Marqui, the blogging and communications company, in conjuction with FreeRange Communications, the mobile RSS company, have released a great whitepaper on RSS entitled "RSS Rx: How Marketers Can Make the Most of RSS Technology." The document is a quick read, at only 15 pages, but gives a really great overview of RSS for marketers in a conversational tone that is very much a Marqui thing. (I mean, really, look at their website and you'll see what I mean)

The document cites nearly every RSS study done to date, and highlights some of the prominent RSS purveyors throughout the document. (Full disclosure: Pheedo is mentioned in the document)

There is also a fair bit of prescriptive content on 'what do do next' with your new-found RSS knowledge, such as the following:

Marketers interested in incorporating RSS into their activities should first take a hard look at their Web site. What content does it have that can – and should be – distributed? For example, does your site have blogs, forums, press releases, product information, support information, email newsletters, audio presentations or whitepapers? If not, can any of these items be added?

Even companies relying on third-parties to manage some of these items might be surprised to find that adding an RSS feed is an option. For instance, companies using a newsletter service to manage their newsletters should ask if the service comes with RSS feeds since more and more services are adding this capability.

Marqui has made the whitepaper available for download on their site in the downloads section.

Technorati Tags: Marqui, Pheedo, Freerange communications, RSS, whitepaper

Chris Hoyt, president, Hoyt & Company wrote a compelling article on the HUB magazine website about mining the blogosphere for comments and content on your company.

According to a November 2005 Reveries.com survey, over 60% of companies surveyed weren't monitoring the blogosphere.

On the heels of the WOMMA WOMBAT conference, the emergence of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, and the venture funding flowing into the word-of-mouth marketing space, its never been more apparent that monitoring the consumer media (blogosphere) is an essential function in every marketing department.

So, what might you listen for on the blogosphere?

1. General consumer understanding
   Find your evangelists & vigilantes
   Early warning signs on issues
   Consumer specifics - likes and dislikes
   Competitive intelligence
   Product/service improvement ideas
   Campaign tracking
   WOM tracking

What would your company listen for?

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogging survey, business blogging, womma+wombat

Todd Tweedy of Boldmouth is slowly releasing the results of a recent word-of-mouth marketing study over the next few days on his blog. He's posted some pretty revealing information so far - I can't wait to see the rest.

While a majority of organizations claim they are already using word of mouth and, with even higher numbers noting WOM is either extremely or very important to the organization’s overall marketing plan I was surprised to learn that 71.4% of all organizations that responded to the survey don’t have an established word of mouth marketing plan.

There was another graph that showed almost 50% of organizations surveyed stating that they "are currently using word-of-mouth marketing" Um, sure you are... Of all of the organizations I've worked at and worked with, I've never seen one with a defined word-of-mouth program or have ever heard WOM mentioned in a marketing planning meeting. (note: I'm guilty as charged...I never thought about it 5 years ago either...)

Technorati Tags: boldmouth, survey, word-of-mouth marketing