards an RSS feed item to his friends via Inclue!
To see how it works, take a look at my quick version (just a demo, haven't included all the feeds, a decent description and so on).
Inclue! also does a great job of promoting RSS to end-users, giving them concrete benefits of how RSS will actually help them ... from tracking eBay auctions to getting job notifications. Just take a look at the link above.
Essentially, the Reader is targeted at new RSS users, giving them simple functions, especially with their ease of subscribing to feeds with just one click.
Now I'm just waiting for them to add visual branding possibilities ... :)
| 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. |
Would you like to compare your RSS marketing results with those of your peers?
Are you interested in the RSS industry average benchmark metrics?
Would you like to get top RSS marketing tips from those that are actually doing it?
Participate in the 2006 RSS Marketing Survey, share your own insights, experiences and data ... and then receive a free copy of the report with all the data to compare your numbers, as well as receive RSS marketing best practices.
Also, if you care to share your own RSS marketing case study, it will be featured in the 2006 edition of Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS, critically acclaimed as the "best and most comprehensive guide on RSS for marketers".
For more information and to participate, please click here now.
And, if you can, please share this survey with as many marketers as you can, since that will provide us with a much better research sample ...
... and at the same time provide you with much better benchmark metrics, as well as more comprehensive RSS marketing tips and experiences.
Simply share this URL:
http://rsspoll.marketingstudies.net
Participate by clicking here now.
| 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. |
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Pheedo, iUpload and PRWeb hosted the 2nd RSS Industry Night Roundtable last week, taking place next to the Ad:Tech event.
This time unfortunatelly I wasn't able to make it, nor will I be able to make the next one at the Syndicate Conference May 15th:(, since I'm speaking at the ACCM conference in Chicago next week and just don't have enough time to stay in the US for 2 weeks.
A pitty ...
Anyway, this time round the industry night focused more on RSS adoption and how IE7 is going to influence it.
The most interesting comment comes from David Gillmor who believes that people won't really use RSS via IE7, but will rather opt-in for web-based RSS Readers.
Also much discussion about RSS advertising, where the people from ClickZ shared concernes that RSS advertising just isn't worth selling ... yet.
For more coverage visit Pheedo's blog, ClickZ Blog and The 360 blog.
To get the scoup on the 1st roundtable, click here.
| 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. |
Since I started receiving e-mail about what happened to this site and why it hasn't been updated since my trip to Chicago, here goes:)
1. Two days after I came back from Chicago I held a 5 day workshop for my internet team from Central and Eastern Europe. Doing lectures half of the day, and providing entertainment the other half.
2. Right after the workshop I had to fly to Poland to find a new internet manager for our operation there.
3. My grandfather was recently hospitilized due to heart failiure, which is near fatal at his age, so things have been pretty hecting on the family side of life as well.
4. I'm working on finishing three RSS books and need to finish up all of them shortly. Long-time visitors will remember that when I was finishing "Unleash RSS" back in the end of 2004 I had to take a short break from the site, since it's difficult to write a book and write for a website at the same time.
5. I'm running on a tight deadline to finish a large webstore that is going to be launched accross 20 countries in Central and Eastern Europe this month and promoted with more than 100 hours of daily DRTV airtime.
So, to make a long story short, life and other RSS related and unrelated projects got the better of me.
But not to worry, I promise to get started again in full force early next month:
| 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. |
Please help us make the RSS Marketing Survey as comprehensive as possible. All participants get the full survey report, and all the key data will be shared publicly.
1. Please take a few minutes and participate by clicking here.
2. Please share this URL (http://rsspoll.marketingstudies.net) with as many people as you can. Post it on your blog, send it out in your newsletter, mention it to your RSS peers ... :)
Really, the more data we get, the better results we'll be able to provide to you.
The goal of the survey is to research the RSS marketing landscape, collect top RSS marketing case studies and best practices, and find which key factors make successful RSS strategies successful.
BTW - the survey is getting alot of support from many marketers, such as Christopher Knight, RSS Ray, Lee Odden and may others (full list will be published after I return from Chicago).
And today we've just been covered by MarketingSherpa as well:
"If you've tested offering RSS and have any results to share, author/researcher Rok Hrastnik is seeking your input for the second edition of his report on the topic. We like Rok -- he's a genuine and enthusiastic researcher on the topic and worth supporting so the whole community can learn together."
Great thanks to everyone that's helping make the survey a success!
| 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. |
Would you like to compare your RSS marketing results with those of your peers?
Are you interested in the RSS industry average benchmark metrics?
Would you like to get top RSS marketing tips from those that are actually doing it?
Participate in the 2006 RSS Marketing Survey, share your own insights, experiences and data ... and then receive a free copy of the report with all the data to compare your numbers, as well as receive RSS marketing best practices.
Also, if you care to share your own RSS marketing case study, it will be featured in the 2006 edition of Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS, critically acclaimed as the "best and most comprehensive guide on RSS for marketers".
For more information and to participate, please click here now.
And, if you can, please share this survey with as many marketers as you can, since that will provide us with a much better research sample ...
