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Posted on May 11, 2008
Why Do You Want To Be Transparant, and How That Will Help Your Business Grow
BY STEPAN MAZUROV
If you are an ecommerce business, word of mouth marketing can help you grow it beyond the boundaries of your niche. Gary Vayerchuk, a guy in wine business, said something very interesting on Tues, May 6th show CNBC's Big Idea:
- Be who you are, be as transparent as possible.
- Don't play in your own playground, be active in communities that might find what you offer attractive.
- It is imperative to be involved in the social networks on the Internet and the real world
- We live in a world where every person's word of mouth reaches a lot more people.
Lets look at some examples of these at work.
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Posted on October 27, 2006
Google Alerts Deepening Online Conversation Tracking
BY JAMES CLARK
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is rolling out significant updates across the board this week. The lastest update is to its popular Google Alerts service. Now, Google has added blogs to its Alerts notifications. This is following the announcement of placing blog search results in Google News.
Why is this significant? In our experience talking with organizations about online reputation management, they often respond saying they monitor online conversations using Google Alerts. The previous version of Google Alerts failed in capturing the online conversation due to the lack of blog tracking. Now when anyone signs up for Google Alerts they will have the option of tracking blogs in addition to Google News, groups and the web. Even better, the default is set to the Comprehensive Alert to track all, giving communications professionals the ability to track a deeper thread in the online conversation.
My issue with Google Alerts is that its still an email-based deliver system. Why not put an RSS feed directly on the Google Alerts sign up page?
As Google is rolling out advanced features in many areas of its business, we can only assume there will be a RSS tie in with Google Reader.
Our biggest concern from a usability standpoint is blog spam. We'll be testing this out to see if the quality of the results from blog posts are good or not. There are companies out there like Collective Intellect and Umbria that have entire systems to track the blogosphere and in our opinion their greatest value is eliminating blog spam. Try doing a Technorati search on a specific topic, 90% of the results are irrelevant, maybe popular, but irrelevant. Google Alerts is no way a substitute for a brand monitoring systems like Collective Intellect and Umbria, but it is a first step into understanding the impact.
So it's still up to the Communications Analysts to take the data from search that is relevant, the data from blogs that are popular and craft a strategy to identify and converse with the influencers.
Note to PR Firms: Google Alerts just upped itself a notch to becoming your clipping service - and it's Free.
Others in the Google Alerts conversation:
TechCrunch
Google Blog
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Posted on September 13, 2006
Tip: Organize Your Feeds by Task
BY JASON CORMIER
Last weekend, I realized that the way I had been using feeds (RSS) had become unworkable. When I first got into feeds a few years ago, I thought the best way to organize them was by topic. Since I have very wide-ranging interests, I ended up with a sprawling collection comprised of more than 25 topic-based folders (science, media, environment, etc.) -- some of which contained 30 or more feeds.
The result? I rarely checked my feeds. What was meant to save me time ended up creating drastic information overload.
The nasty side effect of this was that I wasn't keeping up with online conversations as well as I like. To me, online conversations are very important. They're the lifeblood of my networking, R&D, and marketing. They're also important to my personal life.
So I took the drastic step of reorganizing my feeds by task, switching to a new feed reader, and dumping about 80% of my feed subscriptions.
And I'm so much happier! Especially because I once again am comfortably in the flow of conversations that intrigue and inspire me. Also, it's now so much easier to follow and participate in conversations on behalf of my clients.
So here's the quick version of how I did it...
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Posted on September 10, 2006
Blogger Web Comments for Firefox: Behind the Times
BY JASON CORMIER
So tonight for the first time I finally tried out a Firefox browser plugin that's been around for a while: Google's Blogger Web Comments for Firefox.
It sounded so cool. This plugin was supposed to give me a little icon in the lower right corner of Firefox indicating, for whatever page I happened to be on, whether any blogs had linked to that page. Click on that, and a list of blog links pops up. (Yes, despite its name, this plugin has nothing to do with actual blog comments, but rather cross-links -- another disappointment, but I'll let that go for the moment.)
The trouble is, this plugin is too slow to keep up with the blogosphere. It appears to be able to give you cross-link info for pages that have been posted for a while, but not brand new content. And when it comes to tracking blog buzz, you need the freshest information possible.
Here's what I mean: Today's washingtonpost.com includes a home page article that's sure to generate instant blog buzz: War's Critics Abetting Terrorists, Cheney Says. Sure enough, when I search Technorati for that story's URL, I get a slew of results. But the little Google browser plugin icon shows nothing at all.
Maybe this is because Google needs to crawl the web to index appropriate results, which takes time. This plugin might be a good tool to follow old buzz. But honestly, I rarely need old buzz.
I'd love to see a plugin like this that would work with cross-links gathered by Technorati or Icerocket. But so far, I'm uninpressed by this Google tool.
Can anyone give me a good reason why I shouldn't uninstall it? Am I missing some key benefit here? Please comment below.
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Posted on August 29, 2006
Merging Traditional PR Into Online Conversations
BY JAMES CLARK
Awe the lines are starting to blur and I like it.
Using public relations is a critical tactic in generating awareness for many businesses, and online businesses should be no different. The irony is traditional PR tactics (media relations, ed cal tracking, by-lined articles, speaking opportunities) to drive awareness in the main stream media (MSM), are as foreign to an online business as RSS feeds and blogs are to a majority of offline businesses.
Steven Van Yoder's recent post titled "Why Online Businesses Should Embrace PR" provides excellent insights to using PR to drive traffic.
To quote Steven, "They read newspapers, magazines and listen to the radio. To reach your market niche comprehensively, you need to explore ways to reach your prospects beyond the Internet. It will help you drive traffic to your web site."
We agree. Our experience has been that offline MSM coverage drives a tremendous amount of traffic to a company's website. We know this because we work with PR teams to help them avoid The Placement Crash typically associated with MSM coverage driving new visitors to a dull and non-engaging website.
The magic happens when the PR team is able to work with the online team in delivering a unique and fresh conversational experience to those new visitors.
Don't waste the amazing opportunity media coverage gives you. Capture the conversation by:
- Extrapolating the salient points in the MSM coverage on your blog and continuing the conversation by posting and responding to comments
- Setting up a teleconference on the coverage topic a week out and provide the ability to register for free online
- Get them to sign up for your email newsletter
- Provide an in-depth article on the coverage topic available for download
Because of the nature of online businesses, it is my honest opinion they are more apt to capitalize on the MSM exposure than many traditional offline business. The reason - they have the technical skills and flexibility to update and use social media and online technologies (blogs, podcasts, email newsletters) to capture the conversation that are often beyond the scope of knowledge for most companies.
For more information on strategies for leveraging the synergies between online and offline media tactics, check out our posts on The Placement Crash and Tried and True PR Tactics for Igniting Online Buzz.
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