MEETING SPONSORS
Microstaff (http://www.microstaff.com) provides pizza
and beverages. Microstaff also provides Creative and
Technical Talent for Web, Interactive Media, Marketing
Communications, and Software Development projects.

ONEWARE (http://www.oneware.com) pays for these
meeting minutes. ONEWARE is a Colorado-based software
company that provides semi custom web-based
applications.

Copy Diva (http://www.copydiva.com) provides the audio
visual equipment.

NCAR provides free use of their facility for our
meetings.

Speakers: James Clark & Derek Scruggs

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

JAMES CLARK (Founding Partner of Room 214:
http://www/room214.com)

James Clark has over 10 years' experience creating,
managing and implementing successful communications
campaigns for consumer product and high-tech
companies. His core skill is to help teams rapidly
examine and refine their market strategy, align
communications and business goals, and establish
communications priorities.

DEREK SCRUGGS (Founder of www.escalan.com)

Derek Scruggs is founder and CEO of Escalan, an agency
that helps overworked marketing departments get things
done online, including strategy, web site design,
copy, email marketing, search engine marketing and
custom applications. Derek is also the co-founder of
Click Thru Stats, a "brain-dead simple" click-tracking
service useful in everything from email marketing to
searching engine advertising to web site traffic
analysis. He is also a co-founder of the Enthusiast
Group, a seed stage company that is doing lots of
super-secret stuff with Really Simple Syndication
(RSS), blogs, and podcasting.

Helpful Links:

Site Tracking and Analytics:
http://www.opentracker.net
http://www.google.com/analytics/
http://www.clickthrustats.com

Ezine Article Services:
http://www.ezinearticles.com

Online Press Release Distribution:
http://www.prweb.com
http://www.prleap.com

Reverse Keyword Lookup:
http://www.urltrends.com

Free Keyword and Google Ranking Service:
http://www.nichebot.com

Aggregators
http://www.newsgator.com
http://www.feeddemon.com
http://www.bloglines.com
http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/

Blog search engines
http://www.feedster.com
http://www.technorati.com
http://blogsearch.google.com

Publishing tools
http://www.wordpress.org
http://www.typepad.com/
http://www.sixapart.com
http://spaces.msn.com
http://drupal.org/ (really more of a portal-style CMS)

More about RSS:
http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/
http://rssgov.com/rssworkshop.html


INTRODUCTION - Josh Zapin

When the Internet first became a popular medium, if
you built it, they would come. But today we have lots
of media technologies and services, such as broadband,
have come down dramatically in price. So the choices
for how we communicate now are endless.

JAMES CLARK

Whoever owns the conversation owns the market; markets
are conversations. Context is social medium. One-way
dialog has now become a 2-way dialog. The issues are
no longer given to a journalist who writes about a
story from one perspective. Now it's a 2-way dialog.
We identify the customer or person who wants to enter
the conversation --one who searches the internet and
engage that person in a conversation. Search engines
are now used by customers to identify where they want
to put their money regarding specific subject
matter/services.

Evolution of Authentic Dialog

My firm advises customers to get out there in the
market and talk to other individuals, engage them in a
conversation

The old communication model was completely a
monologue: mainstream media, static websites,
corporate brochures, traditional advertising.

The new communication model is a dialog between
multiple people; the message is not "committeeized and
lawyerized."

* If you hold yourself out as an expert, be prepared
to have that title challenged every day. For example,
if someone comes onto your site, your blog, you can
have an actual conversation with them about what you
know; it's not a one-way message.

* Insights, not dissertations.What I'm interested in
(and others, too) are small insights that can keep me
informed and in the loop.

* Removal of intermediaries - we don't need
journalists to deliver news to us, we can be the
direct contact. Ideas are discussed on blogs. So you
can use a mainstream media tool, like an online news
paper article, and at the end of it, refer them to
your blog. It's a great way to get people to your
site.

How do you incorporate the different aspects,
mentioned above, into a dialog?