... and at the same time provide you with much better benchmark metrics, as well as more comprehensive RSS marketing tips and experiences.
Simply share this URL:
http://rsspoll.marketingstudies.net
Participate by clicking here now.
| 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. |
Online visibility and online traffic are, quite naturally, of paramount importance to everyone and anyone marketing or conducting business online, period.
While RSS will not perform as your key tool to improve online visibility and generate more traffic, its importance for helping you do so cannot be disputed.
It will help you:
Deliver Your News to Where It's Searched For: Generate Traffic From RSS Search and Content Aggregation Sites
The fundamental media shift is not only happening between offline and online, but within online itself as well.
Just a few years ago the search engines, the largest portals and news sites, were more or less the central hub of where online users got their online information. They still are today, but are now challenged by the growth of new online search engine and content aggregation website categories.
It's quite simple.
Go to Google, Yahoo! or MSN and do a keyword search. What you get are somewhat the most relevant results for what you're looking for but without a timestamp. Search engines provide results based on universal relevancy and not on recentcy.
But what if you're looking for the latest relevant content, instead of just the most relevant content?
Enter the news engines, content aggregation sites and RSS search engines. Instead of providing results by universal relevancy, these sites provide results by actual recentcy, with of course a better or lower level of relevancy.
The point is that these websites are starting to become the central hub of searching for news online and latest content online.
Google and Yahoo! know it too their own news engines are among the top of breed.
But what if you don't want to search for specifically the latest news or the latest general content, but just want to search for the latest blog posts pertaining to your topic of interest?
Enter blog search engines, which will only return results from blogs. And Google has one as well, although this one is not on top.
And so on
Why this matters to you?
If you want your latest content to be found where people are actually searching for the latest news and other latest content, even video and audio content, you need to start using these new search and aggregation site categories to increase your reach and attract new traffic traffic that is interested in what you have to say right now.
And the RSS connection?
Most of these new services, although not all, rely on RSS to receive the latest content just as it becomes available and then offer it to their visitors.
In many cases, RSS is the key tool that will get you indexed and then found and read, being used to get your content from your website to the service, which will then make it available to the world.
And additionally, you can expect to receive extra traffic from RSS directories, used by people who are proactively searching for new RSS feeds to subscribe to.
| 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. |
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Free Book Promotion Site
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Free Book Promotion Site
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Free Book Promotion Site
Guerrilla Marketers' Cafe
Free Book Promotion Site
For those of you who don't know about BookPromo Guerrilla Style eZine please check this week's issue contents. BookPromo is a bi-weekly ezine with authors in mind. Just like this blog is looking to provide continuos book marketing and technology that will assist us online. The ezine provides timely reports, articles, links and opinions of those who actively promote their own work. Don't miss this issue and sign up for your free subscription.
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If you haven't heard about the Walmart Edelman PR blog debacle, read Dave Taylor's post over at Business Blog Consulting.
Bloggers are a strange bunch: while we will skewer you if you're not honest and open, we are quite forgiving once you admit you screwed up.
I say hats off to Dave for holding the line. A quick apology from Edelman is not good enough. The tone of a group is always set up the top. And like Caesar's wife, the executives of a group like WOMMA have to be above reproach.
When one of the perceived 'best' makes a mistake like this - violates the basic rules of blogging and Word of Mouth Marketing and there is no repercussion - it's a big blunder.
And there are indeed aspects that don't ring true. Why would Rubel not be involved in a blog project for such a big client? Who was involved? Who will take the heat? Anyone - or no-one?
It will be interesting to see how they handle it going forward. One comment that does ring true - their staff definitely needs more PR 2.0 training.
As a traditonal PR stunt this would be a great idea. And everyone would know the client and the PR agency were behind it. But in the blogging world it doesn't fly. And PR agencies need to learn the difference.
Market research firm Compete has released a report on the convergence of social networking and e-commerce, reorts ClickZ. In the process they tried to coin a new buzzword: “social commerce,” or s-commerce for short.
Whatever you call it the numbers add up:
Consumer visits to social networking sites have increased 109 percent since January 2004, and page views per visitor have grown by 414 percent in the same time period.
"Social networkers” spend less time viewing traditional media, have more discretionary income and prefer online shopping than non-social networking site users.
The social media elements making the most impact are:
branded micro-sites, customer reviews, forums, peer-to-peer transactions, product blogs and user-generated content projects
And the key to social media success is listening to your customers, says the report.
“Companies would be better served to build online forums on their sites, micro sites that support their brand, or explore other ways to get consumers to participate with them versus going to social networks to find more consumers,” said Stephen DiMarco, VP of marketing at Compete.
He suggests that savvy CMOs should reexamine where their budget is being allocated for 2007.
He advised that marketers should look at how to redirect the dollars into more research and customer focused marketing.
Don't be misled by the perception that MySpace is a place where teenagers hang out. More than half the visitors to the popular social network site are now 35 or over--up from less than 40 percent last year, reports comScore Media Metrix.
