ContentRobot

Yesterday, ContentRobot participated in a webcast that featured Seth Godin, a marketing guru and best-selling author of nine books, as he discussed his latest effort: How to Avoid the Meatball Sundae. He wants to encourage marketers to change their tactics to reap bigger rewards in the Internet Age.

Background
We are in the midst of another industrial revolution. This time, it doesn’t involve the factories and the processes that characterize the 1920s; rather it takes advantage of the Internet and the new ways to sell products and services.
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According to Wikipedia:

The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May of 1999. This was quickly adopted as both a noun and verb (”to blog,” meaning “to edit one’s weblog or to post to one’s weblog”).

Thanks to everyone who has paved the way for ContentRobot to not only blog ourselves but to help others in their blogging quests!

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With the rise of blog and its popularity, occasionally A-listers would ask, “Where are all the women bloggers?” Looks like the answer is,” they’ve finally arrived.”

According to a survey done by Synovate:

… 80% of Americans know what a blog is, 50% regularly visit blogs, and 8% publish their own blog … more women than men are bloggers, with 20% of American women who have visited blogs having their own versus 14 % of men

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Pew Internet & American Life Project today published its latest blogging report called Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers.

In sum, the report says:

The ease and appeal of blogging is inspiring a new group of writers and creators to share their voices with the world.

A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology.

Blogs, the survey finds, are as individual as the people who keep them. However, most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression – documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family.

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So what tools and technologies make Web 2.0 possible? With a little bit of help from the Wikipedia, here are the terms and their definitions.

Social software
Social software enables people to collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. It can encompass older media such as mailing lists and Usenet, but more recently it suggests genres such as blogs and wikis.

Social software can also be referred to the use of computer-mediated communication to create communities. People, then, will form online communities by combining one-to-one (e.g., email and instant messaging), one-to-many (Web pages and blogs), and many-to-many (wikis) communication modes.

Blogs
A blog (a shortened form of weblog or web log) is a website in which content is posted regularly and displayed in reverse chronological order. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging.” Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries.” A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger.”

A blog has certain attributes that distinguish it from a standard web page. It allows new pages to be easily created simply entering data into form and then submitted. Defined emplates allow you to add the article to the home page, create the new full article page, and archive via date or categories. It also allows the administrator to invite and add other authors, whose permission and access are easily managed.

Wikis
A wiki is a type of website that allows users to easily add and edit content and is especially suited for collaborative writing. A wiki system provides various tools that allow the user community to easily monitor the constantly changing state of the wiki and discuss the issues that emerge in trying to achieve a general consensus about wiki content. Wiki content can also be misleading as users may add incorrect information to the Wiki page.

A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Most wikis are open to the general public without the need to register any user account.

Podcasts
Podcasting is the distribution of audio or video files, such as radio programs or music videos, over the internet using either RSS or Atom syndication for listening on mobile devices and personal computers. A podcast is a web feed of audio or video files placed on the Internet for anyone to download or subscribe to, and also the content of that feed.

Podcasting’s essence is about creating content (audio or video) for an audience that wants to listen when they want, where they want, and how they want.

RSS feeds
Web feeds provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other metadata. RSS in particular, delivers this information as an XML file called an RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel.

In addition to facilitating syndication, web feeds allow a website’s frequent readers to track updates on the site using an aggregator. Web feeds are widely used by the weblog community to share the latest entries’ headlines or their full text, and even attached multimedia files.

Simpler web design
Design becomes focused on developing a community rather than selling to an individual. Whereas alot of web sites are rich with Flash-based presentations and other “bells and whistles,” the design in the Web 2.0 world gets simplified. Think of how sparse the Google home page is and how well it does with community-building with its offerings.

Blog templates, which are customized with CSS, are designed to showcase the content more than other elements on the page. This simplicity allows for the colloboration of many authors who don’t need to know much more beyond the basics of HTML to publish content.

