Janet Johnson | The Art of Marketing

The Enterprise RSS Day of Action is coming up this Thursday, and it’s fun to see the conversations bubbling about it around the web. I especially liked Charlie Davidson’s matter-of-fact post about it the other day over on the Attensa blog.

In his very succinct post - “RSS is what RSS does” - he summed it up nicely…

“Ironically it is also the tool I am using daily to participate in this community of thought.”

Scott Niesen described a meme he’s been following that positions the technical and business points of view on collaboration and communications flow, where he succinctly describes how Attensa’s started talking in a very different way about “enterprise RSS” to enterprises who are struggling to get their arms around all the information they’re being asked to manage:

“When it comes to talking about getting your arms around the information you and Enterprise RSS, it all comes back to Andrew McAfee’s SLATES:

Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals

“SLATES describes the combined use of effective enterprise search and discovery, using links to connect information together into a meaningful information ecosystem using the model of the Web, providing low-barrier social tools for public authorship of enterprise content, tags to let users created emergent organizational structure, extensions to spontaneously provide intelligent content suggestions similar to Amazon’s recommendation system, and signals to let users know when enterprise information they care about has been published or updated, such as when a corporate RSS feed of interest changes.”

Replacing the abbreviation RSS with words like signals, alerts, delivery is far more descriptive and useful to customers. One of our customers has named their RSS initiative project: Communication & Collaboration Delivery. That’s got a much better ring to it than Enterprise RSS.”

As long as we don’t replace RSS with SAD, I’m cool with it, Scott.

James Dellow, over on the Enterprise RSS Day of Action WIKI, has envisioned this day and the WIKI space to set aside some time to review the following:

Enabling Communication and Collaboration To Do List:

1. Develop a resource pack, containing slides, posters etc, that people can use to run their own day of action
2. Create a list of Enterprise RSS solutions (servers, feed readers and other related tools)
3. Develop an Enterprise RSS FAQ and Glossary
4. Collect case studies of early adopters
5. Enterprise RSS Company bios

I plan to spend the morning on Thursday talking communication and collaboration online. Care to join in?

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I was over on ChiefTech’s blog (thanks for the link, James!) checking on the latest reception for the Enterprise RSS Day of Action on April 24 (it’s been good) and he found an excellent article and illustration (below) on enterprise 2.0 from Fred Cavazza that I just had to post about.

Fred’s 2007 article is extremely well-researched and thorough - it’s a classic if you take the time to read it. For most people, it’s likely TMI, but a great reference piece for many of us. What I found most interesting was the illustration of enterprise 2.0 - replicated here (click on it and you can see it larger).

RSS is clearly an enabling technology for any “enterprise 2.0″ application - and we’re talking enterprise-capable RSS, not merely Google alerts.

So with this foundational understanding and knowledge, I’m about to jump into the “mashup” or “buy” options available for enterprise RSS applications… stay tuned.

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As James Dellow over at ChiefTech says:

Put this in your diary: Enterprise RSS Day of Action is coming up on April 24!

The purpose of the Enterprise RSS Day of Action is to help raise awareness for the potential for Enterprise RSS; which I applaud because it’s critical to productivity and intelligence, especially in larger organizations.

James’ brainchild, he’s set up a wiki already, and is tracking blog posts about Enterprise RSS there.

There’s been a call for a logo, and Stu Downes has come up with a cool one already, turning this into a truly global competition.

I’m expecting some collaboration from our friends here in Portland - with Scott over at Attensa, a leader in enterprise RSS systems, and perhaps John over at FreeRange Communications will chime in…

I know we’ve got fans of enterprise RSS here - let’s have an online party for Enterprise RSS. I’ll be there…

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I love SmartBriefs. Extremely smart newsletters on various industries - from consumer electronics to construction and real estate, from telecommunications to travel and hospitality - there’s likely a newsletter for your industry.

I subscribe to, and read (almost every day), IAB’s SmartBrief (see example here) on the interactive industry.

Dosage: delivered daily.

Cost: Free

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In an effort to show, rather than tell, I’m putting forth my personal Top 10 Marketing Tools in a series. I asked the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network’s marketing committee to send me a list of their top 10 tools, and will be posting about them over on the OEN Blog.

(It’s spring break, so I haven’t seen any of them yet… So here’s my second in the series, to inspire action when they return:)

Tool #2: A Smart Search Engine

I have to admit, I’ve used Google for traditional searces for years. But when I went out on my own, I discovered that a roving worklife meant I was never sure I would be at the same computer all day. I’ve long been a fan of SaaS technology (software as a service - where you go online and login to manage information) and iGoogle, the personal Google service, has saved my bacon many times.

They’ll tell you - when you type in “what is igoogle” to your google tool bar in your browser - which is fantastic in and of itself - that:

Google offers the ability to create a personalized iGoogle page that gives you at-a-glance access to key information from Google and across the web.

• Your latest Gmail messages
• Headlines from Google News and other top news sources
• Weather forecasts, stock quotes, and movie showtimes
• Bookmarks for quick access to your favorite sites from any computer
• Your own section with content you find from across the web

I don’t use it as a personal “portal” to all things online. I use it because:

• It gives me access to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, where I can set up living documents to capture and share notes, track action items and collaborate in meetings with clients. No matter where we are, we’re quite literally all on the same page.
• I used to be on a Dell with Outlook and a Blackberry, and could never get my calendar to synch with my PDA. (A great lead-in to Chapter 3) I kept my calendar online in Google’s calendar application, and while I wasn’t able to view my calendar (again, I’m not technical or patient enough to set it up correctly) from my blackberry, I could get to it from any computer connected to the internet. (A great selling point for SaaS) And, it would send alerts to my blackberry, which helped me get to meetings on time.

Beyond iGoogle (back to just plain Google for a bit), I use Google as a spelling tool and a dictionary. It goes like this:

You can’t get a fast read on whether you’re spelling a word correctly or not than to type it into your Google toolbar - take one of most commonly misspelled words - accomodate. If you’re unsure, in a flash you’ll know,

“Did you mean: accommodate?”

(While you’re at it, check out the results around the spelling correction in Google - you might see some smart search engine marketers trying to capture common misspellings for their clients.)

I use Google to quickly find sources for quotations - who knew John Heywood wrote: “Many hands make light work…” You can also find complete song lyrics in the same way.

But there are cooler things :

• like putting your UPS tracking number into Google to find out where your package is
• putting your flight number into Google to find out where the plane is…
• figuring out who called you by knowing where the 541 area code comes from… instantly
• …and don’t even get me started on Google maps - it’s the greatest thing for those of us who used to have to rely on CitySearch to find restaurant phone numbers… thank goodness for Google.

…those are the quick timesavers that make Google one of the Top 10 Marketing Tools I use.

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