September 13, 2005 SAO Marketing and Sales SIG
Subject: Blogs & RSS: Buzzwords or Business Critical?

By Kate McPherron

In a freewheeling discussion moderated by Scott Ransmeier of Serena, Stephen King (president and CEO of Marqui , Inc.) and Scott Niesen (director of marketing for Attensa) addressed the impact of blogs and RSS on the exchange of information. Presenter bios follow the story.

Note:

Blog is an abbreviation for weblog, an online journal that is frequently updated and generally represents the personality of the author or the web site.

RSS – Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication – is a way to syndicate site content by creating an XML document that summarizes content such as news, blog posts, comments or forum threads.

A new blog is born every minute, and 6 of the 10 top blog hosts have grown more than 100% over the past year. Yet, to the corporate crowd, blogging as a practice is very much a maturing phenomenon. While many in attendance at the meeting indicated they visit blogs by a show of hands, very few:

-         moderate or contribute to blogs,

-         know about RSS, or

-         plan to use blogs or RSS.

Q: What is the history of blogs?
Stephen King: Blogs started as individual diaries that others could read. A blog is a conversation between the creator and reader, a way of interacting with the producer of information, which is a new paradigm for interactivity. The consequence of interactions becoming more dynamic is that companies must become more transparent, more open. Therefore, external and internal corporate “personae” must be in synch. The old way, where these personae are different (think Disney) is dead.

Also, keep in mind that blogs don’t exist in isolation; there are RSS feeds, WIKIs, etc.

Scott Niesen: RSS was commercialized by Netscape in 1997, but lay dormant for a while. What changed that was the synergy of blogging. It used to be “surf and find,” but now, through RSS, it’s “publish and subscribe.” With RSS, information comes to you; you subscribe to it. Attensa founder Craig Barnes has said, “Not taking advantage of RSS is plain stupid.”

SN: The time is now. RSS is another communication channel – a new way of getting information out, to deliver messages to any constituents. It can be used for communications with and among customers, developers, HR, investors, suppliers, etc.

Blogs are an easy way to get information out. Think of it as a word processor that puts information on the web in bite-sized, manageable pieces in real time. When you update information, it goes out.

SK: We seem to be “swimming in information,” so how do you distinguish the two? The important thing is don’t get overly excited. Most companies are still moving from paper (brochures, documents, white papers, etc.) to electronics (web, email, etc.). That’s the first issue: how does the audience need the information? For example, a windsurfing product company with a young audience that’s very tech-savvy can rely on web-based information, but another – a cruise company that has an audience primarily over 60 years old – might need to rely on paper.

Companies must also ask themselves: are you ready to have two-way communications with customers, to be transparent?

There is a shadow side, too; like spam, allowing respondents to go public has risks. You have to be able to edit. That’s a balancing issue.

I think RSS will replace browsers. Yet I also think you need to ask whether your company should do this. And the answer depends on your audience.

Is the technology out there? Yes. Is there risk? Yes. Who do you let write, could they say things that are illegal? I think there needs to be caution.

Make sure that blogs are appropriate for your business. Be aware of the shadow side – you must be able to manage this. Ask yourself if you have the people and writing skills to do this, and be aware that this leads to new methods and processes.

How to make a blog effort successful:

1. It needs to be bounded, something you’d want to read. Marqui’s blog has become popular because it focuses on challenges in marketing. Stoneyfield Farms has a blog on healthy eating. It’s tangential, but more interesting and bounded than “yogurt.”
2. Good writing is important; it can’t be underestimated. 
3. It should help people, build community, create a sense of dialogue with people.
   

SN: Blog is a word processor that gets web presence – one author. A WIKI is an open doc that has many authors.

Blogs have a huge benefit: great feedback, answers to questions. A WIKI is a tool we use internally for project development. We have “ghost meetings” where we sit down and discuss what’s important, what we’re doing, what got done. The blog creates persistence, a document that’s available to employees who then know what’s going on and can comment, for example, note what has been done. By comparison, email with attachments and a note – “here are the notes from the meeting” – is not as useful. With a blog, multiple people can see and edit.

SK: I’m not aware of any now.

SN: Salon.com

SK/SN: You could make money with click-throughs or what we started, bloggers paid to say something. And there’s a new one: blogging for market research, where a bunch of bloggers start talking about the product in the public domain. Nokia France paid people to review their product and talk about it. Microsoft Longhorn does something similar, where you can look at the early product, but have to come back and blog about it. People are literally reviewing the product in the public domain. Of course, there’s risk, compared to a PR-controlled professional review.

