[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4prgDMt1dR0[/youtube]

What it is, and why you would want to maintain one to help your business.

Also a great explanation of RSS and its usage.

Moving to Flash has provided a real opportunity for the company to not only offer full screen tours but also improve loading performances. Flash gives users a number of options to help compress their files. 360 Spin of course specialise virtual tour photography which is designed to help enhance user experiences on your websites. The service seems to work particularly well with businesses such as restaurants, hotels and also retail outlets.

Even for just the fun factor we recommend you logon to their site and checkout some of the examples. The hotel room one is especially good.

I instantly thought about a political treatise by one Early Tudor statesman. The treatise “Tree of Common Wealth” was written between 1509 and 1510 by Edmund Dudley; you may consult its electronic copy at Nicholas Bridgewater’s site (and also to try your hand at deciphering a Tudor text).

In his treatise Dudley uses the image of a fruit tree to illustrate the functioning of the State and its social classes. On the tree there are four fruits, each of them is wholesome and beautiful on the outside. Inside is a “perilous core”, “that may in no wise be touched, but of necessity be utterly refused, for they be venomous in the highest degree, that no cause will help them” (modern transcription – JS).

Indeed, as the search gurus (or Evangelists and Thought Leaders, to use the imagery of the Tree of the Blogosphere) tell us, a quality content is a must for a blog to survive and to draw attention from Search Engines and links from other sources. Furthermore, since the Blogosphere and Internet Marketing are both about engaging in the conversation, the healthy flow of valuable comments shows that the content is attracting interest (see, e.g., Blogging Tips from Avinash Kaushik and Eric Enge). Yet comments can also damage your brand or topic, so attracting comments means bargaining in for the feedback you may not want to hear.

Fear not, though, for Edmund Dudley underlined that each fruit from the Tree of Common Wealth must be consumed with a special sauce, which, in his times, was “nothing else but the dread of god”. With the Tree of the Blogosphere, what sauce is there to sweeten the sour taste of comments that may befall your shiny quality content? In my opinion, it should be a blend of Brand Management and Business Development (whether we speak of a large corporate blog or a small business or individual blog). As some case studies show, the bitter comments befall the content (or product) that fails to engage with the audience (customers). However, for a company that doesn’t shun away from critique and aspires to make the best use of available and emerging marketing strategies, the Tree of the Blogosphere can bring fabulous and very tasty fruits.

As a matter of fact, the topic of how to handle the taste of the “perilous core” (=comments and criticism) and how not to overindulge in the sweet fruit (=content and PR) was exactly the subject of the KMP’s “Blogging for Business” seminar. (Roy wrote about it previously). So, in the end I may be not entirely wrong in drawing parallels between the early 16th c. and early 21st c. uses of the fruit imagery. In any case, the year when this treatise was begun is 1509, so it’s great to see how historical sources become useful almost 500 hundred years later.

Just one thing: it’s interesting to see a green apple of Technorati (“Brand Awareness”) lying under the tree. I wonder about the meaning…

Obviously we blog for our own business and encourage all our clients to blog for their businesses to, so we’ll be hoping to learn something new at the seminar.

I’m particularly looking forward to Mark Rogers talk on Identifying and Monitoring the blogosphere where it looks like he’ll be discussing a number of large corporates that have used blog and social media to address the requirements of their customers. We discussed this topic in our previous post, Power to the people! How social networking sites can influence change.

