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

Well, now that was a conference!

First of all, thanks to the fellow WOMMA bloggers who helped me bring the conference coverage to everyone last week:

- Toby Bloomberg of Bloomberg Marketing and the Diva Marketing blog.
- Josh Hallet of hyku - another pro blogger and blog consultant
- Marianne Richmond of Resonance Partnership, LLC and the Resonance Partnership Blog

Thanks also to WOMMA for bringing us all to Orlando to be part of such as great thing. It was a pleasure working with such fine folks covering such a monumental event.

Technorati Tags: bloggers, feedback, Josh Hallett, Marianne Richmond, Toby Bloomberg, wombat06, womma wombat

In just a few days, Toby, Josh, Marianne and I will all converge on the WOMBAT conference to do some pretty heavy conference blogging. We've worked very closely with WOMMA do put a great blogger program together to make sure that we're setting a good example of how comp'ed conference blogging should be done, but at the end of the day, what do we know.

I'm more interested in what you all know. What are some of the "Best Blogged" conferences you've been to or read about? Have you conference-blogged yourself and have some good posts to show off?

I'd love your take on what you feel makes the best conference blog and conference blogging experience (and reader experience if you're consuming conference blog posts)

Thanks!

Technorati Tags: conference blogging, womma+wombat

Bill Flitter posted a great summary of the year in RSS activities over at his ReveNews blog. Full links to each of he events can be found in Bill's original post.

A few highlights:

1/10 – CNBC presents an introduction to RSS segment on Closing Bell. Welcome Wall Street!

1/12 – John Robb presents the idea of a Global RSS Subscription Repository to make subscribing to RSS a universal function that eliminates automatic subscription buttons from large vendors.

1/18 – Rok Hrastnik releases the most comprehensive electronic book on RSS.

2/23 – The Associated Press begins to deliver content via RSS feeds. Can you say mainstream?

4/3 – Feedburner gets second round VC funding.

4/28 – Dave Winer calls for RSS ads on a subscription basis.

6/24 – Microsoft announces that it will support RSS in Longhorn (now Vista) and Internet Explorer 7.

7/5 – The New York Times reports on the growth of RSS and the resulting RSS marketing opportunities.

9/27 – Forrester announces that 6% of consumers are using RSS, up from 2% in 2004.

10/2 – Feedburner announces partnership with Feedblitz to give publishers the capability to deliver content to readers via email.

10/7 – Google releases RSS aggregator: Google Reader.

10/10 – Yahoo releases whitepaper: RSS – Crossing Into the Mainstream. Key findings include:
• 12% of users are aware of RSS and 4% knowingly use it.
• 27% of internet users use RSS without knowing it.

12/4 – Target offers weekly ad via RSS.

12/12 – RSS Industry Night Roundtable, hosted by Rok Hrastnik, brings RSS industry leaders together to discuss the future of RSS.

12/14 – Pheedo releases second Pheed Read report.

12/15 – Microsoft announces use of orange RSS button in IE and Outlook.

Check out the rest of the RSS 2005 highlights here.

If we're in the era of 'web 2.0', then it stands ti reason that we're also in the era of 'conference 2.0', doesn't it? No, I'm not saying that we're going to go un-conference on everything, but I would like to see a bit more in the area of 'social & technological awareness' around conference communications.

I'd like to get your thoughts on what makes a good social media toolset for conferences.

I've come up with these tools so far, please add your thoughts in the comments:

1. A blog (of course)
2. A wiki
3. A Frappr map (like Loic's) of conference attendees, speakers and followers
4. A del.icio.us account tracking links about the conference
5. A flickr photstream with conference photos, tagged with the appropriate keywords
6. A technorati link to the conference keywords & tags
7. Buzznet Buzzwords

What else have you all used to bring social media to your conference?
What else would you try if you had the chance?

[UPDATE] LesBlogs did a great job using social media for conference coverage.

Technorati Tags: womma+wombat

I'll be posting this on the WOMBAT blog later, but I wanted to introduce y'all to the WOMBAT Bloggers who will be covering the WOMMA WOMBAT conference next week in Orlando. In true ethical WOM fashion, we'd like to fully disclose our involvement as quasi-compensated blogging pro's who happen to be just mad about WOMMA!

Seriously, our mission is to bring the conference out of the seminar rooms and into your living rooms (or offices, or basements, or wherever you happen to dwell in front of the screen).

And...the bloggers are:

- Toby Bloomberg of Bloomberg Marketing and the Diva Marketing blog.
- Josh Hallet of hyku - another pro blogger and blog consultant
- Marianne Richmond of Resonance Partnership, LLC and the Resonance Partnership Blog
- Me

If you're going to the conference, look us up! You're sure to be blogged!

Technorati Tags: wombat, womma