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Blogging is hot and growing fast. It’s becoming an
increasingly important communication and marketing tool for
individuals and businesses alike.
Are you considering starting your own webblog? Or are you
just interested in learning more about this phenomenon? In
this issue I ask Bill Flitter, Chief Marketing Officer of
Pheedo,
Inc., to help us better understand the blog world and
its significance to entrepreneurs and the business world.
Bill is an expert in weblogs, as his company is focused on
serving that market. Bill is also a blogger himself.
Anthony: Bill, can you tell
us about Pheedo?
Bill: Pheedo is an RSS
ad-serving and advertising network. We help publishers
monitor and monetize their RSS feeds. As RSS is picking up
in momentum, publishers are losing ad impressions on their
websites. This has created a need for a solution to help
them generate revenues from their content at the newsreader
level.
On the advertising side, we match advertisers with
publishers. We look at content and match categories for the
ads. Publishers have complete control over the ads that
appear in their feeds. We also have the ability to create
integrated campaigns where the ads that appear in an RSS
feed can also be related to the ads that appear on a
website. This is very unique in our particular space.
Pheedo also gives publishers a look at what people are
doing at the newsreader level, how they’re interacting with
the content, and how many individuals have subscribed to
their RSS feeds. Typically, a web monitoring solution cannot
perform this type of analytics on the feeds because RSS is a
completely different technology that does not cross over to
web analytics packages or email marketing packages. So we
developed these much needed new tools for publishers.
Anthony: What is RSS?
Bill: RSS stands for
Really Simple Syndication. It summarizes the content on
your website and delivers it straight to consumers.
Consumers have to take a physical action to opt into RSS,
which is based on an XML platform. News aggregators
then take the code produced by RSS and interpret it into
readable human format so it’s actually organized and looks
like words. When you opt-in to the RSS feed, any time the
publisher updates his/her website, the updates come straight
to your newsreader. You don’t have to come back to the
website looking for updates. The updates are delivered
automatically to you as soon as they are published.
This is a 100% opt-in medium, so you have complete
control over everything that’s in your newsreader. You can
unsubscribe if for some reason you don’t like that
particular content. In a nutshell, RSS is a way of
delivering content right to your newsreader.
Anthony: For those who are
not familiar with weblogs, please give us a quick
background.
Bill: It’s been 8 to 10 years
since the first weblog appeared online. Their popularity has
skyrocketed in the past 12 months. Many people point to
September 11, when the weblog phenomenon kicked off because
reporters of traditional newspapers weren’t publishing
information fast enough. The weblog platform allows you to
publish information very quickly. It’s just like writing an
email. You write your text, you hit send, and it’s published
right to your website. If you think about it, it’s just a
content management solution that allows you to publish
information very quickly. You need to know little HTML, if
any. If you know how to send an email, you know how to
create a weblog. So blogs make it very easy to publish
content, and when you make something easy to use for
consumers, they usually adopt it.
A blog also allows you, as an individual, to have your
own voice. You would use weblogs to talk about a particular
subject that you have an interest in. Blogs are very focused
conversations.
Currently, there are 10 million weblogs, depending on the
reports you read. And those are active weblogs, defined as
having been updated with one new post in the last 30 days.
The growth rate in the last year has been phenomenal. About
10,000 new weblogs are created every day. It’s so much
easier to implement, which is why they’re growing so
quickly.
On the RSS side, the last report to be published by Pew
stated that there are 6 million US consumers reading RSS
feeds. And what’s important to point out here is the growth
rate. Last year, that number was below 1 million. So in just
12 months, there has been a tremendous uptake in consumers
adopting RSS, and many major publishers are embracing this
idea of syndicating content.
Anthony: What are typical
market applications for blogs?
Bill: It’s a diverse market. A
large number of teenagers right now are writing diaries.
They write about anything that’s going on in their lives.
