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View Article  Lessons from the Singing Telegram Business Plan

Quick...how do you get your message "heard" by the right people who can directly influence the bottom line revenues in your business?

Well, there are many ways depending on your business and customer base. Watch the video and see how one company chose to get their proposal directly into the hands of someone who has the potential to make a dramatic impact on their bottom line.

What's the connection?

What is the connection between this video and business blogging? Maybe much, maybe very little. One thing is apparent though. At a time when information clutter, overload, volume and competition are always at the ready to overwhelm your message and reduce it's effectiveness in reaching your audience, you must think about how to break above the noise and deliver a crisp, clear and direct message that will be heard and received.

The company in video used a low tech but effective medium to deliver their business plan to their target in a memorable way. As a result they were able to get immediate attention and some level of action towards their business objectives as outline in their business plan.

Why Create a Business Blog?

As a business considering a business bog, realize that business blogging allows you to use a hi-tech method to engage in an ages old process of talking with customers and prospects. While the method of delivering your conversation to your customers had changed, the mode has not. You are still simply talking. The important thing about blogging is that this talking isn't just a moment in time. It is digital dialog which is nearly immortalized in bits and bytes in the world of the Internet. This talking has the ability to reach your customers and boost your business quicker than traditional PR means and even email.

This digital dialog is persistent and endures as an organic mesh of links which carry permanent influence. This talking also bypasses the corporate boardroom and the media newsrooms. These means of communications and others not listed here are not obsolete but blogs have disrupted the command and control nature these mediums once had. Your business cannot drive the message alone any longer through these media channels. Customers are drivers of messages and drivers of change more so than ever before and blogging outpaces traditional media channels in getting much of the information that matters most out into the mainstream of your customers and prospects.

Is Traditional Media Communications Dead? No. It Just Isn't Trusted.

Traditional media channels are not trusted. Trusted communication is communication that involves business and consumers. The spirit of entrepreneurship is alive and well yet the image of corporate success has been tarnish greatly by greed and scandal. A business imperative for you is the establish trusted communications and relationships. Blogs are the most trusted form of accuracy right now. There is a lot of opinion disseminated within the social context of blogging and that opinion will eventually reach your business. The social matrix of blogs is very good at filtering fact from fiction although it isn't perfect but the power in blogging is that it is the power of the people.

People trust the opinions of the guy or gal consumer like them and will consider their opinion and expertise in making decisions about your business...UNLESS... you are blogging! Blogging is inherently an open medium of communication. You bring yourself to the level of identifying with your customer base when you open a business blog. You engage in an authentic process of communication which can boost your business and brand. You also position yourself for tremendous opportunities to exercise thought leadership in the marketplace, build an army of customer evangelists and influence (not control...remember the customer is in control now) opinion about your business.

The culture of the customer is one that has conditioned them to look for opportunities to talk to businesses, express their opinions about businesses, share their purchasing experiences with businesses as well as look for those companies (especially the ones they like) which are willing to talk back and share the inside story of how the company is being run and managed. The opportunity here is that any business can position themselves as leaders in their market, in their communities and most importantly in the minds of their customers by simply talking about how they are doing business and asking for input and feedback from customers.

The social marketing and social networking era ushered by blogs is a culture of collaboration. Each customers reaches another one through opinion, persuasion and choice. Simple word of mouth. Again, old mode but new medium.

Your Business Blog May Not Sing or Dance, But...

You may not be able to get your blog to sing or walk into someone's office and do a presentation but you can channel a stream of expertise into your marketplace and create an ongoing presentation of what you do best as a business and demonstration the value of your products and services on a continual bases and at the speed of change. A business blog is now in the critical communications path at some degree of internal or external communications. You simply have to have the means to get your information to your customers as fast as possible. You should also be willing to get information from your customers as quickly as possible.

To create a business blog is not to just jump on the bandwagon of "me too" blogging. To create a business blog is to position your business more effectively for the communications wars where information and perception conspire to help your business or hurt your business. You have an awesome opportunity to drive your brand value deeper into minds of your customers and strengthen your customer relationships at dramatically reduced costs.

A business blog doesn't guarantee an overnight increase in profits, new customers or fame. It takes some time to build an effective business blog but with the right strategy for your business and right guidance on how to deploy social communication tools in your business, you could be well on your way to improving customer relationships, building brand equity and keeping your competitors in check.

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View Article  Create Blog Mobility with Nokia Nseries Multimedia Devices

via TMCnet...


Nokia reports that Globe Telecom (located in the Philippines) is the first telecommunications operator in the world to offer customers a fully integrated mobile online sharing experience with the new Nokia Nseries multimedia phones (N93 shown at right).


What's so special about this? Well, Globe customers can now upload their photos and video clips directly from their Nokia Nseries devices to the Globe WAP blogging services called G-Blogs. The Nokia N93 and N73 devices support this feature.


The Nseries phones are full multimedia devices that allow you to text, take photos as well as capture video. Nokia also has a platform that allows customer to create blog entries on the go. There moblogging software is called Lifeblog and it is designed to allow Nokia mobile phone users to keep a multimedia diary of items they collect on their mobile phones. Nokia Lifeblog automatically organizes photos, videos and text messages in a chronology or living timeline that allows for easy archiving, browsing and sharing.


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View Article  Scrapblog - Create a World for Your Pictures with Blogs and RSS

Now this is pretty cool. Scrapblog combines "...the storytelling aspects of scrapbooks and the sharing power of blogs". I haven't tried this service yet but I did have a interest in scrapbooking in a former life but I remain passionate about the power of story with visuals. Using RSS of course, Scrapbloggers can share their creations with one another.


