June 23, 2005

Tara and I had fun in our Gross Anatomy of a Blog presentation this morning. We promised to post the answers to the questions we couldn't get to during the presentation here, so here's our first attempt to answer them.

Because this is a longer than usual post, I'm going to take advantage of an 'extended entry' which will link Our Dear Readers to the actual Q&A on another page. This is a personal preference kind of thing. Many people hate extended entries, and many people hate long posts. We'll offer this up as an example, and let you decide.

Q. What is the name of the web site where you can find the blogs for your industry?

A. We like Technorati (www.technorati.com). Pubsub is also a good one: (www.pubsub.com), but it seems to index more 'personal' blog sites than Technorati. You can simply type in a phrase, or a company name, and you'll get results just like a regular search engine. It's particularly important to check these indexes regularly to find out who's talking about your company, and what they're saying. Check these especially when you've generated any kind of ‘news' like a product release, press release, etc.

Q. How do marqui's tools support my desire to blog? JJ's note: this is an actual question, not a plant, I promise!

A. Without getting into a ‘sales pitch' here, Marqui allows marketers to automate and simplify their marketing activities. You can see more about the solution here. In a nutshell, Marqui supports all kinds of online communications activities. It enables you to manage the activities yourself (as a marketing department), without relying on your IT department or technical vendors. (I couldn't have managed all the amazing activities we generated as a result of our blogosphere program last fall without it. And I was a one-person marketing organization.)

We use it to automatically update our newsroom with our latest blog entry, which helps keep content fresh (that's great for search engine visibility). It will automatically generate RSS feeds of the information that you publish (if you'd like it to), so it'll give you the extended reach that we discussed this morning.

Q. Will we discussing how to promote our blogs?

A. We hope you found the section on blog promotion helpful. In essence, make sure you promote your blog like you'd promote your web site – by announcing it, listing it in all of your marketing materials, adding it to your signatures, etc. And don't forget Ping-o-Matic (www.pingomatic.com), which will help you alert blog search engines for your most current releases.

Q. Are there ways to preview comments for sensitive information that you may not want your entire audience to see?

A. Some of the higher end blog software solutions offer you the option to preview/approve comments prior to publishing. Other solutions (like blogger) require users to be ‘authenticated' or ‘registered' in order to post comments on blogs. As corporate blogging takes off, we believe this will be a requirement, and look forward to lots of improvement in comment (and post!) management through automated workflow and approvals.

Q. Will you be sending us the slides after?

A. If you were unable to download the PDF of the presentation, you're welcome to let us know. We'll happily send the slides to you.

Q. Do you have to run moveable type or wordpress on your own server?

A. No. Your IT department (if you have one) doesn't have to install any blogging software for you to blog. The good news is that you log into most blogging software with a simple internet connection and user name and password. That way, you can blog while you're on vacation!

Q. What is the demographic of this call? Small/Medium/Large biz?

A. According to Roger at Corvent (www.corventllc.com), they didn't ask size of business profile questions of the presentation attendees, but in looking through the attendee company names, he noted there were many medium/large business attendees. I think it's cool that businesses of all sizes are looking at extending their marketing dialogues in real time through blogs.

Q. Do you know the host of these blogs, i.e. Typepad v. Wordpress, etc?

A. Typepad is from SixApart (www.sixapart.com), which is also the publisher of Movable Type. Typepad is a personal blog tool, and Movable Type is a step up in terms of functionality. WordPress information can be found at www.wordpress.org. (Or follow the links of love!) I hope that's what you're asking. Please comment away if it's not.

Q. What do you consider to be the key similarities and differences with podcasting and how do you see building a podcast into one's online marketing strategy?

A. As I mentioned in our presentation this morning, podcasts are audio blogs that people can download to their MP3 players (your computer will play them, too!). Actually, more and more media organizations are offering podcasts of their popular programs. In the past couple of months, there have been announcements that podcasts are available for programming from NPR to Rush Limbaugh. If you're marketing to a more youthful audience (or if you market to iPod users!), I would absolutely consider podcasts as a part of your online marketing strategy.

Marqui's CEO Stephen King was interviewed by Todd Cochrane for a podcast in January of this year about our blogging program, and so far it has been downloaded (at last count) more than 35,000 times. That's pretty cool extra reach, if you think about it. You can listen to it here. (It was dubbed the first podcast infomercial – but we like to think it was just an interview. Welcome to the sometimes cynical blogosphere.) You can listen to it here.

There are more questions to be answered, but I wanted to publish these so far...

Posted by at June 23, 2005

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ab email - benjaminbloom.net

since one of your reps called after my attendance...and in the spirit of blogging, I am commenting back this way.

not sure if your trackback was working when i posted...just wanted to make sure you had the feedback and were aware of my post.

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