Blogosphere
Blog posts about blogs and blogging. Related subjects include:
A very fast splogger
The first post ever on Strategic Messaging went up at 2:49 am. Within four hours, I had my first splog trackbacks, all from the same site. The strategicmessaging.com domain itself had just repropagated through DNS hours earlier, and had no incoming links other than Whois and the like.
Pretty impressive spamming. Not that it did him any good, of course, except insofar as he was stealing a bit of my content …
Beatblogging recognizes that communities take work
Beatblogging is a plan to let reporters build social networks out of their list of sources. On one level, that’s no different from setting up a forum to let readers post about stories. But of course there’s a big difference; the reporter is actively involved eliciting and acting upon content provided.
So I have a better, albeit immodest, analogy — Beatblogging is a whole lot like what I already do. Go to my search page and search on Olivier Jouve or Mary Crissey or Mike Stonebraker (most particularly) or Andy Astor or Bill Hobbib or Stuart Frost. You’ll find quite a bit of community participation from exactly the people who are my sources.
Could it be a lot richer than that? Sure. But these are busy people, watching what they say for marketing reasons, and in some cases competing directly with each other. It takes a fair amount of wheedling to get even as much out of them as I do. 🙂
Frankly, with all the blogs and home pages and so on people have today, I’m not sure there’s a point in building yet another destination social network. Fostering discussion on existing blogs and the like may make more sense. We’ll see.
| Categories: Blogosphere, Social software and online media | Leave a Comment |
The integrated marketing communications blog
Following up on a piece earlier this year, I just published a Monash Letter called “Online Marketing Shortcuts.” As always, it’s proprietary to Monash Advantage members, but I’ll share one key idea here. That’s the integrated marcom blog, which is pretty much the single most efficient thing a marcom department can do to communicate multiple messages to multiple audiences. Here’s a brief excerpt from the Letter:
Marcom does a lot of different things. But most of it can be categorized as the dissemination of four kinds of information and opinion:
Customer success evidence – since everybody cares a lot.
Technical strategy and theory – especially for high-end evaluators and influencers.
Technical facts – for anybody who cares.
Other kinds of facts and news (e.g. events, major executive hirings, awards, etc.) — in case anybody cares.
By a combination of original articles and pointers to pre-existing resources, one blog can provide major help in all four areas.
Most important, a marcom blog gives many opportunities to enhance customer success story-telling. For example, you can:
- Call attention to stories you publish or place elsewhere (on your own sites, in the media, whatever).
- Add detail and context to the stories you publish elsewhere.
- Follow up when there are deployments or expanded usage at previously announced customers.
- Summarize customer stories presented in conference speeches.
- Allude to customer stories you’re not allowed to publish in full standard multi-page success story formats.
- Aggregate information about groups of customers – e.g., ten installations over 50 terabytes or 15 sales to retail/CPG.
- Point to information your customers themselves reveal.
FeedBlitz search is totally fried
If you take our integrated feed — and you should* — and you happen to pick the email option, that’s delivered via FeedBlitz. I subscribe myself, of course, and today I happened to check the option “Search Monash Information Services” (Monash Information Services is the name of the feed). That goes to this search page.
*That’s what this link is for. Or this one.
Curious to see how results compared to those from our own cross-site search, I tried a search on a company I write a lot about, namely “Netezza.” Nothing came up. Then I tried “Attensity.” Ditto. And “text mining”. Still nothing. In fact, there aren’t even any results on “Monash”.
I think some repairs may be in order …
| Categories: Blogosphere, Search engines, Social software and online media | 2 Comments |
I’ve decided to trust Akismet/Bad Behavior
Akismet recently upgraded so that you can see all the spam it’s holding, not just the last 150 messages. This made me a lot happier — but ironically I quickly gave up, and decided to trust Akismet without checking. Why? Well, Akismet sequesters 15 days of spam, and I currently have the following numbers of messages stashed away in it:
- 2246 here on Text Technologies.
- 4427 on DBMS2.
- 816 on Software Memories.
- 5156 on the Monash Report.
That’s over 800 spam per day across four blogs. And when I did check, I almost never found a false positive, except occasionally a trackback of my own.
More problematic is my e-mail. Eudora flags pretty much everything that isn’t from an established sender as spam. So along with my 300+ true spam, I get a number of false positives per day, some of which have turned into paying customer relationships. So THAT spam directory I do check carefully …
| Categories: Blogosphere, Spam and antispam | Leave a Comment |
Interesting comment thread on reputation tracking
Techcrunch blogged skeptically about Umbria’s* service, specifically its partnership with PR Newswire. The comment thread had a fair amount of pushback, largely from vendors with skin in the game.
*Note: Umbria has a non-obvious URL.
I haven’t actually spoken with Umbria — uh, guys, why not? — but they seem to have a reputation tracking service. Their niche is apparently to quantify/measure by a variety of metrics, and that’s supposedly what makes their service (and their competitors’) worthwhile. Read more
| Categories: Blogosphere, Competitive intelligence, Sentiment analysis, Social software and online media, Text mining, Text mining SaaS | Leave a Comment |
How to lose your credibility in 24 hours and 49 minutes
Deeply loathed football writer Ron Borges of the Boston Globe has just been brought down by plagiarism. This detailed timeline of the events is probably indicative of what happens in many other blog-driven flaps.
| Categories: Blogosphere, Social software and online media | Leave a Comment |
Online marketing checklist for enterprise IT vendors
A recent Monash Letter covered online marketing strategy in considerable detail. The complete seven-page Letter is exclusive to Monash Advantage members, but I thought I’d share a summary checklist here. If you’re an enterprise IT vendor, and you don’t do all these things, you’re probably missing some major marketing opportunities. (The good news is – nobody, including your competitors, is doing all of these things yet.)
- Offer both a conventional website and a “developer’s network”-style technical website. Whether they’re on one domain or not is unimportant.
- Absolutely minimize the registration requirements for your sites. Why make it hard for people to accept your marketing pitches?
- When you do pay-per-click advertising, don’t just look for phrases buyers would use. Also go for the tire-kickers, or the people who don’t even know yet that there are tires to kick.
- Devote a website page to every partner. If this doesn’t make sense on your main site, create a separate website just for the purpose.
- Monitor and participate in forums where your products are – or should be – discussed. For most classes of enterprise IT, the first place to look is the old Usenet comp.* hierarchy, most easily found via Google Groups.
- Maintain one or more executive blogs.
- Maintain a news blog hosted on servers physically separate from your main website(s). That’s for business continuity at a minimum, but you can also use it for other purposes.
- Contact influencers regularly and BRIEFLY. Pinging us is OK. But constant press releases and newsletters make our eyes glaze over.
- Increase the number, and vary the style, of your success stories.
- Don’t put all your eggs in the basket of “big bang” message launches. Also build “rolling buzz.” The print publications won’t reduce coverage because the influencers have already figured out what you’re going to do.