Reason #6 Market Timing Mechanism
Blogs and RSS are powerful market timing publishing tools. They allow your business to stay in tune with market sentiment as it unfolds. You can literally monitor and get a good sampling of what is happening in your market at-large by monitoring the other blog leaders in your niche. What are they saying? What type of comments are being posted by the audience? In what context are others linking to them?

How about your own blog? You do have one right? If you do, what type of feedback are you seeing? How are others linking to you and in what context are they linking to you? Blogs and RSS allow you take advantage of the rise and fall of market sentiment allowing you to obtain a competitive edge. The goal of market timing with investment markets is to take advantage of rising prices while avoiding downturns, right?

With your blog you can respond in a similar way. With your blog you can take advantage of "time" and "events". This would include good sentiment and bad sentiment alike, such as the analogous market price downturn. An example of a downturn could be rumor of dissatisfaction with a feature, product or service of yours.

The Kryptonite Crisis would be a example of how a crisis developed and because of slow reaction and not using a blog (on possibility) with which to react to a crisis, Kryponite ended up loosing a reported $10 million dollars in 10 days. You can quickly circumvent a negative situation and prevent negative escalation by merely being accessible. Being proactive is best and a blog allows you to move quickly and easily in driving any response into your marketplace.

How about trends? You can use PubSubs prospective search to your advantage. I like to call it subscribing to the future. Really. That is what PubSub allows you do. Assuming you have keywords that represent topics of interest to you and your business, you can create a search using PubSub and save it as a stored query. You will not see immediate results from your saved PubSub search query. Your results in PubSub are yet future. PubSub delivers results based on information as it appears in real time and matches your query. Once your query begins to produce matches you can continually receive those results using RSS for as long as you desire. PubSub reads over 6.4 million weblogs, more than 50,000 Internet newsgroups and all SEC (EDGAR) filings. You can monitor important in real time all the time using PubSub. Using RSS you can continuously receive your results as become available. You get it when you want and where you want using RSS.

What about buzz marketing? Blogs and RSS the ultimate buzz marketing tools. The viral aspects of blog content is quite compelling and amazing to experience. You can get tens of hundreds and thousands of people talking up your brand and business through an each one reaching one process of pings, trackbacks and permalinks. Write compelling content, content that adds value, and content others want to evangelize and you will have people talking you up and spreading the voluntarily spreading the word about you. Can you appreciate the benefit of a low cost tool such as a blog that allows you to instantly and easily publish content that can multiply very easily and without much more intervention on your part?

You can also track the trends and track the talk that matters most to your business. You can use a news directory search service like Feedster and BlogDigger to subscribe to search results that include terms related to your business. Unlike PubSub, BlogDigger and Feedster allow to you search millions of blogs and RSS feeds for up to the minute information. You can also use a service like BlogPulse which provides trend discovery from the blogs that they monitor.

These are all good tools you can use to monitor and respond to events in your niche, measure the "talk" as it is occurring and provide a means to keep for you to keep in touch with the most important information that affects your business.

Another tool that I use often is Technorati. Technorati is a premier blog and RSS search directory. They currently are monitoring over 5 million blogs and nearly 1 billion links in what they refer to as the World Live Web. Technorati allows you to follow news and conversations related to anything happening in the world of blogs. What is powerful however is that you can easily track how many people are linking to you and when they links were made.

This allows you to easily track what others are saying as they are referencing your blog and it is also a avenue and opportunity to drive your message and deeper into your space by commenting on blogs that are talking about you. All you do is go to Technorati, type in the URL of your blog and the results will show you all the incoming you links you have, who the link is from, when you were linked to and what is being said about you.


Reason #7 Knowledge Management
Blogs are simplified content management systems that makes categorization and archival of your content an automatic part of your publishing process. Internally a blog allows knowledge to be distributed far more efficiently throughout your organization. Your knowledge leaders can publish and get instant feedback and interaction with others over time. Information that would be isolated in e-mail archives and inboxes can be shared broadly with a blog to a greater audience that benefits. No more "Can you forward that e-mail to me please?".

