New Venture Marketing

Resources on Business Blogging

Getting ready for a panel next week on business blogging, I thought it would be useful to provide some initial resources for those who wish to learn more about the subject.  There are now a great many books and posts on the subject.  These are just a few favorites:

A few thoughtful articles on blogging for business

.  Does Your Company Belong in the Blogosphere?, Katherine Heires, HBS Working Knowledge newsletter.

.  23 Questions for Prospective Bloggers -- Is a Blog Right for You? by Darren Rouse, Problogger.

.  Marketing Challenge:  When its best not to blog, Meryl K. Evans and Hank Stroll, MarketProfs.

.  The Beginner's Guide to Corporate Blogging, Fredrik Wacka.

.  Blogs level the playing field for small companies by alpha blogger, Steve Rubel.

.  Business Blogging:  Big Companies  and  Business Blogging:  Small Companies  on my own blog.

.  The Flip Side of Corporate Blogging:  Sun Microsystems says blogging helped rebuild its reputation, by Sally Falkow.

.  Business Blog Case Study: Stonyfield Farms by blogger, Rich Bruner.

How to Compete With Microsoft

I just finished listening to a brief CNBC interview with Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com.  Benioff describes a new generation of companies that are competing with Microsoft, not by maintaining a billion dollar war chest or by applying brute force, but by using the power of the Internet to greatest advantage.  "The Internet," says Benioff, "requires new kinds of technology, product and business models."  The same could be said of marketing and communications.  Today the Web allows companies to sell and promote their products and services in entirely new and exciting ways, at lower cost and greater effectiveness.

This new kind of marketing is online, global, and high-touch. Customers will rely on word of mouth references and use the Internet to search for new products that fit their very specific

News@Cisco (4)

Corporate Communications Intranet

Intranets, are the poor cousin of a company’s web site—in most cases, they generate neither money nor customers. But in reality, corporate intranets not only offer the potential for companies to transform how they market and communicate, they can streamline and improve operations and impact the bottom line.

In 2002, two years, after Cisco Corporate Communications built News@Cisco, the team began Phase Two of their IT makeover-- adding a Corporate Communications Intranet.

The objectives of this second phase were five fold:

Create Once – Use Everywhere

News@Cisco (3): Lessons Learned

The Tale of the Lowly Press Room

Hidden away like some Cinderella before she was discovered by the prince, On Line Press Rooms do not often attract attention, much less admiration. But like the fairy tale character, media rooms can offer a powerful example of the power of the Internet to transform a humble servant into an information hub.

Cisco’s transformation of their news room also demonstrates the shift that is already under way from mass to micro marketing. This trend refers to the shift from focusing on large market segments to smaller, more finely tuned slices. For example, instead of Cisco providing the same information to all wireless customers worldwide, it now offers the ability to search for information, by country or region, by product or customer.

News@Cisco, Cisco’s news portal, provides a stunning example of how one company is harnessing the power of the Internet to transform the lowly press room into its news hub. News@Cisco, the Cindarella of our story, offers an excellent case study of how companies can use the Web to reach out and connect with a broad range of news users.

News@Cisco (2)

Content Distribution

News@Cisco combines the use of both more traditional and newer ditigal technologies to communicate with an increasingly fragmented, increasingly connected world.

Cisco still produces press releases for wire and press distribution, still makes b-roll available to broadcast stations via the Internet or Federal Express, but about a year and a half ago Cisco introduced RSS syndication.  RSS is a specification which describes how to display syndicated content (known as a feed) in news aggregator software. Publishers (such as Cisco) make their content available by providing a RSS feeds on specific subjects, and users buy or install news aggregators which collect RSS feeds in which they are interested.

Then when someone writes about your company or products, your competitors or anything else of interest to you, an update is either sent to your email or aggregator account.   RSS syndication has often been called the "Tivo for the Internet" and it has been predicted that it will change the way content consumed.  (See PR Week for a good description of the technology as it relates to PR.)

Today, Cisco provides some 350 RSS feeds on as many categories. Journalists (and anyone else) can use Cisco RSS feeds to stay on top of breaking news for

Micro communications: News@Cisco (1)

Recently I had the occasion to speak with Jere King, Vice President, Corporate Communications Services at Cisco and asked what the company was doing to leverage the Internet in its own communications.  I confess I was curious about the company whose name is almost synonymous with the Internet.

Jere put me in touch with Gretchen Ushakova who has headed the company's news portal, News@Cisco, since its creation some 4 years ago.  In preparation for that meeting, I decided to explore the news site first to see what I might find. And I can honestly say that I was blown away by what must be one of the best, most innovative examples of how one company is using the Internet and new digital media to transform the way it communicates with its markets.

News@Cisco is a study in the elegance of simplicity and the richness of content that only B2C companies, like Amazon or eBay, have been able to provide.  The news portal demonstrates the ability to take an immense amount of information, hide its complexity away from the user, and enable anyone to find what they need on the $22 billion global company's site.

In the next few posts, I will explore some of what Gretchen and I discussed and the issues these represent for communications in an Internet world.

Vanishing Mass Market: From Mass to Micro Marketing

The impact of powerful new digital technologies on marketing has hastened the transition from mass marketing to micro marketing. These new digital media enjoy with several advantages:

 .  They provide companies more finely-tuned market segmentation -- the ability to reach smaller, more focused slices of a targeted market.

  · They enable marketers to provide information more finely tuned to the specific market segment and specific customer needs.

  · They allow the marketers to analyze and track a program’s impact, return and cost.

         · Finally, new on-line approaches can be implemented, evaluated and changed very quickly.   “Vanishing Mass Market", BusinessWeek, July 12, 2004

Because these new micro marketing tools are still in their infancy, I plan to discuss how they can be used, how they are different from what we have done before and what can be learned in the process.

Micro Marketing: Targeted On-line Ads

I recently had the occasion to talk with Alka Joshi about work her firm , Alka Joshi Marketing, www.alkajoshimarketing.com/portfolio.htmdid for Openwave’s Developer Network, and  think it a fine example of the power of applying new micro marketing techniques to on-line ads.