Archive for June, 2006
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corporate blogs on the rise
Precedent is not the only company with a corporate blog, and if you’re considering one, you’re not alone. According to a new rapport, "Corporate Weblogs: Deployment, Promotion, Measurement" the deployment of corporate blogs will double in 2006. 35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate Weblogs this year. Combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006.
You’re probably thinking what the benefits are? According to David Schatsky (president of jupiterkagan), you can engage prospective customers in active dialogue, showcase your expertise and domain knowledge, create a forum for communication of your strategies and visions. Another benefit is the opportunity to generate buzz around your products or services, while eliciting feedback and collaboration from product evangelists.
Fastlane is General Motors blog and it’s one of the most successful blogs. Here is an example of GM Vice Chairman, Bob Lutz latest post: "Although I’ve been traveling extensively this month, I have found time to get behind the wheel of some of our vehicles. I’ve driven two recently that I’m quite excited about, because they really illustrate the progress we’ve been making in mid-size cars. The first is the Saturn Aura, which goes on sale later this summer. Simply put, I enjoyed it very much. it’s a very refined, very civilised car, beautiful put together, with impressive levels of quiet, and wonderful handling."
Bob successfully created a dialogue (70 readers commented on this post) and generated a buzz around a new product, in only 80 words. That is effortless and effective marketing, don’t you think? Perhaps that’s the reason why corporate blogs are on the rise.
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Building a web team
Many moons ago I was responsible for a web team. The way we went about growing was as we needed. We wanted to have more control over our development, so we hired a developer. We wanted to create more creative content, so we hired a couple of editors. We wanted to have significant more content so we invented the posts of content contributors.
It was a very organic process, but it left me wondering if there was a better way. Lo and behold Kevin Cornell has written a great article on manning a web team over at A List Apart. Wish he had written it a couple of years ago. Having a strategy for the web, getting management buy in and planning a team around this, it sounds so simple, almost like common sense.
To be honest, I don’t think the organic approach was poor, it fit our purpose at the time. That is we didn’t know what our purpose was. But if you do know what your trying to achieve, a little bit of planning is a good way to build the right web team.
Comments Off
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Mashups
Mashups are really fun and they are taking the Internet by storm. The term “mashup” was first used in the music industry when DJs began playing two songs simultaneously to make something new. This could also be done on the web and it is created by taking data from two or more sources and combining them to something new.
Anyone can do it and its free! You can for example combine data from Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Flickr, Amazon or eBay with data that you find interesting. Have a look at these examples:
If you are looking for financial, legal or tax advice you can use the AdviserMap to search locally for an appropriate professional adviser www.advisermap.co.uk
www.ononemap.com is a property search engine map that lists more than two thirds of homes for sale in England, Scotland and Wales.
Do you want to know where your UPS package is? Then use this mashup that tracks UPS packages with Google Maps www.rrharmon.com/tracking
www.alternate-url-ads.com is a mashup service designed to increase AdSense revenues. Alternate URL Ads replaces non-paying PSAs with paying contextual geo-targeted ads.
Were they helpful?
Google, Yahoo and Amazon showed the way by launching APIs that let people take their data and reuse it. There are know 216 different APIs, which means that there are endless of possibilities to create a unique mashup. What kind of mashup combination would you like to see?
If you would like to create your own or find useful mashups then have a look at this website: www.programmableweb.com/howto
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Unprecedented - the why’s
As part of the redesign and redevelopment of our website, we’re introducing a new feature - this blog. If you are unfamiliar with the concept - blogs are essentially participative online journals where the readership can talk to the blog’s author.
Unlike many blogs, many different names and faces from the Precedent team will be contributing their thoughts over time here.
So, why are we doing it?
For me, Unprecedented is about giving you more of an insight to us as a communications company, opening up to share with you a bit more about what we are thinking about, where we going and - of course - why you might like to come along with us for the ride.
We feel we’re right in the middle of an exciting time for Precedent and where (client confidentiality aside) we can share that with you, we will.
But more than that, blogs are all about two-way communication - and that’s very much key to what we are trying to do here. We want to hear from you.
Which brings me to comments. Any blog can suffer from what often gets described as signals versus noise. Indeed, one of the very best blogs is called just that. To cut down on noise, we’ll be using comments sparingly - to ask your opinion, to run an idea past you, that kind of thing. If we feel a conversation has run its course, we’ll close off comments - that way we’ll avoid you trailing through less relevant content and keep focused on what matters.
We’re with Six Apart’s Mena Trott when she talks about civility on blogs - so, fair warning: if you can’t be polite, we’ll remove your comment.
A final note: if you know your way around a news reader and can talk authoritatively about Atom vs. RSS (good luck to you), then you might want to know that there is a feed to enable you to keep up to date with our postings here (there is a link on the right of this page called ‘Subscribe to this blog’s feed’)
Happy reading and look forward to sharing with you and hearing from you.
Andrew