Search components, archives and categories will make information easier to find, manage and share with others. Formal business information such as policies, procedures, announcements, etc are perfect for use on your internal blogs. It is your organizational thought leaders and subject matter expects that will really raise the value for your internal organization. When your best thinking is made available internally to those that derive the greatest benefits you drive all manner of growth and change much quicker into your internal organization.

External facing blogs serve in the same capacity. Whatever knowledge is being communicated into your market through your blog becomes searchable, manageable and valuable to your audience. Your content categories promotes repeat visits since your audience can easily find information that interest them among several tightly related topics your blog may cover. Your archives provide historical reference for your content plus it becomes a search engine traffic generator as your content and keywords are continually available for search and find endeavors by others.

Reason #8 Competitive Intelligence
This reason is very similar to Reason #6. However, you should specifically monitor the competitive environment with your markets. Again, all in real-time. Now surely you wont' find your competition releasing their best secrets or strategies on their public blog. What you will have is the ability to monitor THEIR buzz. This allows you to make informed decisions about everything in your business from marketing to long-term business strategies.

Reason #9 Channel Publishing
One aspect of the World Live Web is time-shifted content consumption. RSS allows consumers to subscribe to your content and read it when they need it. Think of RSS as TiVo for the web. Consumers will check in with your blog using RSS and check your content for updates. They will then read the content at their convenience. RSS is a time and energy savings for your audience. They don't have to surf hundreds of sites individually checking for updates. The can aggregate all their news into one view using an RSS reader.

With the declining influence of the homepage you will need to prepared to use new media for reach and relationship. RSS as a new media allows you to deliver content as a channel to your audience. Just as TiVo had changed the TV viewing habits of millions, RSS is changing the content consumption habits of millions online. Users increasingly are searching for topical content "channels" from "trusted publishers". Your market will be looking for specific content, from a relationship that can be trusted and through a channel that allows them to access their information conveniently and on their personal time-shift.

Content consumption will be anonymous and private (e-mail information isn't required to read your content via RSS), yet open and honest in communication (comments on your blog) and ultimately personalized as users aggregate multiple RSS news sources into a single view using their RSS reader.

You need to think about your RSS feed as much as you think about your blog. They are both distinct technologies yet they go hand in hand for a comprehensive publishing strategy that is the mark of our changing online media. Think of your blog as a publishing tool and your RSS feed as your broadcast tool. Everything you publish with your blog is broadcast through a channel using RSS. There are many channels and people are tuning into channels that are delivering value to them. Start thinking content channel publishing as one ripple in this tidal of wave of live web publishing.

Reason #10 Open Source Media
This is one of my favorite reasons yet one of the least talked about it seems. Blogs and RSS as open source media tools means they are accessible to anyone that has an internet connection and a blog software platform to publish with. Not one person controls the this media of collective blogs and bloggers. Anyone can contribute to the World Live Web because it is a fully open and non-proprietary medium for publishing and distributing content.

As an open source tool blogs and RSS allow you to tap into collective thought leaders, A-listers, and trend setters in your niche markets or personal interest niches. You can grow your knowledge exponentially and have unprecedented access to some of the best thinking in the world. Blogs have the incredible benefit of linking what would be otherwise islands of great thought and leadership hidden away for access by only by the informed. Now your only limit is your learning and ability to search.

If it's been published with a blog than it is searchable and can be found. As an open source tool blogs allow you to filter the best information from your clients and improve your business over time as a result. You can collaborate more efficiently and precisely with customers, partners and employees because of blogs.

Blogs are here to stay. Their is a window of opportunity that still exists with establishing your authority and market positions with your message through a blog. Blogs are here to stay - yes, but blogs are still evolving. Many are still working on how to best position their blog for best results in their business. It is certain that millions are publishing blogs at an astounding rate and it is also certain that blogs and RSS are excellent tools for use in getting connected more personally and powerfully with an online audience.