Scrapbooks can be made public or private. I've taken a look at several of the public scrapbooks and I must say that this service is exciting, fun and very promising. Scrapblog allows you to import photos from Flickr and embed your Scrapblog pages in MySpaces pages or your personal blog.


Scrapblog allows you to enhance your scrapblog with rich media so that you can tell your stories in real-time and with engaging visuals. Scrapbook hobbyist from all walks of like would do well to check this service out. Assuming there isn't a to big of a digital divide between traditional scrapbook creators and social publishing aspects of Scapblog using RSS and blog publishing, there should a very bright future in store for Scrapblog.


Check out the press release.


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View Article  Influence 2.0 - Tracking the Influence of Influence in Media

Cymphony announces their Influence 2.0 initiative to speak more boldly to and precisely track the convergence between traditional meda and social media. It's about the the creation of what the Wikipedia definition of the Web 2.0 calls "market conversations". It's about the the creation of what the Wikipedia definition of the Web 2.0 calls "market conversations".Cymphony plans to play a significant role in helping businesses understand the new strategies required to navigate the dynamics of market influence. In addition to their blog announcing the Influence 2.0 initiative, they also released the first chapter of their ebook, Influence 2.0 and their new Influence 2.0 Wiki. via Media Post Publications


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View Article  RocketPost - Weblog Editor - Quick Review





Windows-based weblog editor. Feature rich and ease of use especially for those who like the look and feel of a Windows-styled word processor like Microsoft Word. This is a great weblog editor when it performs right. I'll get to that in moment. For now, I'll talk about what I like. RocketPost prides itself of being a fat client that gives full online and offline control of your content development and management. For it's claim here I would most certainly agree. RocketPost allows you to create blog content for one or several blogs and allows you to fully manage that content in and organized manner. This isn't necessarily a novel feature and much of what RocketPost offers isn't necessarily new. But it's the execution of these features that makes the different for a blog content publishers using RocketPost. Environment can make a difference in motivation and the right tool makes a big difference in how stuff gets done and how often it gets done. It's the joy factor in doing something. RocketPost brings a level of joy to the blog publishers life.


Here is a quote for Anconia's website about their weblog editor tool, RocketPost:


RocketPost imports all your blog posts upon setup. It treats the posts on your PC as the primary version of your data, which enables lots of unique productivity features to speed up your blogging. Created by a former Microsoft Word® designer, it supports all your favorite word processing features and shortcuts so you can write faster.


RocketPost is the most comfortable writing environment for bloggers. And it's a single unified command center for all your blogs and blogging systems. RocketPost puts the blogger first.


RocketPost prides itself of being a fat client and full featured for the serious-minded bloggers. RocketPost has all the major formatting functions available from a toolbar with clearly identified buttons. It is a great thing to have all your major features a button click away. It saves time over having to search the menu bar if you're the type that doesn't bother with learning the shortcut keys. I especially like the Dropcaps and Pull Quotes buttons.I especially like the Dropcaps and Pull Quotes buttons.


What I didn't like however was the unexpected behavior of RocketPost. For example as I type my content I like to save the content just in case of a error on my system or an error by me. I can simply recover the content by using undo/redo and in the worst case just close the file and open it back up. Well with you press the "save" button in RocketPost there is no visual indicator that the content is saved. It seems the button doesn't work at all. The only way to save is the publish your content as a draft to your blog server or service. Doing this regularly allows you to save your content. I attempted to undo and redo changes that I typed or inserted with RocketPost tools and the undo/redo didn't work at all at times. At other times I removed too much content.


I actually lost two paragraphs of information by simple clicking the style button and then canceling the action. Because the save button didn't work and I didn't post the changes as a draft to my blog server, I had to rewrite the content from memory. Not good.I had to rewrite the content from memory. Not good. I also noticed that RocketPost tended to tie up the my CPU sometimes and performed sluggishing when executing formatting features like bold, italics and underline. Sometimes these formatting changes would carry over to the next line and since RocketPost doesn't give you a visual cue that formatting is turn on or off, it takes a button click or two with typing to make sure your formatting is off once turned on.


I will keep my on this as I'm running WindowsXP Pro SP2 with a 1.8GHz Intel processor and nearly a gig of RAM. This behavior wasn't consistent across the board. I only had a Firebox browser session going with an several processes running in my system tray. Nevertheless, my PC resources should be plenty to run this weblog editor without problems.


This is one the best tools I've used for publishing. The design ideas are right and even the execution of the features are fine. This weblog editor seems to have been around since about December 2005. They need to work out some the code and smoother and precise behavior but it's a very good start. I do think that this product is rather pricey. The is a single blog version priced at $37 and a version that allows you publish to and unlimited number of blogs for $99. $99 is a bit high given the unpredictable behavior I've experienced products features. The publisher considers this a high end productivity app and has thus priced it a such. There are more features available with this editor that would be welcomed by serious blog content publishers that time and space do not permit to document.


I do recommend that you visit Anconia and get your 30 day download and try it out for yourself. If this program plans to be around for awhile then the future for it is very bright indeed. Even with the unpredicable behavior I experienced I will continue to test this tool and as it improves will certainly add it to my toolbox. You should definitely give RocketPost a test drive.


View the RocketPost 2 minute demo.


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T. L. Pakii Pierce
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