The comScore research compared audience demographics among top social sites, aiming to dispel the notion that they are the exclusive domain of teens. In fact, MySpace is increasingly becoming a mainstream Internet portal, finds the report. This makes it an attractive site for advertisers.
Using social networking sites like MySpace as part of your Internet marketing strategy needs a delicate touch. It is possible to post content that will attract thousands of 'friends' on MySpace. It just has to be done right.
Like Americans, Europeans and Asians have become fervent bloggers, says the International Herald Tribune.
Many American brands, and some brands of other countries, are starting to include blogs in their marketing plans, using PR at a much earlier stage. By the time of the official "launch," a product may already have been slipped into the hands of bloggers several months before. Feedback from their online discussions with other devotees can help inform a marketer's subsequent advertising and media strategy.
One example of a soft launch using online content and bloggers is SkinMD Natural, a shielding lotion. The results caught the attention of PR Week.
But other companies are not as blog savvy. When Olay launched their Life in Close Up campaign for Olay Definity, the media bash did not include any beauty bloggers.
A search in Blog Pulse shows a few bloggers offering their free sample of Definity. With a better online brand strategy they could have had much more buzz in the bogs.
"A year ago, brands were saying, 'Oh no, not the blogosphere,'" said Peter Hirshberg, chief executive of Technorati."Now they re saying, this is a great opportunity."
Podcasting should be a part of the SMB communcation toolbox, says SmartBiz in an article today.
As a an emerging mode of communications, podcasting has the potential to create a unique opportunity for SMBs to gain a competitive advantage, grow their business, as well as contribute to bottom line profitability.
Podcasting has the potential to become a valuable part of the marketing mix, says the article. It allows these organizations to transition their Web sites from traditional support vehicles to dynamic, multimedia marketing and sales channels.
Many marketers make the mistake of thinking only the young listen to podcasts. According to a recent podccast survey almost half the people listening to podcasts are over 35.
And the genres where demand outstrips the supply of podcasts is news and business.
What takes an audio file from traditional content to next generation communications tool is the distribution and syndication of the content in an RSS Feed.
So if you are looking for a way shine in your field, start podcasting. At the Podcast Expo last week we heard from all kinds of podcasters - Mommy casters, Food casters, Comedy casters and Culture casters.
One of the great ideas I heard at this show was to produce a podcast sponsored by a relevant product and talk about the issues close to the hearts of the users of that product.
Podcasts I'd like to hear:
A podcast about skin care sponsored by The National Skin Care Institute. Dermatologists talk about natural skin care options.
Environmental podcast focused on fuel, vehicles and harmful emissions
Smart moves, NBC!
Meredith Vieira, the new co host of the Today show, is blogging her personal thoughts and backstory elements of her interviews on iVillage.
"There are a lot of things I might like to say on a personal level on the blog that I can't on Today because of time or it might not be appropriate," Vieira says. "So it helps me wind down and get some thoughts out that I wish I could have otherwise and let people see other sides of my personality."
And of course it neatly ties the two new acquisitions together and leverages the audiences. Vieira's arrival at Today attracted 6.9 million viewers. Now they've been directed over to iVillage to read the backstories on the Today interviews.
Who wouldn't want to hear all the 'real stuff' we don't get to see on the show?
And the link to ther blog is right on the homepage of iVillage - so their readers get corss pollinated to the Today show.
Then there is the launch of the daily talk show in December called "iVillage Live" that will be broadcast simultaneously on its local stations and on the iVillage Web site.
Community features such as online chat and blogs will be a big part of the online version of "iVillage Live."
Don't ya love it when a social media plan comes together?
Laura Ramos of Forrester is digging into the world of business blogs.
70% said they planned to boost their spending on social computing tactics during the next 12 months
Should every B2B marketer blog? Perhaps, says Ramos.
Questions marketers should answer are: What is the purpose of the blog? Who is the audience? Will the blog encourage participation? And, who should own the blog’s content?
Blogging is a commitment and it takes resources.
B2B blogs may not be as personal as individual blogs, but depending on the purpose, they can be an excellent adjunct to your communication strategy.
Blogs can give you better search engine visibility - that's vital to business success today.
Blogging can build a profile for the author/s. That might be useful.
A business blog can create a community, or give you insight into customers' feedback - positive and negative. Scary - but very valuable.
Before you rush in where bloggers fear to tread, figure out a strategy, line up the needed resources and get some training on how to blog successsfully. You'll find that your business blog will pay real dividends.
We hear a lot about PR 2.0, but marketing is also getting the message: companies are responding to consumers' on-demand expectations by focusing more on marketing strategies, according to a recent survey from Weber Shandwick.
"Consumers are 100 percent in the driving seat," said Billee Howard, a co-director of Weber Shandwick's global strategic media group.
"Companies are now a part of customers' lifestyles and have a better understanding of their culture."
It sound as though the online conversation and consumer-generated media is making its mark.
I'm the CEO/Founder of Guerrilla Marketers Cafe - Free Book Promotion Site, Where Authors and Readers Mingle. I'm passionate about helping others succeed.
