Google Blog Ping Service
Google has just announced a new blog ping service joining an already very crowded space – I’ve been using Pingoat.
Today we’re launching the Google Blog Search Pinging Service, which is a way for individual bloggers and blog platform providers to inform us of content changes. Blogging providers who syndicate RSS/Atom/XML and want to be included in our Blog Search index can now ping us directly. We’ll continue to monitor other pinging services and will contribute change notifications to the community.
Measuring Blogs…
One of the most frequently asked of me at conferences and the like is “how do you measure the effectiveness of blogs. Charlene Li at Forrester weighs in on a methodology to quantify the return on investment in blogging starting with:
- return on impressions
- return on media impact
- return on target influence
- return on earned media.
This is an interesting view in that it looks at the ROI element of the equation. Some of the other areas we also see benefits in are:
- Reduced cost of customer acquisition: customers are looking at the blog for education and insight reducing the requirement for hard materials and ongoing dialogue with sales engineers. In short, blogs reduce the sales cycle. We can measure this in hours of people time taken back.
- Reduced SEO costs: By participating in other blogs (especially those of pundits and analysts) we see more inbound traffic against key topic areas reducing our dependency on paid search to drive traffic. We’ve seen this go as high as 25%.
- Participation reduces research costs: Closed blog communities are a great source of insight for polling and thought taking. They reduce the cost of insight.
Charlene points over to Fraser Likel’s paper “Perspectives on the ROI of Media Relations Publicity Efforts” which also has some good thinking in this area.
I suggest to companies that they start by aligning the blog goals with business goals and let the metrics flow from there.
Reads & Feeds
- Stanford University is launching a wiki that allows students to share campus information and and much more. Editable only by students but open to all.
- PodZinger to Offer Targeted Video Ads: “Audio and video search engine PodZinger is launching a new advertising platform that targets video ads based on search queries and the content being viewed.”
- del.icio.us Plans To Become A Social Network: del.icio.us will essentially turn into a social network, with more focus on people instead of data. Please don’t change too much – I love what you do. Josh says:
“One of the amazing things about our users is how smart and far-reaching their interests are. While delicious previously has been very much about just the data, in the future I hope to allow our users themselves to come forward within the system. Additionally, I want to help people connect with others within the system, either to people they already know or discovering new people and communities based on interest.”
- WriteToMyBlog web-based post editor – Lifehacker: “New web app WriteToMyBlog is an advanced, rich web-based blog post editor.”
- Advertising Age – John Battelle Leads Bloggers Into Land of Ad Respect: Profile of John Battelle
- Neil Patel gives a series of great tips on how to land your blog post on the digg home page. If you care more about architecting traffic than authenticity…
- Verizon has a policy blog.
- The blueorganizer. Very cool
Blogs Big in Japan
A recent Wall Street Journal story by Yukari Iwatani Kane suggests that blogs are a bigger cultural phenomenon in in Japan than the US:
Blogs, in particular, are contributing to the vast reservoir of online content. Stories that incorporate the Internet and that unfold in its anonymous, abbreviated writing style are proving to be especially popular — perhaps because they represent real, spontaneous conversation, not an author’s massaged prose.
Blogs are even more popular in Japan than in the U.S. It may be that they represent an appealing outlet in a culture that discourages public self-expression. Japan produced 8.7 million blogs at the end of March, and the U.S. an estimated 12 million blogs — making blogging far more popular in Japan, taking the countries’ relative populations into account. An estimated 25 million Japanese — more than a fifth of the population — are believed to read blogs.
Books based on blogs — which some people have dubbed “blooks” — appeal to Japanese who rarely go online as well as to heavy Internet users. “Even people that are on the Internet regularly buy books to read on trains,” says Taichi Kogure, a marketing specialist for Ameba Books Ltd., which published “Demon Wife Diaries.”
Thanks to Stowe for the pointer.
Survey: For big news, consumers bypass blogs
Well yeah!
For many Americans seeking news during important events, blogs are just about the last place they look, relying instead on traditional outlets, a survey says.
Fifty percent said they turn to traditional media like television, radio and newspapers as their primary source for information during major events such as hurricanes over “emerging media,” according to a survey of 333 business professionals and 1,167 consumers between the ages of 25 and 64. The survey was sponsored by LexisNexis.
Link to Survey: For big news, consumers bypass blogs | CNET News.com
