B2Bridge

Last week, I finally became an RSS adept. I even became a heavy promotor of RSS feeds. I was not for months, although many people tried well to convince me. Main reason was that I did not have enough reason to open the seperate feed reader. I preferred e-mail warnings from my favorite sources like B2Bridge, Forrester and Tijd. Those e-mail warnings arrived in the same inbox I was already scanning a couple of times a day for my business. That made the e-mail warnings a much faster source of information than surfing out to a seperate feed reader. Moreover, the e-mails provided me on the spot with enough information to decide whether an in-depth reading was going to be interesting or not. So why surf out to yet another web page and loose valuable time? I now know I do not have to.

Voting on resources is about the leanest feedback you can set-up for users. It provides a first step to involve users in a community.

It can be done in several ways:

• a vote (e.g. Digg)
• voting up or down (e.g. Reddit, Squidoo)
• a 5-star rating (e.g. Google Groups)

What's the value of votes? Users may rate quality, but they might as well be voting on interest, relevance, novelty, visual appearance, or even entertainment value. Giving guidance on voting is basically a waste of time - most users will not read it. As a result, votes are a metric that requires substantial interpretation.

Welcome to the summer edition of B2B Marketing Carnival. New submissions remain welcome and I'll post a new digest once in a while. As long as contributions are related to business marketing, meet a minimum standard (language, novelty) and do not use abrasive language, they're likely to be included. A few fringe topics are listed in the 'other topics' section. Use at your own discretion.

I invite you to browse the first edition of the B2B Marketing Carnival - it will introduce quite a few blogs that would otherwise not easily come on your radar.

Based on an idea from Tom Pick's Web Marketing Central, let's evaluate the effect of social bookmarking for building traffic on individual posts.

I've posted today's article on virtual trade fairs in 2 places:

• on this portal, promoted to the home page, but without active promotion
• on the b2b marketing blog, promoted to the home page, but also actively promoted on a selected number of social bookmarking sites

We'll let you know the result in a couple of weeks.

There are many websites 'out there' providing guidance to bloggers. The advice may be good, but is it good for you?

At the risk of simplifying, there are 4 main types of bloggers:

• Full-time or part-time bloggers
• Independent bloggers (i.e. blogging for themselves), or bloggers working for an organisation. Independent bloggers can be blogging for money, or for building a community around a cause, a hobby, a family, ...

Probably the vast majority of the blogospere consists of independent bloggers.

The full-time independent blogger typically starts a blog for advertising or affiliate revenue, then writes a book, tours the lecture circuit and finally becomes a consultant. A main challenge for this blogger is to build a vast amount of traffic towards a particular target group which is interesting for advertisers. This has implications on posting frequency which is typically high (daily or more).

Problogger uses a reader comment as a pass to introduce a self-management system for the blogger who works full time:

“I work full-time on the side as well. The way I get things done is by using a point system. Some days I don’t feel like writing, some days I don’t feel like commenting, some days I don’t feel like networking, or whatever… I have to reach at least 50 points per day.

• 10 points for a long blog post
• 5 for a short one
• 2 points for a comment on a blog I’ve commented on before
• 5 points for commenting on a site I’ve never commented on before
• 1 point per comment on my own blog
• 10 points for installing a new module/plug-in, etc.

Works well for me. I think I may have created the system, or sub-consciously remember reading about such a thing somewhere.

This system works like a timesheet, but offers a major advantage: rather than measuring inputs (time), it measures outcomes, and through the scoring mechanism, you can promote the outcomes that you value more.

We made this video for our friends (and yours) that haven’t yet felt the power of our friend the RSS reader. We want to convert people and if you know someone who would love RSS and hasn’t yet tried it, point them here for 3.5 minutes.

A great 3.5 minute video to introduce the power of RSS. If you’re wondering 'what is RSS?', watching this video could be your best 3.5 minute investment for the year.

Four recent articles from very different sources have a common message:

'The truth about blogging' is a hilarious piece about what not to expect when starting a new blog. You only have one certainty - to completely loose every minute of free time, and some of your sleeping time as well.

The Wrong Advices, in 'blogging is harder than you think' explains why it is so difficult to do what successful bloggers make to appear to easy.

Sometimes, the blogosphere feels like everybody talking but nobody listening. Are only other bloggers visiting your blog, scouting for ideas or leaving comments to link to their blogs? Are there any non-bloggers in the blogosphere, such as customers?

Blogs about blogging are naturally visited by (prospective) bloggers. Just as blogs about marketing would be primarily visited by marketing professionals. But where are the b2b marketing blogs (not the blogs about b2b marketing)?

Dave Jung, a rare lustrum blogger, runs www.b2blog.com, 'for and by practitioners'. But he too uses the blog to participate in the b2b blogosphere, rather than talking to customers.

You will need a (free) Squidoo account to vote items up, down, or add your own.