Of course, journalists are blogging and that makes it easier to interact with them for PR.

SN: New search engines that look at blogs are very similar to conventional search engines; any blog post with a keyword will come up. How that ties into SEM is that if keywords are buried in blogs, you can get found in a completely different way.

SK: SEM will focus on the business, say yogurt, but the blog search will find other aspects, tangential aspects, and microsites. Websites are not instantly up, but blogs are much easier to keep up-to-date. You can address current events much more easily, and discuss topics that are more likely to get picked up.

SK: In the future we will move from search to subscribe.

SN: Attention and intention. Most blogs have worthless information – personal. That’s not what we want: more information. What we do want is better information, more targeted. We want to measure attention: which blogs were deleted, which were read. This leads to prioritization, to get to the meaty stuff first, before the other stuff. By demonstrating preferences, you become part of affinity groups, and now relevant information can be suggested to you.

Search engines use links and keywords, but what captures our attention? If you know that an affinity group is really interested in, say, yogurt, you know you can address them with messages on yogurt.

SN: If you think cookies were trouble, just wait. We need new privacy policies so that each time you subscribe to new sites, you’re asked whether you want to share your interest in this field with others. You’ll really need to read the fine print! Attensa gives subscribers the community control and is up-front about it, transparent.

SN: We try to place minimal burdens on users. We hardwire our RSS feed into our software, so while we’re giving it away for free, you also get updated information from Attensa, asking what kind of information do you want.

SK: RSS is like the future browser; just because they come to the site doesn’t mean you have to ask who they are. Like websites, the blog model says: ask as little as you can, and begin a dialogue. You can start making offers to encourage them to give up more of their identity, once trust develops.

Scott Ransmeier: So this is an incrementally deepening relationship, like a real conversation.

SK: Marketing and sales have traditionally used a “bang ‘em on the head and get leads” approach. This is different.

SK: You have to approach it a little differently than you do with traditional print journalism. If you read “The Economist,” you know you’re getting a certain kind of writing. With blogs, there’s not enough disclosure about perspective – there should be more of a “here’s my world view and here’s how I contrast with others” disclosure.

SN: Allocating time to get a balanced perspective. The weakness of the blogosphere is that it’s NOT professional journalism. You can try reading bloggers who cover the same subject (attentiontrust.org) for exposure to different points of view on the subject, but you don’t really know the perspective of the authors.

SK: No corporation should start blogging with tools that are in the marketplace today – there’s no approval process, and at the very least legal should check things over. It’s very dangerous now. Certainly, the CEO should participate, be one amongst many in the blog. But you want a mechanism that channels views through a funnel; if the CEO blogs, it can verge on megalomania. Remember: the blog needs to be tangential. Plus, the majority of CEOs don’t write very well. You need a process engine and the blog needs more than one author.

Stephen King, CEO, Marqui, Inc.

Stephen King joined Marqui in July 2004. He's not the famous mystery writer, although he does write and lecture about archetypes in today’s world. Prior to joining Marqui, Stephen was General Manager at Merant PLC – a $130M global enterprise software provider –  where he was responsible for all aspects of marketing, engineering and business development. Stephen played a key role in the dramatic turnaround of Merant and its successful acquisition by Serena Software for $380M in May 2004, creating close to $300M in shareholder value in a difficult two-year period.

Prior to joining Merant in February 2002, Stephen led Terayon Communications Systems' cable solutions group, growing the business by more than 20 percent per quarter to $280M in revenue. Prior to that, he served as the chief operating officer at digital video start-up Imedia Corporation, which was acquired by Terayon for $106M.

Stephen grew up in the West of England, and graduated from the London School of Economics with honors in Economics and Statistics. He also holds an M.Sc in computer science, an Executive MBA from Wharton, and an MA in mythology.

Scott Niesen, marketing director, Attensa

Scott has nearly 20 years of experience building brands and driving demand for some of Oregon's major technology success stories in hardware, software and semiconductors. A serial start-up guy, Scott has managed advertising, PR, channel marketing, event and Internet marketing for InFocus, Extensis, Pixelworks and Attensa. He has a BS in Journalism from the University of Colorado and an MS in Marketing Communications from Roosevelt University in Chicago. Now that the Web 2.0 era has dawned, the one eternal marketing truth he’s internalized is "Everything I know is wrong." 

Attensa, Inc. is a venture-backed software company committed to developing an RSS Network that intelligently delivers relevant, up-to-the-minute information to people on any device they choose.

About the author

Kate McPherron, a technology evangelist, has helped technology and industrial firms manage and market their products and services for the past 20 years. She can be reached at klm54@cornell.edu.