If you haven't decided whether the buzz over developing new media promotion tools, like blogs, RSS, and Podcasts is hype or reality; it's time to come out of denial. It's a brand new business world out there and as Warren Buffet might say, "It's time to get some skin in the game!"

It' not bad news though! The Internet has finally evolved to a place where unambiguous success can be achieved by those who recognize the opportunity and make a die-hard commitment to develop a radically different outlook on business, and really, on life in general.

I hate to state the obvious, but just in case we've got some readers who have missed what the Internet has already done to the business landscape, here are some quick facts from a Google query:

>>Forrester Research, Inc. estimates that 47.3 million North American households have online access and 43.9 percent have browsed online. Of the 43.9 percent, 65 percent have made purchases.

>>Time-starved consumers are regularly going to the Internet first to determine which local service company to patronize.

>>Consumers are rapidly becoming more comfortable using credit and bank cards to make purchases from security-backed virtual retailers.

>>Large corporations and governments have already mandated the use of online transactions to their downstream vendors.

But remember, that's history now

These early years of the 21st century are radically different than the "old" Internet described above. The one where people became comfortable with the stability, security, and general trustworthiness of receiving information making purchases. We have just entered a brand new era, one that is especially historic for business. Why?  Because for the first time in the industrialized world technology has aligned in a "perfect storm" with the marketing concept—the concept that businesses should make all decisions based on the needs of their customers. It's always been great concept, from when Adam Smith first wrote about it in 1776, but never realized in a macro market. Today we have the tools to make the marketing concept a achievable reality on a broad scale.

Businesses driven by real-time communication with customers (i.e. the Marketing Concept) create an almost utopian scenario—the customer's needs are best met, the business is optimized for profitability and growth, and society benefits from a net gain in opportunity from the customer and investment profit from the business.

It's the realization of a true free market economy in which the consumer has the most direct influence over the management of businesses, institutions, and organizations. It's a radical new order within society where a business' best customers can become its best salespeople. Adam Smith would be proud.

Customer Evangelism meets New Media

We here at RisingLine believe that the best strategy to achieve the Marketing Concept is customer evangelism.  Developing a customer evangelist marketing strategy insures that your business is truly focused on meeting the needs of your customers and maintaining interactive communication with them. Ultimately, customers are so pleased with the quality of your solution, that they organically become your passionate advocates.

We group the technology used to launch customer evangelism under the term "New Media." It encompasses ulta-modern Internet technology like blogs, RSS, Podcasts, and content management systems—allowing the Web to become a conduit of real time communication, collaboration, and community—creating the perfect storm of marketing strategy and technology tools.

How do I start?

Funny you should ask, we just happen to be in the business of New Media Marketing...helping clients to gain strategic insight and catch the passion of customer evangelism, then providing them optimized web tools.  So, a great place to start is our website...to to our front page and work you way through: http://risingline.com. For a great introduction to Customer Evangelism, we've posted the Customer Evangelism Manifesto by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba. To see some of the New Media technology applications, (Web Edit Content Management, Custom Blogger Blogs, Quask Forms, etc) you might like to visit our live demo site and try them out for yourself. To get a feel for the power of RSS we invite you to visit a non-profit site we sponsor, http://freeRSSdisplay.org.

We of course are ready to provide some more personalized insight through a phone call, WebEx, or visit...just let us know how we can help.

Labels: New-Media-Marketing

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's an easy way for you to keep up with news and information that's important to you, and helps you avoid the conventional methods of browsing or searching for information on websites. Now the content you want can be delivered directly to you without cluttering your inbox with e-mail messages. This content is called a "feed." RSS feeds are commonly syndicated from special web pages called blogs.

RSS is written in the Internet coding language known as XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which is why you see RSS buttons commonly labeled with and XML icon: . Other common icons that indicate an RSS feed include:

What is Podcasting?

Podcasting is a special type of RSS Feed that includes MP3 audio files, usually published through blogs. Listening to a podcast simply means downloading an MP3 audio from a link in a blog you've subscribed to. Once you download the file, you can either listen to it on your computer or transfer it to an MP3 player like an iPod to listen on the go. more podcasting information

What is an RSS Reader?

