Debbie Weil is a corporate blogging and social media expert, online marketing consultant, speaker and author of The Corporate Blogging Book (Portfolio). She consults with large companies, CEOs and senior executives on how to create blogs that connect with customers and attract media attention.

Been collecting these for a week or so.

• Ran across this nifty page on Robert’s Echo blog. Includes everything from the "origin" of blogs, stats on blog readership, recommended PR blogs, link to a Forrester Research executive summary, lists of internal and external corporate blogs and more.

• Another page with all things blog (including links to RSS tutorials and basic blog definitions) penned by the Singapore-based Rambling Librarian.

• Comprehensive list from Dave Taylor’s Intuitive Life blog with links to other articles.

• 101 writing tips from Kari Chisholm on writing a thought leadership blog. (He writes a grassroots advocacy blog.)

I had the pleasure of interviewing - and being interviewed by - Mr. RSS himself recently… Rok Hrastnik. Rok is based in Slovenia but you’ll find him everywhere these days. Just type “RSS marketing” into Google and his MarketingStudies.net site should come up first or near the top.

He’s the author of Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Potential of RSS. More about this comprehensive (550 pages!) but highly readable PDF e-book later (I highly recommend it)… First, you’ll want to click here (MP3, 11 MB, 48 minutes) to download or listen to our podcast.

In Part I, I ask Rok some basic questions about RSS and how to explain this new communications channel to those not yet familiar with it. He’s got some great answers to help folks get over the hurdle of downloading or signing up for an RSS newsreader. We both agreed that when you click on an orange RSS button it’s essential to have an “interim” page pop up explaining RSS and newsreaders. Click the RSS button at the top of this blog and you’ll see what I mean.

Then in Part II, Rok interviews me on how a company can profit from a corporate blog, how blogs relate to branding, blogs and direct marketing, what companies should blog about… and more.

Oh, and if you’re wondering how we interviewed each other and recorded the podcast… Rok used a nifty online conference room called iVocalize.com. Now, come clean… do you REALLY know where Slovenia is? (Hint: near Italy)

Recommended sites to learn more about RSS:

Rok’s Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS
Rok’s RSS Diary
CNet’s tutorial on RSS
Lockergnome
Robin Good’s MasterNewMedia
Duct Tape Marketing’s Marketing With RSS

30,000 blog readers responded to Blogads’s 2nd annual survey so the results are worth paying attention to. Scroll down to see the complete results broken out by age, gender, income, industry, etc. 70% of these blog readers fall into a coveted demographic known as “influentials.” Yet… 79% do NOT have their own blog. Another notable tidbit: only 12% of the blog readers who responded actually use RSS newsreaders. Thanks to Rok Hrastnik of MarketingStudies.net for this nugget.

On a related note, see my entry in BlogWrite: Will RSS simplify your life? Short answer, no. At least for now.

… and enter the book giveaway to win a collector’s edition copy of Seth Godin’s Free Prize Inside. I’ve got one copy for one lucky winner. It’s packaged inside a cereal box. Very cool… Free Prize was selected by Forbes as one of the Top 10 Business Books of 2004.

Amazing… if you can, grab a copy of today’s New York Times and turn to the spread on pages A25 & A26. You’ll see a cool ad placed by the folks behind Mozilla’s open-source Firefox browser and paid for by 10,000 adopters of Firefox (aka SFX, "Support Firefox"). You can download the ad as a PDF or order it as a limited-edition print. And the connection with blogging is…

Continue reading “An ROI for open source”