Use the knowledge you have about your industry,
company and put yourself out there - talk about what
you know and be challenged.

In order to be successful, you must first determine
what's going on with your customer. You do this by
following up.

Tracking a conversion. For example, a client downloads
a white paper, free video on your site. You must
follow up with customer. Is this a:
* Consultative sale?
* Impulse buy?
* Selling to CEO?
* What is Purchase frequency?

Analyze/measure data.

Site analytics - Online technology enables you to
analyze everything. Look at web stats and determine
amount of traffic based on press release. One good
analytical tool is OpenTracker.net.
* Visitor behavior - learn about your site visitors;
who are they?
* You must be testing your statistics against
something. Tracking programs tell you what you should
measure up to. Gather two months of data on certain
programs in your company and then compare the numbers
based on that data.
* Blog tracking - where is the conversation online?
Many free tracking tools. Must be willing to dig into
the data. Where is the "emotion?" Facts & statistics
aren't what interest people. What are our emotions
about certain products, areas, etc?

Consider the ad value equivalency of getting people to
your site. If your site or blog is mentioned on front
page of USA Today, that story is worth $300K in ad
value.

Interpret Data

Have a control mechanism that determines how well your
web site is working. Determine how users enter site,
where do they visit first, etc?
* Know what you want to analyze
* Focus on conversations
* Set up a control, then test it

Blogging - Social Media

What are conversation entry points of blogging?
* Easy publishing
* Discoverability
* Dialog
* Permalinks (viral)
* Syndication
Tom Peters is a good blog example. He's very "out
there" and visible. Willing to be challenged on his
thoughts & expertise.

Conversation entry points of podcasting (like TiVo)
* Time shifting
* Easy publishing
* Authentic voice
* Personalization
* Tone
Typically, it's about understanding the person you're
selling to. Podcasting is for "C" level and up - CEO,
CTO, etc. That audience is more likely to listen to
audio than communicate on a blog.

Conversation entry points of Article Marketing (e.g.,
white paper)
* Widespread distribution
* Easy publication
* Expert positioning
* Syndication

Conversation entry points of search engine
optimization
* Targeted
* Relevant
* Expertise
* Validation
If your result is not in top 10 results, you don't
exist.

Google is prime real estate. Every time someone
searches Google for your industry, it puts your
product right on the front page

Conversation entry points of Integration
Paid search (pay-per-click)
* Search engines
* Content network
* Immediacy
* Controlled
* Advantage of pay per click: you can test different
messages, specific keywords
* Disadvantage: can be risky if you don't know what
you're doing (can be very expensive with less than
effective results).

Conversation entry points of press release
optimization & news aggregators:
* Google news
* Yahoo
* Immediacy
* Controlled
* Natural search - [Search releases - targeted to
search engines, not really press worthy.]
* Syndication

Most current news available is from news aggregators.
If you distribute news frequently, your
business/product is always out there and always
current.

Tracking methods
* Downloads
* Opens
* Top Keywords

The reality of communication

* Transparent
* Analytic
* Authentic
* Insight
* Real Time - give people the opportunity to
participate in the conversation on a real-time basis
* Dialog
* Inclusion - keep the conversation going; don't shut
down if there are disagreements
* Syndicate - spread the message around


DEREK SCRUGGS

Blogdom's Disruptive Technology

* RSS = Rich site summary or really simple syndication
* "Pull" technology that feels like "push" - your
computer goes out and searches for content.
* 2.0 most common version, but 0.9x, 1.0 & a new
version called Atom is still in the wild (Google uses
this)
* Ongoing debate about is evolution
* 2.0 is safe bet

Primary elements of RSS feed:

Name
* Name of channel, sometimes called a feed
* For blogs, the name of the blog (e.g., Entry
Gradient Reversals)

Description - keep it short & succinct

Link to the page with the item
(www.linktoitempage.com)

What is an aggregator?
* Instead of browsing blogs and news sites, one by one
in a browser, an aggregator downloads items for you to
view at your leisure.
* At least a dozen are available. Five or six are
serious commercial endeavors. NewsGator, based in
Denver is popular one. FeedDemon is another aggregator
* Aggregator goes out periodically to get news,
typically once every 3 hours.

