Category: Blogging

Jott Blog Post

One of the really interesting futures in web 2.0 is hole applications can be develop they can work together. In this case I am working with Jott’s to devolop a blog post for my wordpress blog. I have also expermented with Twitter. So I am going to see how this works out with the a blog post.
Click here to listen

Powered by Jott.com – Try it at 1 (866) JOTT123 – Jott.com

Later: I did this from my cell phone on the way to lunch. I think it’s kind of neat that you can click through the link and hear exactly what I said, because the transcription isn’t perfect. I’ll have some more thoughts on this and on Twitter with Jott later.

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Week in Review

Highlights of the last week:

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Blogs for PR Clip Reporting

Blogs for PR Clip Reporting

My previous post may have seemed a little off-topic, because it was essentially a recap of some coverage of a news release, with links to several of the stories. In reality, it was a concrete example of this PR tip, how you can use blogs for PR clip reporting. This is another way you can use social media tools to accomplish business objectives more effectively than through last-generation tools like email.

In my work with the National Media Relations and New Media team at Mayo Clinic, we regularly distribute news releases about findings of Mayo Clinic’s researchers as they appear in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Examples of these are general medical journals like Journal of the American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine or Mayo Clinic Proceedings, basic science-oriented journals like Science, PNAS or Nature or others that are devoted to a particular medical specialty such as Circulation or Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

When we do a news release like this one on ovary removal and its correlation with an increased risk of dementia, we want to report results on the news coverage to the physicians and researchers involved, and to leaders of their department and staff members in our Department of Public Affairs.

Typically, if the story involves one major broadcast network or a newspaper like USA Today or the New York Times, we can just send an email with the link to the story. In this case, because of the extent of coverage, that would have been unwieldy.
When we get extraordinary response, we’re starting to use a blog on our intranet to communicate with our key internal groups. We can have links to some of the key stories, and can compile them all in one place to make it convenient for people who are interested to get a feel for the nature and extent of coverage. It also gives them a single link to a blog post that they can copy and paste into an email message to share with colleagues.

We have some key external groups we want to keep informed about the news, too. Unfortunately, because they don’t have access behind our IT firewall, they can’t get to our internal blog. So, here’s an external version of what we placed on our internal blog, which highlights some of the exceptional news coverage Dr. Walter Rocca’s study in Neurology received.

A blog is not an efficient way to produce a comprehensive PR clip report; other services are better for that. And it only works for summarizing on-line coverage. But to quickly do a “show and tell” report, sifting through and identifying key coverage and adding commentary and context, a blog is hard to beat. For this time I just assembled the highlights in my personal blog; we may want to consider developing an external blog for this purpose. It wouldn’t be hard, or expensive, to do.

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Looking Back: One Year of Blogging

one year of blogging
It was a year ago Monday that I launched this blog with three posts, the first of which alluded to mine being one of 50 million or so. Now Technorati says there are something over 70 million non-spam blogs.


As you look in the archives, you’ll note that my first posts were on July 30, 2006 and then I went dark until September 21. I wasn’t sure it would really be “OK” to have a blog, but then I got the responsibility for New Media as part of my work portfolio, so I decided to really plunge in and learn. Since then I’ve done 212 other posts, or nearly two every three days.

Here are some highlights, themes and lessons learned from my first year of blogging.

I’ve done several book reviews, including The Tipping Point and Blink! by Malcolm Gladwell, Our Iceberg is Melting by John Kotter, I Dare You! by William Danforth, Pyromarketing by Greg Stielstra, Wikinomics and, most recently, Made to Stick. I recommend all of them.

One book I didn’t review, but which has been the concept behind many posts, is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Click here to read my thoughts on GTD.

I’ve blogged, some of them live, several conferences and seminars, including a Ragan conference in Chicago (where I met Jeremiah), the WHPRMS conference for health-care PR and marketing professionals, an Advanced Learning Institute conference in October, and a similar one in April. More recently, a colleague and I attended and presented at a healthcare marketing conference in Orlando, and last week I was on a panel at the Frost & Sullivan Sales & Marketing East 2007 event. Liveblogging is a great way to take notes on presentations, so I can refer to sites mentioned by the presenters. If it helps others, that’s a nice bonus.

I discovered that my blog was a great place to share personal and family highlights, from our Bible Bowl vacation, to my daughter Rachel’s wedding, to our electronic, multimedia Christmas letter.

On the media front, this has been the year of the buyout and layoff, particularly with newspapers. That has lots of implications for people like me who work with news media.
My biggest surprise, though, was a post on a related topic, when Dr. Max Gomez lost his position as the on-air doctor at WNBC. I began to notice that this post was getting visits every day, even several months after I wrote it. Then I noted that my WordPress.com dashboard was telling me that “Dr. Max Gomez” was a phrase people were using to find my blog. I thought, wow, are people searching for Dr. Max Gomez on Technorati? That must be how people are finding it, right?

I was surprised when I did the search in Google and found what you see below:

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Somehow my blog post ranked ahead of Wikipedia’s entry on Dr. Max in Google!

I found something similar with my review of John Kotter’s penguin parable. Which just does go to show that blogs are naturally built for search optimization.

Most recently, I’ve been amazed by Facebook, which has led to several other posts.

It’s been a great year of learning, and while I’ve invested some time, the financial cost has been zero.

Where else but the blogosphere can you learn so much at no cost?

I’m looking forward to continuing my education!

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Blogging Panel at Frost & Sullivan

The Blogging panel discussion was too short (only an hour), but the great observation is how attitudes seem to be changing. We did have “the ROI question,” but for the most part the real issue isn’t whether companies should be involved with blogs, but how they should do it.

Among the returns on the blogging investment (and the investment can be really small; it can even be zero in dollar terms and just the time of an interested person), we came up with:

  • Time saved in communication – answering common questions that have come by email, enabling leaders to refer those questions to the blog, and as people have further questions those can be asked and answered in the comments, too. It saves having to have the same conversation repeatedly.
  • Leads generated and sales closed – Jeremiah says Podtech.net doesn’t do press releases or advertising; his blog is one of the company’s key methods of marketing, even though that’s not it’s primary purpose.
  • Building relationships with customers – this is the main benefit
  • Customers and potential clients familiar with you – A blog is a great way for people to be up to speed on what you’re all about, eliminating awkward talk about the weather when you first meet.
  • SEO – This wasn’t mentioned the first time through, because it’s a fundamental truth that BLOG stands for Better Listings On Google. It’s a given. Having a blog puts you higher in the search rankings.

Members of the blogging panel, and their blogs, are listed and linked to below:

So tell us, what didn’t we get to discuss that you wish we would have? The beauty of a blogging panel is it never really dies. The discussion can continue indefinitely.

Updated: Thanks for the link, Jeremiah. For those interested in reading more about the conference sessions, here are the links to Day 1 and Day 2 posts.

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