Just saw on Twitter that Emily Chang had posted about RSS feeds for archiving your own personal history. She’s created a feed, using Expression Engine, that follows her flickr, blog, del.icio.us, upcoming, last.fm, etc. She went the extra mile and created a mySQL database on her end to archive this feed.
This is fascinating, but even more so is the comments on her post. People from 30Boxes, AIM, etc. are telling how their service does something similar. That’s interesting in that I had no idea there were companies doing this AND in that these companies know that these comments will resonate to a targeted audience that they want to reach.
From a marketing standpoint, this clearly demonstrates the need to follow not only your name online, but conversations that are of import to your company. No search feed would have clued these people into Emily’s post.
These are likely either 1-regular readers of her feed or 2-regular Techmeme readers (being that the post is now on Techmeme). Either way, they are plugged in enough to know how to mention their company without sounding spammy at all. In fact, they have added their commentary to a blog post that is very relevant to their company.
No advertising will give these companies what these guys just gave them:
1. The real attention of a vocal, and well-read, blogger
2. The focused, relevant attention of all her readers
3. The attention of all the Techmeme readers who clicked through to read Emily’s post
Impressive on all accounts. Make it someone’s job to follow relevant feeds and comment when appropriate (and only then). If you don’t have someone on your team to do this, hire someone. This is WOM at its finest.
Excellent point. I like to call that talking to the passionate consumer- the one that will bring that tool into their day to day world- pass it on to their friends, their co-workers and on an on.
When i first read Emily’s post, the AOL comment wasn’t there- but i read his comment on Stowe’s comments that pointed me back to Emily’s post which i checked back a couple hours later (guess she has to approve comments)- so i got AOL story as well that i didn’t know about- imagine how much $$ and effort AOL would need to go through to get that message to me in the traditional marketing world?
Great point on the AOL. WOM is advertising that money can’t buy. I love to see it in action.
Hi Robyn,
As one of those company ‘reps’ that commented on Emily’s post I thought you might like some perspective on how I found the post and came to comment on it.
I am subscribed to Emily’s twitter stream so I saw her twitter about it.
Also I am part of the Media 2.0 Workgroup along with my friend Stowe Boyd. Stowe caught the post (presumably on twitter as well) and posted his post which I read.
I then posted about both posts on OUR blog and did a manual trackback on Stowe’s and Emily’s blog.
I found THIS post via Techmeme because it is somehow linked to my post in the cluster.
Thought this might be a fun reveal of how these things work.
I guess you could say I am listening out to references and feature requests that my product Touchstone does – but more than that – I am passionate about these things and like to jump into the conversation.
Many times also (shameless self promotion now) Touchstone actually alerts me to news relevant to me on these topics.
As you can see from a post by Daniela – that’s what it is designed to do: http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2007/02/enterprise-20-what-others-corporate.html
Hope this gives some insight!
Cheers.
“I guess you could say I am listening out to references and feature requests that my product Touchstone does – but more than that – I am passionate about these things and like to jump into the conversation.”
I can’t thank you enough for that. It’s precisely what I meant to convey.
You are there because you *want* to be, not becuase you have to be. Yet, passion aside, your company has a relevant solution and you let Emily know. That is a perfect example of how marketing can actually assist prospects/clients.
When people ask me why I am a marketer, I tell them that I like to champion cool stuff or that I enjoy the social aspect of the web, but it all boils down to the fact that I like to help people and if I care enough about a product to take a job at a company, my passion to help people will also crossover into helping that company.
Thanks again for the comment.
Pleasure – great post 😉
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