But where the market is seeing tremendous growth is with
independent contractors establishing themselves as experts
in their particular field. They are using weblogs because
they’re easy to use and very viral in the sense that you can
interact with other people’s content by leaving comments and
doing a trackback (which is a pointer on your weblog that
links to more information on someone else’s weblog and vice
versa). Many marketers are using blogs because they
typically have better listings on search engines. Google
likes blogs because of the high frequency of updates and the
way the information is structured – the content is not
hidden in HTML tags. The structure of blogs makes them
search engine friendly, so marketers are obviously drawn
towards them.
Anyone can start a blog. Technologists are starting blogs
as they try to establish themselves as experts in particular
areas. I read about plumbers who have created blogs in which
they explain how to fix basic plumbing problems. And this
trend continues all the way to larger companies, such as one
we are currently working with that launched a series of
blogs. They are a vertical search engine in the industrial
area. And they are excited talking about industrial
products, industrial engineering and structural engineering.
Blogs cross many different categories.
Anthony: How prevalent are
blogs internationally?
Bill: The international market
is about a year behind the US market, but should be looked
at as a huge growth area. For weblogs, Japan is one of the
fastest growing markets overseas. They have taken advantage
of the fact that they are easy to publish. About 3.5 million
people in Japan have created weblogs while attracting nearly
17 million readers.
Anthony: Is there a
directory of blogs?
Bill: There are 3 directories
I recommend:
Blogdigger,
BlogCatalog, and
Technorati. In fact, Technorati is more than a
directory. It tracks conversations online. Using search
terms, they tell you how a particular blog post may be
connected to someone else, how deep that conversation goes,
and how it spreads virally. They list the top 100 bloggers
based on the inbound links and the outbound links.
Anthony: For what type of
companies does it make sense to include blogging in the
marketing strategy?
Bill: Generally speaking, any
size company should have a blog, just because it’s a better
way of communicating and interacting with your customers.
However, small companies seem to be adopting blogs faster
because they don’t have the same constraints as public
companies. That said, Microsoft has thousands of blogs.
With publicly traded companies, you really have to be
careful with what you say. There are certain rules about the
information that can be disclosed. So they have been slower
to adopt blogs. When they do, they are often governed by the
PR department and/or have their content reviewed by an
attorney before it’s published. Some people think that this
takes away from the spirit of blogging, which is meant to be
a personal communications tool. But they are at least
attempting to reach out to their customers. Another issue
affecting public companies revolves around whether or not to
allow comments. There are certain types of information that
a consumer can write on a company’s blog that the company
could be required to respond to within a certain amount of
time.
Generally speaking, everyone should have a weblog. It’s
certainly much easier to do so for smaller companies that
aren’t public, as long as you have a trusted employee or a
founder writing the blog. The basic rule is Be smart
about what you publish. Don’t tell anybody anything that
you’ll lose your job over or that violates intellectual
property rights.
Anthony: Are there blog
publishers who charge people for reading their blogs?
Bill: Not that I am aware of.
Charging for blogs right now is almost taboo within the
industry. This may become a growth area, however. The
content needs to be information that you cannot get some
place else, including exclusive interviews or the type of
information that’s behind the scenes. In their current
state, blogs are about free flowing information. As more
publishers adopt the blog platform, we may see an increase
in publishers charging for their blog content. But it’s not
going to have the same spirit and the content published will
not be from a conversational standpoint. Instead, it will be
the type that is pumped out to the public. At least that’s
my opinion.
Anthony: Is email marketing
becoming a thing of the past?
Bill: I think email marketing
will take a hit because of RSS or even weblogs. There are so
many problems with sending emails to consumers, including
rising costs, spam and filters at the ISP and client levels.
RSS and weblogs have an opportunity to replace email
marketing. If you’re publishing a newsletter, you should be
publishing it as an RSS feed or even have a weblog. Keep in
mind, though, that email is great as a one-to-one
communication tool. RSS and blogs aren’t there yet. But I
see a day when RSS will be a one-to-one marketing tool.