A blog entry is hard to read. RSS sggregator makes it
easy to read. NewsGator can pull articles into Outlook
folders, for example, so you can read it at your
leisure. You subscribe to different news feeds and the
articles are delivered to your online mailbox.

Subscribing to a channel - You can subscribe to a
search. Feed is updated based on what happens in the
search. Almost all news sources use RSS.

Granularity (level of detail)

* Monitor comments on a specific post or article

You can subscribe not only to the feed, but also to
the comments that were made about the article.
Usually, it's a few people arguing back and forth;
this is typical on a political news feed.

* Monitor search results on search engines. See what
people are saying about an area you're trying to
monitor. ["Google dance" - once a month when they
update their index across all the servers, you could
query results on diff. Google servers, and get diff
results. This doesn't happen as much anymore since
indexes are updated in real-time.]
o Feedster
o Technorati
o Google Blog Search
o IceRocket

Ping: when you post a comment on your blog, it
notifies several different services and lets them know
that new content has been posted.

* Notifications in del.icio.us (a web site)
o Most popular feeds - you can subscribe to these
o User based
o Specific tags - can subscribe to specific tags
(subjects), like health care or Golden Retrievers

If you find a site you like, bookmark it in
del.icio.us. You put that in a folder and label it,
and it's shared with lots of others. You can see what
others bookmark (under "Business," for example) and
they can see what you bookmark. Another way to share
information.

Fred Wilson - venture capitalist in NY. If you tag
something on his site, it immediately gets sent to his
iPod.

You can subscribe to the feed for the project you're
working on; others on the project can do the same, and
you can share with others on the same project

Publishing Tools Abound

* WordPress.org
* Typepad.com
* Moveable Type (sixapart.com)
* Drupal.org
* Blogger.com (Google)
* MSN spaces
* Yahoo offers TypePad and WordPress w/ web hosting
service

Tracking via FeedBurner

FeedBurner uses statistical methods to determine how
many people are actually reading your feed, clicking
through certain links, etc.

One user may hit a feed a dozen times and there may be
nothing new, but this skews web stats because nothing
new is there, even though lots of people visiting the
site.

Podcasting - stats are hard to track. Visitors to a
site downloaded something, but did they read it?
* Just an RSS feed with special type of aggregator
that recognizes podcast (MP3) info.

Surfing is now limited because there are tools that
search for you.

Whatever info you have, you need to syndicate the
content so it gets out there and spread around. Static
web pages are useless.

RSS feeds - can republish content in other places.

Questions & Answers

Question: Do RSS feeds make you more subject to
viruses? No, because it's just a text file; no more
risky than other files.

Question: Is RSS like an open stream video?

RSS feed is not a real-time broadcast, it's a static
file, but it might point you to a URL that takes you
to real-time, streaming video.

Question: How do you track comments on a blog? How
would you track these? Very hard to do this.

Question: Can you limit a blog to only certain
officers, users in a company? Yes, you can have
authentication, password protection. Also, certain
blogging tools specifically designed for Intranet,
accessible only through VPN. It's the web site that
protects you, not the file because it's static.

Question: What about reverse keyword lookup? A product
called www.urltrends.com lets you do this for free;
www.wordtracker.com analyzes keyword searches (this is
a pay service)

Question: How bad an idea is it to change a domain
name?

If you change your domain name, it's very hard to get
seen in Google. New domains sit for about 6 months
before you'll see search results ("the sandbox")

If you're syndicating content, like pulling RSS feeds
onto your own site, this is seen as fresh content and
Google re-indexes your site. This is not stealing as
long as you provide a link back to the original
content.

Some additional comments:

The more you update your site, the more Google indexes
it

You can find out how often your site came up when no
one clicked on it.

Growing your business with Google - recommended book
by Dave Taylor (www.intuitive.com)