Folksonomy
Folksonomy, which combines “folk” and “taxonomy,” refers to the collaborative (but unsophisticated way) that information is being categorized on the web. Instead of using a centralized form of classification, users are encouraged to assign freely chosen keywords (called tags) to pieces of information or data, a process known as tagging.

Examples of web services that use tagging include those who allow users to publish and share photographs, personal libraries, bookmarks, social software generally, and most blog software, which permits authors to assign tags to each entry.

Ajax
Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, or its acronym Ajax, is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability.

What’s Next?
Now that the techy portion of Web 2.0 has been defined and examples given, we’ll explain how blogs fit in and how marketing teams must repond to this new environment

Web 1.0, built in the 1990s, is characterized as static web pages that were built and marketed by web professionals. Sites were found by typing in a domain name and hoping that a particular company had a site (hence the rise of domains such as pets.com).

Web 1.5, created around 2000, brought dynamic sites and ecommerce into the fold. Marketing campaigns are pushed via email and banner advertising.

Web 2.0, building in 2006, offers a place where customers are treated like adults and are valued for their opinions and views and are talked to in a human voice.

To further define the differences, the tables below summarizes the techniques and technologies that surround the Web 2.0 concept.

Web Marketing Techniques

Companies

Last Thursday, I listened to an interesting American Marketing Association (AMA) web seminar, Invisible Marketing: 3 Things Every Organization Needs to Know in the Era of Blogs, Podcasts and RSS Feeds. This has got me thinking about the concept of Web 2.0.

What is Web 2.0? I’ll summarize what how the Wikipedia defines it:

Web 2.0 … has come to refer to what some people describe as a second phase of architecture and application development for the World Wide Web.

Web 2.0 applications often use a combination of techniques devised in the late 1990s, including public web service APIs (dating from 1998), Ajax (1998), and web syndication (1997).

They often allow for mass publishing (web-based social software). The term may include blogs and wikis.

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Gallup suggests that blogs are catching on with web users and their online activities.

Their latest poll, who surveyed 1,013 adults nationally, found that:

• 73% of Americans who use the Web
• 87% use email
• 72% check news and weather
• 52% shop
• 52% plan travel
• 28% use instant messaging
• 23% participate in online auctions
• 22% view videocasts
• 22% download music
• 20% consult blogs at least “occassionally” and “frequently”

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What the buzz on blogging these days? Here’s what we think is hot for 2006.

1. Blogging is Here to Stay
Blogging will no longer be viewed as a novelty and will create less of a buzz as it did two years ago. Despite a levelling off of excitement, it will continue to become a widespread and accepted online activity.

What does it mean? Those who can take the pressure of maintaining constant, regular value-added posts will be able to stay, while the others who cannot keep up should consider other pursuits.

2. Niche Blogs Will Rule.
Trends show that themed blogs dealing with food, tourism, entertainment, technology and other dominant concerns will gain leadership, if they are not already.

Blogs will continue to be an extension of popular culture as manifested by the high traffic of sites dealing with reality TV shows, sports, and (of course) politics.

3. Blogging Becomes a Marketing Tool.
More corporations, businesses and private institutions will get into blogging. Corporate blogging seems like a good idea if you want to get your message across without the “hardsell.” Put up a blog that smacks of a press release and readers will most likely hit the “Close” button.

4. High-tech Blogging: What’s Next?
Podcasting will take off as people will want to hear more than just read about certain issues. On the technical front, mobile blogging (from cell phones and other devices) will make it even easier to publish content.

5. Blogging As a Respected Profession.
While there is a debate regarding bloggers as writers or journalists under a cooler name, make no mistake that this career opportunity will exist for nimble content creators. ContentRobot is especially hoping that this one comes true as we offer “ghost blogging” services for our clients.

Guidewire Group and iUpload published a study called “Blogging in the Enterprise — Corporate Blogging Drives Next Wave of Social Media Adoption.”

ContentRobot is pleased to share the highlights with you, as we agree that corporate blog adoption is both recent and accelerating. We offer some key findings here — our favorite one is “no respondent reported launching a blog initiative that was found to be unsuccessful.”
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