American Marketing Association - AMA - HotTopic Blogging Seminar Weblog

List of links from the AMA HotTopic Blog Seminar

There were a lot of questions that were asked that require outside links to resources. Also, a lot of tools and systems were mentioned that should require some mention. It's hard to capture all, but here's a shot.

[URL LINKS TO COME LATER]
Feedburner.com - measurable syndication of RSS feeds
Technorati.com
PubSub
Scrappleface Blog
Newsgator
FeedDemon
Further explanations on RSS
Relationship management consortium (think this is the UMich?)
Link for Audioblog service
Peter Jackson King Kong Blog

A blogging glossary link is in order
Moblog service/definition
textamerica
AssociationInnovation.com
KonkisKing.net
MicroPersuasion.com
Wikipedia.com
Editme.com
Pubsub.com
Pingomatic.com
FastCompany.com
FolkAlley.com
TypePad.com
Adam Curry's podcasting link
Blogger.com
WordPress.org
MovableType.org

Dave Williams - 360i - Search Engine Marketing & Blogs - AMA HotTopic Blog Seminar

Dave has a guy in his office who's been blogging for something like 8 years.  Man, that's tenure.

Anyway, the discussion for this segment is all about search.

Blogging, in Dave's view, is taking the web back to what it was meant to be. I love data-driven presentations, and Dave's is very data centric. He's done some research on the demographics of the blogosphere and of the sites that are selling advertising which has yielded some unique results.

Content:
- Valueable to keep people at the site
- Simply stated, relevant content is as important to spiders as it is to customers

Search is even more important as the web grows. The web grows exponentially, and so does the use of search (so to speak)

Dave highlighted some Forrester reserach info which is interesting in that it states "link from another website' as the #2 way that people use to find websites. When I look at this from the perspective of a marketer with a blog, knowing that one of the fundamentals of blogging is linking, I'm pretty happy about this!

Dave says, with recent data, that 4 major engines are showing down in the arms race in search.
- Google
- Yahoo
- MSN
- AOL (takes some results from Google)

Some things have changed in search phrasology recently, in that over 50% of searches are in the 3-5 word phrases.

Ben McConnell of Church of the Customer.com - Blogs 101 - AMA HotTopic Blog Seminar

Ben started off his presentation with a poll of the audience on 'what questions do you have about blogging?' There were some wonderful responses, that I can imagine on many of our minds, even if we've been blogging for some time.

Some key questions from the audience:
- Staff time required?

- Tools available for Blogging?

- Impact on servers?

- How does it affect the Architecture of sites?

- How can you integrate it into an existing site?

- What is the interrelationship between RSS and weblogs, or RSS vs. weblogs?

We're always so damn serious, but this quote on what a blog is from the Scrappleface blog lightened things up a touch.

There was a lot of discussion on RSS vs. Atom and a lot of questions on what is RSS and how does it apply, non-blog, blog only, how do I effectively use RSS in my business. We'll have to incorporate more of this for the next session.

Ben touched on Wiki's, but I'm also thinking that we need more discussion on this. Like, how do I combine them and what tools can I use to do both?

There was a brilliant slide that Ben showed with correlates the word of mouth about your company and it's profits (not overall revenues). It was in reference to the airline industry, and showed SouthWest on top in terms of profits (which we already knew) and their word of mouth index (news to me, but makes sense). Apparently, the data came from a case study in Harvard Business Review (I'll try to find the link)

One of the interesting things that was mentioned on the subject of "how does my blog get noticed" was the element of pinging, which is of critical importance. A website in isolation has no link to any directory by default, whereas a weblog, built with a purist blog tool (like MovableType) is programmed to ping aggregator sites, like weblogs.com, which is scoured by Google, which is how new weblogs get found. It's all part of the ecosystem folks.

- How do you figure out who the right person is to represent your company?  (what voice?)

- How do you discover the voice?

- How do you START this thing?  What's my #1 action step?!

- How do you undestand if you're really reaching your target audience?

- How can you figure out how many people are subscribing?

- How NOT TO SUCK in the blog space?

- Integrating more than text - beyond the written word?
** Audoblogs - you call a phone number and speak into a blog post (you need a service for this)
** Videoblog - sit at your desk, smile for the camera, and blog away!
** Moblogging - pictures into your blog, automatically (TypePad allows for this, or you can use a service like textamerica)
** Podcasting - coined by Adam Curry, the former MTV DJ - putting MP3 Audio directly into your weblog for downloading into you iPod

- How can I test it witout committing to it?

Robert Scoble - Microsoft - Blogging Is Changing the Marketing World - AMA HotTopic Blog Seminar

Scoble's 5 reasons why blogging is hot.

1. It's easy, anyone of any expertise can publish
2. Discoverable - pings weblogs.com, movabletype site, other sites that aggregate blogs
3. Ascertain social behavior, trends, linking, know at all times what's being said about you, and who's talking about what, in real-time.
4. Permalinking - each post has its own URL - can link directly to timely, relevant, and focused content
5. Syndication - only read what's published, when it's published - when I 'subscribe' to you, you're now a member of 'my community' - I don't need your email, you don't need mine, and in our normal day to day publishing, we're connected. For as long as we want to be - it's a pull relationship

At the end of the day, all of these things support relationships.

A blog is a web page that has content published in reverse chronological order...

Title your blog properly. Why? When our blog shows up in a list, or is aggregated on weblogs.com, technorati, feedster, it's impossible to use some of the titles that exist for most blogs. (it takes an average of 8 minutes for your post to show up in Technorati)

Look at Tompeters.com for an example of how the website becomes the blog and the blog becomes the website.