Microsoft arrives at the RSS party
September 13, 2005
Microsoft has finally flung its considerable bulk behind RSS as an effective distribution platform. This morning, Bill Gates announced considerable support for syndication in the next version of MS office. Michael Gartenberg from Jupiter Research is blogging it live from PDC. His first thoughts:
RSS support in Office is nice. Not only does the system track RSS via subscriptions in IE 7 (and has an RSS gadget built into the new Vista Sidebar) but Office supports RSS as well. Outlook finally adds integrated RSS support (which is my preferred way to read RSS). In general, it looks like RSS aggregators are indeed a commodity
We bloog, you bloog, they all bloog
September 9, 2005
Newbie bloggers who want to see what their carefully crafted posts framed in a WordPress blog should consider signing up at Webloog.
There’s a free WP blog for all but more importantly free hosting as well. And thanks to a handy bookmarklet, all you have to do is click and write and publish.
The only drawbacks seem to be the domain name which will always be http://yourusername.webloog.com which isn’t very exciting and there doesn’t seem to be any way for techie tinkerers to get at the code to tweak their blogs. But then this isn’t really a geek’s solution.
If nothing else, the price is right.
Employees can influence consumer opinion
September 7, 2005
It might be a scary thought for certain public relations professionals, but companies should really find suitable employees outside the marketing department to blog about their business, and perferably those who display passion for the product or service and are good communicators.
The wisdom of this is born out by a new study conducted by Intelliseek, mentioned by Christopher Hannegan, Edelman’s Director of Employee Engagement. He reports:
[Intelliseek] found that consumers were greatly influenced (7.0 on a 10-point scale) to purchase a product or service if they heard a positive comment about that product or service by an employee of the company who offered it. Only three types of influence ranked above employee comments: “a negative word-of-mouth report from someone you knew personally”; “a positive word-of-mouth report from someone you knew personally”; and “a positive first-hand report from a credible professional source or expert.”
And for those who think they can still buy their way to their customers’ affection:
What was last on the list of things that influence purchase decisions? Advertising in a newspaper or magazine and in television or radio all came in at 4.6 out of 10.