Edgeio is about to launch a free service that will make it simpler for you to use your company blog to widely distribute job listings, a service or product for sale, or anything else for which you’d have traditionally used eBay or Craigslist as a centralized market.

You’ll post a listing on your own blog and add the tag ‘listing’ or ‘listings’. That’s it. You can also go claim your blog (as you’d do for Technorati), use more descriptive tags to improve visibility, and add the Edgeio ping servers to your blog (Weblogs Work will be doing this for our clients) to make Edgeio work even better for you.

We wrote more about Edgeio here. You can also follow the launch at the Edgeio blog. Or track what people are saying about it.

Technorati Tags: corporate+blogging, edgeio, job+search, keith+teare, listings, mikearrington, webreakstuff

From an interview with Anil Dash, SixApart honcho, lover of purple:

I think we’ve seen a number of huge benefits companies get from business blogging. Having blogs means companies can communicate better: between employees, workgroups, project teams, or different locations. Or between a company and its partners or customers.

It’s a cheaper way to share information, a powerful way to collect feedback, and a faster way to respond to the conversations around its products or services. It’s also a much better channel for marketing communications than traditional PR, if your target audience is regular people.

Charlene Li is putting together an evaluation of corporate blogging solutions, and she wants your input. 

So this is the process we’ll be following:

Part 1: We’ll ask for feedback on features and functionality required for corporate blogging, and get recommendations on providers to evaluate. Open source solutions will also be considered.

Part 2: A set of specific criteria will be posted on this blog for feedback.

Part 3: The final set of criteria will be available for you to use in grading a current/potential blogging solution provider. You will be able to suggest and grade any blogging solution provider that you have had personally used.

Scott Ryan is using his Architel blog to roll out information about SimpleTicket, the new trouble ticket system developed for his clients.  Architel was the first outsourced IT support company in Dallas to provide all-you-can-eat computer support for one flat fee. 

In addition to a CEO blog, where Scott posts his POV as an executive running a growing company, Architel uses its news blog to offer IT tips, productivity hacks and information that is useful for the 70 Dallas-area companies for which it provides outsourced computer support.  Sometimes it’s desktop issues.  Sometimes it’s how to best escalate issues for quick resolution.  They’ve been blogging the creation of SimpleTicket since the beginning, and launched a separate SimpleTicket blog to handle the flow of info requests that project has generated. 

SimpleTicket is an open source ticketing system developed in Rails by Kevin Marvin.  Rock star designer Dan Cederholm, of SimpleBits, did the design work for the application.   Oh, and I came up with the name. 

I’ve been asked about stealth commenting on blogs before — can you engage without seeming to engage? Just sneak a little spin into the comments of someone’s post? No.

Again, no.

This week Mike Arrington got a fistful of snark when he talked about the launch methods of a new startup. Shel, Jeremy Pepper and others thought Tello’s minions were leaving nasty anonymous commentary. Paul Kedrosky dubbed it Astroblogging. It’s a clueless act. Got something to say? Put your name on it.

Technorati Tags: jeremy+pepper, mikearrington, paul+kedrosky, astroblogging, shel+israel, tello

One of the questions I get all the time is how to measure ROI for social media. (A better question is how do we value return on attention, but, let’s bracket that.) Naturally, you want to know if this stuff is helping you achieve your business objectives. As Hugh correctly points out, blogging’s impact is mostly indirect. And it’s also a long-haul thing. You have to stick with it to build your tribe. Some of the metrics we look at are readership, feed subscribers, comments, links, inquiries, leads, partners and so on.
That said, sometimes the gains are so immediate and direct you sort of get slapped in the face. Exhibit A: the blog for the as-yet-unreleased open source ticketing system called SimpleTicket. SimpleTicket was developed by Architel, who started blogging about it on their own site. Soon, they were getting so many inquiries for the code & questions about the project, that they needed to launch a blog just to more efficiently communicate with this growing community. So, we put together another WordPress-driven site for SimpleTicket, and they started blogging the project progress there.

Results to date:

• A new crackerjack employee for Architel, who found them (and thought they were cool) because of SimpleTicket
• Over $75,000 in annual billings from new clients who hired Architel after discovering them through SimpleTicket
• Immediate improvements to the base code for the project; questions answered
• An international group of beta testers ready for the code release on the 28th

Again, the impact of blogging & social media is often indirect, but these are some pretty good results for a blog that is just a few weeks old.

