Every company has a number of audiences: prospective customers, current customers, suppliers, affiliates and associated companies, the media, and many more.
RSS lets you narrow-cast, so make a list of your major target audiences, then create an RSS feed for each of those audiences, and promote the feeds. Each audience will receive only the information [...]
Excellent advice —
Blog entries are disposable. It’s good to write a coherent and well-thought-out blog entry, but don’t worry about it being a Pulitzer prize-winning article. Trust me, it won’t be. If you’re uptight when you’re blogging, your entry may end up sounding dry and uninspiring. Many people see blogs as a form of conversation, [...]
When you blog, you’re having a conversation with your customers. Blog about your upcoming products. Describe the products, and ask your readers to help you to make them better.
When you blog about your new products, not only do you get customer feedback and invaluable (free) consumer research before a product is launched, but you also [...]
The answer lies in encryption, and this isn’t difficult. It can be done through the Firefox browser, as this tutorial in "Secure RSS Syndication" shows:
1. My content, which is going to sit inside the description element of an RSS feed, is going to be encrypted. We will actually put it inside a microformat.2. That feed [...]
Created your first podcast? Great! Your work isn’t over yet. Summarize your podcast and put the summary online with the download audio file. Think of the show notes as liner notes. They tell downloaders what to expect from the podcast and provide references to sources mentioned in the podcast.
The notes are a marketing tool too, [...]
How do you encourage your people to blog, while ensuring that confidential information stays confidential? Ideally, you provide a company blogging policy. BL Ochman offers links to Sun and IBM’s blogging policies.
Sun says:
Don’t Tell Secrets Common sense at work here; it’s perfectly OK to talk about your work and have a dialog with the community, [...]
The New York Times advertises a link to its RSS feeds prominently on the bottom of the newspaper’s home page, with both a text link and an orange RSS button. The text link leads to an RSS signup page.
As soon as you create your first RSS feed, you should do the same. Create links and [...]
The Fast Company article "It’s a Blog World After All" reports that uber-blogger, Microsoft’s Robert Scoble, describes himself as a "technical evangelist".
That’s a broad description, but it’s an excellent one. The article notes:
Corporate America is jumping onto the blogwagon for many of the same reasons all those journalists, brooding teenagers, and presidential campaigners are already [...]
"RSS Works: Hard Metrics To Prove It" offers fascinating metrics on RSS marketing, including:
The most interesting piece of data is the 23% average CTR (click-through rate) from feed to site within last 48 hours, which proves that RSS works in terms of getting readers from the outbout message to the site. RSS users are [...]
Business Week Online’s article: "It’s A Whole New Web" notes:
… even software king Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) is seeing core franchises such as its Office software attacked by Web mail services, wikis, and JotSpot Inc.’s do-it-yourself software tools, which let you quickly create customized mini-programs such as a shared to-do list for a corporate department. [...]