Blogging | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Bulldog Reporter Online Measurement Teleseminar

At noon CST today I’m going to be participating as a panelist in a Bulldog Reporter teleseminar entitled Online Measurement: Proven Tools and Affordable Techniques for Tracking Brand and Reputation on the Internet.

Among the sites I use for tracking mentions of Mayo Clinic in the blogosphere (and in other on-line sources such as news sites) are

Technorati
Ice Rocket
Google News
BlogPulse (can track trends of blog mentions vs. a competitor, or look for a spike in your own mentions, which may indicate an issue that needs attention.)

I use the same tools to track some other issues I care about, and set up searches that are connected to RSS feeds that automatically send updates to my RSS aggregator. I use NetNewswire for Macintosh because I like being able to take my feeds with me on my laptop when I ride the bus. There are other software packages available for this, or you can use My Yahoo!, Google Reader, My AOL, Newsgator or other on-line services so you can read your feeds from any computer. The only downside is you need to be connected to the internet.

In addition to potentially giving an early warning about issues that may be brewing, I also find these services (which are all FREE) helpful in identifying potential story ideas. Frankly, most of our mentions in the blogosphere are positive, although we do see posts falsely claiming Mayo Clinic support or validation for a product. We follow up on those, involving the Legal department if necessary. But we have lots of patients who have blogs, or people blogging about the experience of a family member at Mayo Clinic, and we have had some occasions in which we see a compelling patient story in a blog, and have followed up to see if the patient would be open to having a story on the Mayo Clinic site for patients.

And, of course, now that I’ve done this post I will see it show up in those monitoring sources I’ve mentioned above.

We also use some flat-rate paid service for more comprehensive on-line monitoring, primarily of news sites. That’s what is really nice about the web and automated on-line services: instead of a per-clip fee, you get everything for a flat rate. We still use a clipping service for the print clips because the on-line versions of major newspapers differ from their web sites, but particularly for major stories we can use free and flat-rate online monitoring services to get quick feedback and pass it along to the patients involved, to caregivers and to leaders of the organization.

I look forward to hearing my fellow panelists’ contributions.

Technorati: Google Reader, My AOL, RSS, Newsgator, Blogs

Worth a Click

Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report shows a slight increase in the time it takes for its number of blogs tracked to double (it’s now about 236 days), which is somewhat to be expected given that the total is now about 57 million.

Businessweek, the Washington Post and New York Times each have articles about Google’s plan to broker print ads.

Jeff Jarvis comments on newspapers in “free fall.”

Wired has a run-down and comparison of social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us.

Technorati: Technorati, Google, Newspapers, Advertising, Social Bookmarking

Blog Business Summit Highlights

I met Janet Johnson last week at the ALI conference on blogging and podcasting in San Francisco. She led the preconference workshop, and you can see my posts on her presentation (and some of her posts from the last week)here.

At the time, Janet was a little sheepish about the state of her blog because she had recently left Marqui, was waiting to get the design done on her new blog and hadn’t posted much yet.

That’s no longer an issue.

Janet’s reports this week from the Blog Business Summit, particularly the tips from Maryam and Robert Scoble and the post on Brands as Symbols of Social Aspirations, are give a good window into the proceedings for those of us unable to attend.

Thanks for the highlights, Janet!

Demographics Don’t Matter

Of course, for traditional media, demographics are extremely important. If you want to reach a particular kind of audience through TV ads, for example, you need to pick programs that are watched by a sufficiently large group of your audience of likely consumers (probably not advertising Flomax on the Cartoon Network, for instance.)

New media, particularly podcasts, blogs and vlogs, are different entirely. Here’s why:

Search. With over 80 percent of internet users using search engines (scores of millions of users, if not more than 100 million) to find what they need on the web, if your content is out there and searchable, many of your potential customers will find it, wherever you are housing the video or audio files.

In other words, it doesn’t matter if a particular niche within the web is mostly inhabited by people outside your target demographic. For example, if YouTube’s audience is mostly younger, and your target audience is mostly older, that doesn’t stop your audience from finding your content…particularly if you have included it within your own web site or blog.

You can take advantage of the free service to add your video clip to the 100 million or more in the YouTube inventory. The teenagers won’t be looking for it and won’t find it. But by embedding it in your web site or blog and tagging appropriately, people who are looking for your kind of product or service can find it. And since you paid nothing (beyond the time to upload the clip) to add it, your cost per thousand impressions is….? And how does that compare to the TV ad?

The audience may not be large enough to carry your business, and you may still need to use traditional media, too. But if you’re paying for TV, why would you not take advantage of distribution that is essentially free? Especially since those people who have searched for a term that leads them to your content are likely your best potential customers?

New Media Growth. With 67 million iPods sold to date (and likely another 20-25 million hard-drive based mp3 players of all other brands), the audience is getting sufficiently large that it can’t be just the teenagers anymore. And of course the files can be played or viewed on computers as well, which makes for an even broader audience.

For media that are walled off from the broader internet (e.g. cell phones and cable VOD), my first point above is less relevant. You still need to consider the audience for that channel and whether it is large enough and has enough of “your” kind of people to be viable.

I discussed the underlying concept of the Economics of Abundance and linked to some other relevant articles here.

Technorati: iPod, YouTube, podcast, vlog, blog, New Media, demographics, TV, advertising

‘Type-Ins’ Tipping Point?

Janet Johnson, formerly of Marqui, is back in the blogosphere with a newly designed site and an interesting post on the phenomenon of direct navigation, in which users guess at a URL instead of using Google, Yahoo, Ask or another search engine.

Her advice is that if you are using Google’s AdWords service to buy pay-per-click ads on a term like, for example, Rochester MN jeweler, you should consider buying the domain name rochestermnjeweler.com. That is, if the search term you are buying in AdWords isn’t too obscure.

You can read Janet’s thoughtful analysis here.

Technorati: Google, Adwords, Yahoo, Ask, Search Engine, Direct Navigation