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.
Barcamp Dallas is tomorrow. Starts at 10:00 at the building off @ 35 + Oaklawn. Make sure you check out the wiki for info about getting into the building. We’ll have someone by the door from 10 to 11. After that, you’ll need to go around back to the loading dock area to get in. We’re on the second floor — Suite 2013.
We’re stoked. We’ll be showing off SimpleTicket, one of the Big in Japan apps, and I know at least one other startup is launching a product tomorrow. Chris will be there to show off the latest on Flock.
Good, clean, geeked out American fun. Come on down. We’ll be staying until. Some of us are camping out as well.
Searching the Live Web is an altogether different beast, as we’ve said. The tools are still en utero. The Community Engine Blog points out that mass conversation tracking via the current tools just isn’t cutting it.
Doc expands on the reasons that Live Web searching is tougher:
I suggest that the two breeds are Static Web Search and Live Web Search. The Static Web is the one with sites that are designed and architected and constructed and are, on the whole, buildings on real estate that front the Web. The Live Web is the one that’s written and authored and published and blogged and podcast and tagged and syndicated. There is some overlap, of course. Static Web search engines cover both. They just do a better job with static sites than they do with live ones. Live Web search engines (including Bloglines, Blogpulse, Google Blogsearch, Icerocket, Pubsub, Technorati and Yahoo’s blog results sidebar on its news search), by responding to RSS feeds, only follow the Live Web.
Here’s another difference: The Live Web engines are evolving a lot faster, and a lot more responsively, to a market they can’t help following if they do their job.
Plus, good news: Doc is doing a book on the Live Web. Open source style, natch. I’ll be tracking that conversation, fo sho.
Technorati Tags: blog search, doc+searls, liveweb
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
Last week during my social media 101 talk, I spent some time introducing Digg and talking about it’s efficiency as an attention allocator. Great way for people to discover your thoughts. Jeremy Botter gives us the proof in that pudding today with a post about his experience with the Digg effect. He did a post on the possibility of Yahoo buying Digg, and his blog went from 40 page views a day to around 6,800.
Well, hello there.
Shel Israel (one of the guys who literally wrote the book on corporate blogging) follows up on our thoughts about blog monitoring with his own observations:
As I’ve stated before, PR firms in this new Conversational Era need to focus their efforts from pushing messages out to facilitate conversations between clients and their constituencies. The hardest part for new business clients is understanding how the tools work, and how to use them to listen better to conversations they did not start themselves.
I’m still learning to master Technorati, PubSub, Feedster and Bloglines. I’ve abandoned a few others. For businesses just trying to get their arms around it all, these tools are as hard to master as they are important to understand. This is a place for a PR agency to jump in. Use them to listen and learn for your clients. Serve as an early warning system for what is being said by both topic and company. Over time, these tools will get easier and an intermediary will not be used, but not in the near term.
More & more, we are getting clients who come to us for blog monitoring. We don’t see a one-stop solution yet, and so we handroll a process that includes all the top blog search services. As blog monitoring becomes a given for PR & marketing types, we’re going to keep working in this area. Help us out by telling us what you’d like to see. We’re conducting the survey below from now through January 31.
Everyone who emails answers to the questions below (to brian@weblogswork.com) will be put in the hat for a drawing, and Weblogs Work will do free blog monitoring for the winner during February 2006. Plus, we’ll gather up all the answers and post the results for everyone to get a sense of what people are doing to track blog mentions of their brands.
- How do you track what’s being said about your brands, products, services, executives on blogs?
- What do you usually do when you find a valid link? What sort of action do you take?
- How does blog monitoring fit in or differ from the other types of media tracking you do today?
- What do you want out of a blog tracking tool?
- On a scale from 1 to 10, how effective do you think your current method of blog monitoring is?
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
Tara will be excited to see that Rebecca Blood has posted up a swell interview with our favorite philosopher of connection, David Weinberger. A few juicy bits:
“We shouldn’t be writing blogs in order to gain a mass market. And we shouldn’t be evaluating blogs and bloggers by how many people read them. …
Because I’d like to see the broadcast strategy get a real alternative not just in who the stars are but in the star system entirely."
and
"I blog because I tried it out and liked it.
I like it because it gets me into conversations and it builds friendships. I like it because I like writing. I like it because it stimulates me so much that I jump out of bed in the morning to get started."
We look forward to meeting Rebecca at the New Communications Forum event. We also look forward to hanging out with the esteemed Dr. Weinberger whenever the chance should arise.
Chris Messina has a bit of fun with the big fancy advertising campaign of AT&T’s.
