Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

In a case of severe understatement, I read an article in CIO Asia magazine that quoted Wallem Shipping CIO Patrick Slesinger as saying:

“There’s enough problems controlling and managing IT infrastructure when you know precisely where it is,” says director and CIO Patrick Slesinger, “let alone when it is constantly moving at sea.”

Oh, yeah.

Wallem is a ship broker and ship management company with more than 8,000 employees in 21 countries. Wallem gives shippers full, on-line access to things like procurement records, accounting and personnel records for their ships. Patrick has developed quite a system to do so. He uses Attensa’s managed RSS platform to immediately notify employees, ship owners and service providers when their ships change their itinerary - due to weather, etc. That way, employees needing to work the ship would immediately know whether there would be a delay. And if service providers needed to change their plans, they’d know as well. It’s really quite an amazing system.

Four years ago, I worked for a company with the BC Ferries system as their client. They used RSS in a similar way. Because so many people in the BC area relied on the ferry system to get to work, people were able to subscribe to the BC Ferries web site and get service notices delivered to their PDA’s or email when ferries were delayed, etc.

One of the most innovative uses of RSS by BC Ferries was to constantly update how many people were waiting at the dock to board the ferries - you could always tell how full the ship was by how full the parking deck was. And every time a car passed through the parking gate, an attendant would send a count from her Blackberry to the web, where it was reflected in a graphic of how full the parking deck was. It was a very cool mashup (I actually just typed maship, which I rather like) at the time.

Somehow these shipping guys know how to use RSS to get the right information to the right people at the right time, no matter where the information originates. Like a rippling tide.

George Dearing is using Cover It Live to stream the Enterprise 2.0 conference coverage over on the Content Management Connection blog. It’s very cool, updates are posted “live” and look like this:

I am more involved teaching agencies these days how to enter the blogosphere with their clients. There’s a nice checklist for PR people over on Melanie Season’s Fake Plastic Noodles (one of the best names for a blog I’ve ever read) called “Do you know whom you are pitching?” on how to pitch bloggers in 2008.

The nice thing about it is she updates the notions of:

1. Relevant content - PR people should never pitch bloggers who don’t write about the ecosystem their product may live in. I really don’t care much to spend time writing posts about things that don’t interest me, thank you. And my interests change over time. Melanie’s idea of researching not only blogger’s blogs, but their Twitter feeds and Facebook pages is spot on…
2. Relevant context - I’ve seen many bloggers (via their Twitter feeds) definitively state: “Don’t pitch me in email. If you’re going to pitch me, do it in Twitter.” I rather love the notion of paring down the pitch to 140 characters. Can you do it?
3. Current thinking - Melanie suggests you check out blogger’s activities on other’s blogs (by reading their comments) to capture a holistic view of their thoughts. An easy way to do this (thanks Melanie!) is to run a Google search: posted by: janet johnson <their screen or blog name - find it in their own blog’s comment area> to see their interactions around the web. I am fairly consistent in my rants and raves whether on my blog or on others, but you never know when you might be surprised by a potential bloggers’ current thinking on others’ blogs. As an example, Melanie points to this Flickr exchange started by Tom Coates in early 2007. Before you pitch any blogger, I think it might be required reading - just to give you a “heads up” as to attitudes and optics you might find out there.

I’m following @mseasons now, and looking forward to getting to know her, 140 characters at a time.

I’ve blogged before about tools to measure buzz / “memes” and reputations online. The first tool you should use is a smart RSS reader, like that from Attensa. But there are many other tools out there to measure buzz, and some very fun ones are beginning to be developed.

Over on the Search Insider blog, David Berkowitz profiles “Seven Buzz Monitoring Sites to Watch.”

A short list:

• Facebook Lexicon: Lexicon is Google Trends for Facebook
• Summize: a Twitter search engine I discovered recently. But David points out that using Summize Labs you can also use a “near:” modifier to narrow results to people writing from a certain zip code - in case you want to find like-minded folks nearby. Cool.
• Flaptor is another Twitter search engine, and has a trend tool called Twist that you can use to compare search terms. You should always run your Twitter searches through a couple of engines, as they’re not yet perfect. I’m looking forward to the day that Attensa takes care of all of these searches for me, persistently.
• Using Quantcast you can track the demographics of searchers for a particular keyword. David helps you figure out how easily, and I won’t steal his thunder… go have a look on his post.

There are tons of additional tips and explanations there anyway… It’s going in my del.icio.us file. For sure.

Over at the SplashCast blog, CEO Mike Berkley has a nugget in one of his comments that I’m going to lift and use in every presentation on “why to blog?” for business:

“Content is the currency used to acquire audience. Companies can print their own. Most don’t. Why do I, the CEO, make time in my very demanding schedule to blog?“

Brilliantly put, Mike. Brilliantly put.

Nothing has given me more pleasure in my career than to have the ability to share nuggets like this with friends, colleagues and passers by… every time I “meet” someone like Mike, I feel blessed to share in, and participate in, the richness of this blogosphere.