Here are some more blog posts on the topic of business blogging that you may be interested in:

What is business blogging?
Warning Signs – When Your Business Isn’t Ready For Blogging
Top 3 Reasons Why Businesses Should Blog

So why should a business blog?
There are many reasons. It’s a very dynamic way of speaking to an audience regularly. And not only speaking to them, getting very relevant feedback from them on a regular basis. It turns business communications from a one way diatribe into a conversation. And if your clients and other interested parties are reading what you say, the chances are that they are telling other people about you as well. This also opens up the floor to other interested parties, they may not be customers or suppliers but they have some interest in what you have to say and very possibly something valuable to add to the conversation. Consider the general website: It is very static and is rarely updated. After the initial visit, there is little reason to visit it again unless some particular fact or figure is required., however due to the dynamic nature of a blog, it means that there is often a good reason to revisit, or in fact have the content from that blog sent straight to you, which I shall discuss later.
As an example, a company blogs about their marvellous product “Wonderthing”. They blog about a new service variant they are considering called “Wonderthing Lite”. Because they have been diligent bloggers making regular posts that are relevant and engaging, they have an interested audience. So one of the audience comments on the blog “Hey, we’ve been thinking that something like that for quite a while but we had it in our minds that “Wonderthing Lite with bits on” would work really well in our sector. A need has been identified very simply. ” Someone else from the audience elaborates, and so on; delivering very focussed market research whilst stimulating demand.
Blogging about issues affecting your industry is a great strategy. If your point of view generates sympathy or even controversy, then over time, the blog can become established as a point of reference. Consequently it becomes apparent that blogging has direct relevance to market research and public relations.
The very nature of the blogging process develops an element of personality. It shows something about the way that the company and the people within in it operate. It is just about as close as you can get on the web to generating the ‘feeling’ that is the root of so much business. Business is not always a price decision. It is often based on the thought “Do I want to do business with these people?” and the personality expressed via blog can go a long way to establishing a company as the people to do business with.
RSS and News Feeds
One of the most powerful but harder to understand aspects of blogging is “RSS” or News feeds. RSS is colloquially known as Really Simple Syndication. It is a means by which people who are interested in your blog can have the latest updates from it delivered straight to their desktop. People who consume RSS feeds use a tool known as an aggregator. This basically pulls the headlines from the blogs that it is subscribed to making up what is in effect a highly customised newspaper. It is an enormously powerful concept; a consumer inviting you to put your thoughts directly in front of them on a daily basis. Two examples of easy to use RSS readers are:
Google Reader

Bloglines

The BBC are great advocates of RSS and have some excellent information on the subject

Blog Strategy
When running a business blog, it is important to consider the policy of how that blog should be run, what sort of voice it should have. We strongly believe that the following criteria act as a sound basis for developing a blogging strategy. The blog should be:
• Honest
• Regular
• Relevant
• Open
• Responsible

It’s important that anybody who blogs from within the company should be aware of the companies blogging policy which should be based on the above criteria. Too often the roll of blogger is seen as being one person within the company, one who is perceived as being “qualified” for the roll: a figurehead. However, all too often there are passionate and eloquent advocates of the company who make excellent blogger given guidance. We would perhaps suggest the following policy guidelines:

• A bloggers comments don’t necessarily represent those of the company.
• Confidentiality should be respected
• No flaming
• Moderation and not censorship should be applied.

Who Should Be Involved In The Business Blog?

The question of using various people from around the company is often a sticky one. We often find that the figurehead does insist that they take on the spokes person roll but very quickly finds out that they do not have the time to deliver on the commitment. Whereas an involved and enthusiastic employee often has the time, enthusiasm and knowledge to generate excellent content for the blog.

Above and beyond the interpersonal reaction with real people online, blogging also works superbly well with search. Search engines absolutely love the fresh and thematically coherent content that blogs so often produce. It goes towards the core theme of search which is relevance.

Business blogging is possibly the most important activity that a company could undertake online right now yet fraught with unnecessary fear. With a little training and the right setup, a company can be gaining online competitive advantage very quickly.

Here are some of the main warning signs that a blog isn’t the right tool for your business at the moment:

1. There’s no-one available to take ownership
2. The business has a cumbersome approval processes on all communications
3. Resources are likely to be moved to alternative projects
4. You don’t trust your staff to comment responsibly
5. There’s a high risk that it will trail off and die
6. Your business is based around a particularly sensitive topic

If you’re about to embark on a blog but tick these boxes you may need to put some more planning in place, get some help or give it up for now.