Technorati Tags: architel, hugh+macleod, simpleticket

I totally dug hanging out at Joe T. Garcia’s yesterday at the Fort Worth Ad Club Luncheon. Here is a clickstream for the talk I gave — a little social media jumpstart link kit:

Blogging Buzz/Confusion

BusinessWeek story — "Blogs Will Change Your Business"
Forbes paranoia — "Attack of the Blogs"
Blogging Delivered
Blogging Not Exactly Delivered

The Situation: Attention Scarcity

Long Tail blog on Mainstream Media Meltdown
John Moore on the influence of word of mouth
Brand Hijack manifesto
Sifry’s latest state of the blogosphere
Wrong! NY Times on tv-style ads on mobile devices. (Note: don’t try this at home)
Extinction Management

Tools

SixApart (Typepad, MovableType)
Wordpress (hosted option as well)
About RSS
Bloglines
NetNewsWire
(Example of syndicated headlines at Architel site)
Technorati
IceRocket
Delicious
Digg
tech.memeorandum
flickr
Odeo
iTunes podcast support

The Good

Robert Scoble
Jonathan Schwartz
English Cut
Stormhoek blog sampling

The Bad

Dell Hell
Dude, You’re Getting Dell’d

The Ugly

Captain Morgan "blog"

Essential Reading

Cluetrain Manifesto
Naked Conversations (check out the blog, too)
Small Pieces, Loosely Joined

Useful Marketing Stuff

MicroPersuasion
GapingVoid
BrandAutopsy
What’s Your Brand Mantra?
Church of the Customer
Media Orchard
New PR Wiki
Marketing Begins at Home
HorsePigCow
Like It Matters

PDF of my slides. (9.67 MB)

Technorati Tags: ad club fort worth, social media, Weblogs Work

Who knew?

AT&T billboard on I-35 (Stemmons Freeway across from the INFOMART) in Dallas, Texas. 

We’ll be talking about the new marketing — telling compelling stories in the age of do-it-yourself media — tomorrow at a luncheon put on by the Advertising Club of Fort Worth. Thanks much to Lynne Swihart, of Blanchard Schaefer Advertising & PR, for inviting us. It’s at Joe T. Garcia’s at around 11:45. Google Map. I’ll be posting up the clickstream for the talk as well.

Technorati Tags: ad+club+fort+worth, brian oberkirch, blanchard+schaefer, lynne+swihart, weblogs+work

One of Rex Hammock’s posts today echoes my point yesterday about the LayerOne story:

For me, there’s a peace-of-mind in knowing I have one place where I can tell my story the way I see it — even if it’s not that significant a story. Before blogging, we all had to depend on other people’s platforms to “interpret” our story. If you we’re doing something significant in your community or business, it was the “media” who told our story. If it was something significant to fewer folks, it was the “grapevine” who told our story.

Blogging lets you tell your story, unfettered, uninterrupted, uninterpreted. Of course, it can also be remixed, repointed, reinterpreted, etc., but that’s the joyous to & fro of dialogue. With a blog, you get to play a more major role if you can plus up the conversation.

Technorati Tags: blogs, layerone, rex+hammock

Weblogs Work & M Ventures are featured in an article on Web 2.0 in a piece in yesterday’s Seattle Times — a syndication of an article that ran a few weeks ago in the Star-Telegram. The piece focuses on Alex’s rapid development of elfURL, one of the apps in the Big in Japan toolbox we’re working on. I was able to put in a plug for the sandbox meme (check out Peter Merholz’s ‘Designing for the Sandbox’ blog):

“Web experiences aren’t things you control so much,” said Brian Oberkirch, chief executive of Weblogs Work, a self-described Web 2.0 company. “It’s more that you create a sandbox people can play in.”

Technorati Tags: alex muse, biginjapan, brian oberkirch, elfurl, mventures, web 2.0, Weblogs Work

Start Up guru & evangelism evangelist Guy Kawasaki sent out word that he’s going to start blogging on January 1. We encourage you to watch his site for it. We really dig Guy’s style. You can also participate in a free online seminar on some of Guy’s ideas in a recent book, The Art of the Start:

http://snipurl.com/artseminar

This is the link for the online seminar for The Art of the Start. It’s
January 4th at 10 am Pacific, not 9 am Pacific.

Technorati Tags: artofthestart, guy+kawasaki