An RSS reader is a small software program that collects and displays RSS feeds. It allows you to scan headlines from a number of news sources and display them in a central location.

RisingLine also builds web sites that can be auto updated through RSS feeds from your own blogs or external sources to provide valuable automatically updated content for your visitors. For the more technically oriented, we also sponsor the site freerssdisplay.org that provides free RSS feed server service for building and styling any RSS feed for display on other sites.

Where Can I Get an RSS Reader?

Some browsers, such as the current versions of Firefox, have built in RSS readers. If you're using a browser that doesn't support RSS, there are a variety of RSS readers available on the web; for some there is no charge to download and others are available for purchase.

One popular option is "Include" which allows your RSS news feeds to be displayed in MS Outlook.

RisingLine makes it easy for your visitors to subscribe to your RSS news updates by including options for your feed to be automatically added to individual's popular home pages just by clicking on a graphic link. If you have a homepage at one of these sites try clicking on the graphic to add our news to your page:

We utilize the great resources of FeedBurner to provide a smart feed that allows people to choose the RSS syndication tool that works best for them. See all the RSS options for subscribing to the RisingLine blog:

How Do I Add RSS Feeds Manually?

If you're using a RSS news aggregator instead of one of the options listed above, each reader has a slightly different way of adding a new feed, also called a "channel." Follow the directions for your reader but, in most cases, here's how it works:

• Click on the link or small XML button near the feed you want. For example, on http://RisingLine.com/blog/ click on the or icon.
• From your web browser's address bar, copy the URL (web address). For example, the URL you would copy for our blog is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/NewMediaMarketing
• Paste that URL into the "Add New Channel" section of the reader. The RSS feed will start to display and regularly update the headlines for you.

Subscribe to RisingLine's RSS Feed

• Subscribe to our New Media Marketing Blog – Stay on top of important web technical and marketing information.

Set your site up with RisingLine's custom Blog and RSS solutions

Labels: Web-2.0

I know that many of you have heard my mantra on why advertising is losing effectiveness in our society, but I recently came across a New Yorker article that brought about a new dimension as to why consumers are getting burnt as a result of mass media ads. To be specific, we consumers are the ones paying for the ads we don't want to see. In fact, a good number of Fortune 500 companies allocate approximately 25% of their budget to advertising. For instance, Proctor and Gamble spent nearly $3,000,000,000 on advertising ~ and that was two years ago. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that those costs are passed along to the consumer. So, when you need to cure that scalp itch with some Head and Shoulders, just remember that a quarter of what you're paying for goes to pay for commercials you don't want to hear.

So by now you're probably asking yourself why this blog is relevant to New Media marketing. Therefore I'll get to the point ... if you're a marketing professional at your firm, think like a consumer and channel your message so as to communicate in a non-intrusive yet informative manner. In the old days, people would gather at the coffee shop to discuss life as well as business; and within their business discussions, they would give recommendations to their peers over a friendly conversation. This might have cost the consumer a nickel for a cup of joe, but they actually enjoyed the fresh roast much more than having an obnoxious guy with a beard yelling at them through a screen about how some special soap will remove grape juice stains from their grandmother's afghan. In other words, as a consumer myself, I don't mind when a friend passes a recommendation along to me because 1) I enjoy my friend's company, 2) I know my friend isn't getting paid to provide this information to me, and 3) I myself am not paying for that information.

Furthermore, today's coffee shop is virtual and the conversations are taking place, you as a marketer need to engage and infiltrate in order to build your brand from an organic level. For example, Apple is a forward-thinking company that understands this concept of transparent community, so much so that they are willing to invite criticism of their own products. Recently I visited their site to purchase a new power chord for my PowerBook G4, I was pleasantly surprised to gather information - FREE INFORMATION - that wasn't filtered by Apple that influenced my purchasing decision. I'd encourage you to visit Apple's Web store to see for yourself:

In conclusion, this New Media marketing revolution must be looked at as a win-win for both consumers and companies because it is not only reducing the communication channel while increasing intimacy, but it is also reducing costs for companies and bringing about the opportunity to lower pricing for the consumer. The only downside to this movement is that many advertisers will be looking for new careers in the near future.