Anthony: Some companies are
changing the way they do business because they must now take
into consideration the reaction of the blogging community.
Can you tell us more about that?
Bill: What every company
should be doing is monitoring the blogosphere for their
company’s names or products. People are talking about you or
your products some place somewhere, and it’s important to be
part of that conversation, be it negative, inaccurate or
even positive information. Reacting to the information and
thanking someone for their post go a long way in being
noticed and being taken seriously. You should follow up on
every complaint. Given how easy it is to publish information
using blogs, you can no longer afford not to monitor those
conversations, participate in them, and ensure that the
correct information is disseminated.
There are companies that allow you to set up a living
search, as they call them. You put a couple of keywords or
phrases into a particular search engine, and it generates an
RSS feed for you. Everyday it scans the web looking for
those keywords or phrases and delivers the results to your
RSS feed into your news aggregator.
PubSub.com,
Feedster.com, and
Blogpulse.com monitor the blogosphere and news sites.
Google
News is another way to watch what people are saying
about you in the traditional press. I recommend using all of
those tools, not one or the other, because some pick up what
others don’t. If you do all of them in combination, you’ll
have better results. And it’s very important that you do it.
Anthony: Can you talk about
how this new and powerful form of communication is
disrupting the traditional media model?
Bill: Because of blogs,
traditional media now has to be much quicker about
disseminating information. They have to be on top of their
game because general news can now be found on weblogs. I
think that traditional media companies will need to figure
out a way to compete with the ease of publishing and the
fact that every consumer is becoming a publisher. With the
growth in blogs, traditional publishers need to take notice
of what’s going on, react to it, and start building business
models around it. For instance, they can create their own
branded blogging communities. Take a newspaper, for example.
If it can create a branded community that goes out and
reports about what’s going on in a church in a particular
zip code, the traditional reporter doesn’t have time to go
to that particular church on a Sunday and write about the
happenings at the church. However, everybody who attends
that particular church has an interest in the information.
And if you can bring that into your newspaper and highlight
those stories once in a while, not only would you make the
people attending that church every Sunday very happy, but
you would also get them to write the content, turning them
into loyal customers.
Anthony: Bill, what advice
do you have for today’s entrepreneurs with respect to the
use of blogging in their ventures?
Bill: Using Pheedo as an
example, we had zero marketing budget when we started. All
we had was our weblog. We participated in the community
which as a whole interacted with the A list bloggers. But we
also participated on the blogs of the publishers and
marketers we were trying to attract, and made comments on
our blog about something they were posting. What we saw was
tremendous growth, and people started talking about us,
linking to us, and doing trackbacks to us. That’s how we got
the attention of a lot of the mainstream press, and even
investors. Because after a while we acquired a great deal of
mind-share and became experts in our particular field.
So as an entrepreneur in a young start-up, keep in mind
that it’s not about just starting a blog and they will come.
You have to participate in the community. If you do it in a
sensible way, you can really shoot ahead of your
competition.
Bio
Bill Flitter is
Pheedo's
Chief Marketing Officer. He spends most of his days thinking
about marketing. One could say he’s a marketing geek. His
mission is to re-invent online advertising and make it a
medium that is once again enjoyed by consumers.
Most of his thoughts about RSS, blogs and marketing can
be found on
Pheedo's weblog. Since 1996, he’s been an entrepreneur.
Pheedo is start-up number three working with Charles Smith,
Pheedo’s President. They co-founded Fastlane Ventures, a
boutique venture capital firm in 2002. Prior to that, they
started an online advertising company which was acquired in
2002.
Away from Pheedo, Bill chairs the Weblog & RSS special
interest group for
ebig.org,
a San Francisco Bay Area tech forum. He is also a Green Bay
Packers fan. The most rewarding result of his career was
starting the Interactive Advertising Scholarship at his alma
mater, the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.
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