Archive for December, 2004

According to CorporateBloggingBlog, a Swedish association, the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, issued an ultimatum to an employee to quit writing a personal blog because "they believe his personal views could be mistaken for the organization’s." Instead, he quit, and has now been recruited by a free-market think tank.

There’s a reason successful companies like Google and Microsoft encourage their employees to blog.

Just got back to my room — the session went well, and there were lots of great questions throughout. I’m going to go back through my notes and see how many of them I can cover here in some future posts. (And feel free to post any other questions you might have in comments.)

Now, off to the reception and dinner at Epcot…

I’m talking to the folks who were hardy enough to gather here at 4pm to talk about blogs in Orlando. Personally, I’d rather be outside enjoying the weather. But I wanted to take a minute to show them how easy this is.

Just sat through an interesting session on "Redefining Association Value" and am now enjoying some incredible weather at lunch.

During the session, we conducted some roleplaying around a case study of an organization facing some slight changes in its membership base. The responses were interesting. How quickly some people jump ahead to drastic measures! And how quickly others assume you can’t do anything without three years of research and planning!

There has to be an in-between there somewhere.

(Bonus points to anyone who can tell me where this post’s title is from.)

Imagine a world where you could deliver your messages to your members — indeed, where your members could talk to each other — without worrying about spam filters, firewalls, and "junk email" syndrome (you know, where you come into a full emailbox and wind up missing an important email because it was buried between the latest Viagra promotion and another Nigerian with a sob story to tell and $40 million to park in your bank account).

It was only a few years ago that that was the norm with email, before spam exploded off the charts and made it all so much more difficult. While I remain committed to email marketing and communications, because I still think it provides tremendous value as direct marketing, there is another tool that is growing in effectiveness, and it ties in very nicely with blogging — in fact, blogging has led the way in promoting its use.

It’s called syndication, and while I’m going to avoid getting all technical (I would only confuse myself), it’s basically a way to deliver content directly to someone’s desktop through a "feed" that’s based on a standard language (XML) and is interpreted by "reader" software.

Here’s how it works in a nutshell: You download reader software. Through the software you subscribe to whatever feeds you want. (There’s one on this blog — look for the orange XML button on the righthand side of the page and you’ll get the feed link.) Then, whenever you update the feeds, you get the latest content posted to that webpage.

It doesn’t just work for blogs — there are newsfeeds available for most major news organizations, scholarly journals, and just about everything else. Anything that goes in a webpage can be reformatted into an XML template and published as a feed.

If you’ve never used a reader before, the concept can be hard to explain without showing it to you. Well, thanks to the gracious hard work of Paul Ward, along with design work contributed by Rock Creek Creative, now you can. Paul’s created a demo system that you can download here for free and get a look at how it works.

You can download the zipfile for Windows here.

When you download the file, unzip it, and then in the newsforum folder, open the "ACCANewsForum" executable. You’ll see some sample newsfeeds already there, and to look at a different one, click NewsManager and you’ll see several more samples. Go all the way down to the bottom of the NewsManager and you’ll see the space where you can add additional feeds. (For questions on the reader demo, contact Paul directly at paul@pkward.com.)

Syndication is a rapidly-growing content distribution method that is going to grow more popular as email becomes more and more difficult. (As Paul’s reader shows, you can even set up email discussion groups for the newsreader format. In the main screen, the first entry, "Blog on Blogging," is actually a Yahoo group created for the purposes of the demo.)

And it’s a much more efficient way to surf the web if you have a number of sites you visit regularly that provide newsfeeds. I use my reader to keep up with dozens of blogs and news sites so I don’t have to worry about spending time in a browser checking to see if they’ve been updated.

A direct channel into your member’s desktop, providing content when you want to provide it, to be read when they want to read it … it’s the best of "push" and "pull". Think of the possibilities.

(Hey, a free newsreader to download — that’s better than any paper handout, isn’t it?)