Articles of Interest:

The New Pitch, Do ads still work? by Ken Auletta

Advertising Doesn't Work - Part 2. by Mike Catherall

Fixing the Ad Agency Mess - by Joseph Jaffe

Labels: New-Media-Marketing, Web-2.0

This article will change your life as a business person. It's a radical departure from the "conventional wisdom" of advertising and promotion, but like many great movements, its strength lies its simplicity and focus on core values. Customer Evangelism is the pure essence of marketing again. Remember, the definition of marketing that that we read in the first week of marketing 101? Something to the effect that marketing is defined as discovering and meeting the needs of your customers? It seems to have been promptly forgotten or defiled by many executives, product managers, and advertising firms upon graduation from business school. Customer Evangelism is a popular uprising that has the potential to bring marketing back to reality.

"The Customer Evangelism Manifesto" by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba takes us to the core essence of marketing and beyond. It's about providing the highest quality solution and then providing even more to a special class of customer: the encouragement and empowerment to become an active advocate, or evangelist, and a de facto member of your organization. It's a charter to breed a special kind of super customer who not only purchases from you regularly, but feels compelled to tell others.

There is so much gold in this article, you've just got to read it, print it, share it, and forward it. If 50% of the businesses in the U.S. today were focused on creating customer evangelists our society would be radically changed for the better. (See how persuasive a customer evangelist appeal can be? How motivated would you be to read their article if you saw "Customer Evangelism Manifesto" advertised in a magazine?)

Here's just a teaser to get you started: some clues to how a customer evangelist behaves:

• They passionately recommend your company to friends, neighbors and colleagues.
• They believe in the company and its people.
• They purchase your product as gifts.
• They provide unsolicited praise and suggestions.
• They forgive occasional dips in performance or quality.
• They do not want to be bought; they extol your virtues freely.
• They feel part of something bigger than themselves.

Read or download the Customer Evangelism Manifesto

Labels: Customer-Evangelism

This is one of the best articles on the importance of blogs to business that we've seen. It's a bit dated but still a "must read" for any business owner who plans on developing or maintaining a profitable business in the 21st century.

BusinessWeek - Blogs Will Change Your Business By Stephen Baker and Heather Green

If you don't have time to read the whole thing, at least read these selected quotes:

"..you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because...[blogs are]...simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they're going to shake up just about every business -- including yours. It doesn't matter whether you're shipping paper clips, pork bellies...blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite."

"There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day."

"The overwhelming majority of the information the world spews out every day is digital -- photos from camera phones, PowerPoint presentations, government filings, billions and billions of e-mails, even digital phone messages."

"Potential customers are out there, sniffing around for deals and partners. While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to."

"They [blogs] represent power. Look at it this way: In the age of mass media, publications like ours print the news. Sources try to get quoted, but the decision is ours. Ditto with letters to the editor. Now instead of just speaking through us, they can blog. And if they master the ins and outs of this new art -- like how to get other bloggers to link to them -- they reach a huge audience.

"Any chance that a blog bubble could pop? The answer is really easy: no...the dot-com era was powered by companies -- complete with programmers, marketing budgets, Aeron chairs, and burn rates. The masses of bloggers, by contrast, are normal folks with computers: no budget, no business plan, no burn rate, and -- that's right -- no bubble."

"'Blogs are what's causing the Web to grow,' says Jason Goldman. He's project manager at Google's Blogger, the world's biggest service to set people up as bloggers."

"While the traditional Web catalogs what we have learned, the blogs track what's on our minds. Why does this matter? Think of the implications for businesses of getting an up-to-the-minute read on what the world is thinking."

"In time, [RSS] aggregators could turn the Web on its head. Why? They discourage surfing as users increasingly just wait for interesting items to drop onto their page or e-mailbox. Internet advertising, which traditionally counts on page views and clicks, could be thrown for a loop. Already Yahoo is packaging ads on the feeds. Google is testing the waters."

Labels: Blogging