Artur Ciesielski operates a MyST Blogsite, PhoenixMarketTrends.com, to market his real estate business in the Phoenix greater metropolitan area. In a recent e-mail exchange on another matter, Artur happened to mention how his MyST Blogsite had been outperforming other real estate blogsites in his area. Well, as you can imagine, that was music to our ears so we asked if we could share his comments publicly and Artur graciously agreed.

Bill,

Thanks for the heads up.

By the way. I spoke with a group of bloggers in Phoenix recently. I'm very interested in others return for their blogging efforts. What I found is that very few had any business from their blogs despite a lot of effort. I have 5 closings and 7 active buyers directly from PhoenixMarketTrends.com in 2008. I know because I ask. One person told me they have been reading my blog for almost a year before they called me to buy a property. I know its not the platform that did it but it certainly helps implement my strategy.

Thanks

Artur Ciesielski, CCIM
Premier Marketing Group of Realty Executives
602-628-4349 Direct
866-433-2198 Fax

Thanks, Artur, for sharing this information; we're wishing you the best of continued success!

There are many reasons you might want to consider authoring your blogsite content in Google Docs; here are just a few.

• It's a great place to write content, perform spell checks, and collaborate on new posts with your team.
• The formatting capabilities and user interface is similar to Microsoft Word, so you can enjoy the benefits of an application you may already be familiar with.
• Google Docs provides a place where you can keep archives of everything you write.
• Google Docs provides a word count feature.

Google Docs is free - you can setup an account in minutes and begin writing immediately. You can also copy and paste from Google Docs directly to your Blogsite editor window without fear of dragging along any strange formatting classes and styles from desktop applications such as Microsoft Word.

It was only a matter of time before the idea of “Blogging 2.0” made its appearance. In a recent post by Duncan Riley (The Changing Blogosphere and Blogging 2.0), he accurately underscores the revolution that is taking place – conversations are moving away from blogs (specifically business blogs) as content consumers attempt to participate [more] in the conversational aspects of the blogosphere.

I don’t believe this shift is intentional; rather, it’s simply the market of content consumers (and providers) voting for better interaction and conversational services. If anything, it underscores why Twitter has grown so quickly and why other services such as Ping.FM have emerged.

In my view, Blogging 2.0 could (and possibly should) be called “Flow 1.0”. Stowe Boyd helped me get along with this thinking where he said …

“So, larger numbers of blog refugees exist, who read blogs in RSS tools or are alerted to interesting stories and conversations in these flow apps, and comment there, into a minority of what once was the greater community of participants.” – Stowe Boyd (Blogging 2.0 Meme Doesn't Go Far Enough)

Stowe takes it a bit further suggesting that the very fabric of the blogosphere is being challenged by the movement of information within windows of time – i.e., through “flow” applications such as FaceBook, Tumblr, and Twitter.

"In this model, everything has become disconnected, everything is principally in the flow. The absolute address of any post, or comment, or vote, is irrelevant. And posts and other atrifacts may be copied with appropriate reference back to the original author, and some means to get to a URL, but only as a way to represent an identity."

Blogging itself represents reverse chronological publishing – it is indeed a flow of sorts, but it’s typically a half-duplex (unilateral flow). In 1999 it was a revolutionary idea to publish content in this manner, but humans embraced it because a flow creates a time-centric process that people can easily relate to. Flow applications embrace the conversation slightly better because they allow conversational artifacts to more easily collect in natural ways. Ironically, in this comment, Jos Schuurmans equates the emergence of social networks with the end of “channels”.

Conclusion…

Blogging 1.0 was great; commenting… not so useful. Flow applications; a natural extension of commenting that enhances the conversation and will dramatically impact the emergence of Blogging 2.0.

Note to Self… Blogging 2.0 Requirements

• Integration (inbound and outbound) with flow applications.
• Inviting flow application users to comment on specific posts related to recent flow-based conversations.
• Search technologies that leverage the data in flow applications.
• Social media embrace including search, syndication (inbound and outbound).

Two things we did when we designed the MyST Platform™ was to ensure that (i) comment objects be treated as first class citizens in the common scheme of the content sphere, and (ii) that comments could represented by an abstract association with any other information objects. This gives us the agility to meet the new Blogging 2.0 requirements with ease.

What is MyST Social Media Newsroom?

Like most businesses, your staff and executives are making social connections across many online social networking systems; Linkedin, Naymz, Twitter, and other social systems, are attracting your employees as they seek out new ways to sell, support, and represent your business. You may even have a social forum of your own, a blogsite, or marketing partners that allow you to participate with high-value content about your products and your business.

The MyST Social Media Newsroom™ solution provides a unified representation of all your businesses’ social and news media content. This social newsroom solution makes it easy for your online visitors to find and make connections quickly and efficiently with your conversational content and people that can respond to customers, journalists, and prospects.

Social Media Search Engine

The MyST newsroom solution features a social media search application that is integrated into your newsroom and provides a unified search experience across all your content domains as well as related social content distributed in the many social networks.

Automated Pressroom and Investor Relations Content Integration

Existing pressroom and traditional media resources are automatically integrated into your social media publishing channels with the MyST Aggregation Server™. This eliminates the necessity to create links across distributed PR-related pages and provides a unified experience for journalists, investors, and prospects.

Optimized Findability

Our newsroom technology is based on MyST Blogsite®, a highly optimized publishing platform designed at its core with search-optimized rendering capabilities. Integrated content briefings, a newsroom blog channel, and extensive abilities to syndicated social content from other systems, provide a foundation for achieving greater visibility in search engines for all your social media.

Automated Intelligence Monitoring

Tracking and monitoring social networks is a key success factor to managing your social media. Secure intelligence channels provide daily briefings from social and news sources relevant to your business, competitors, and market segment.

Contact us to learn more about the ways we can help you transform your disparate social media assets into a unified online experience, and be sure to check out this example at Expansion Plus.

See Also

• MyST Social Media Newsroom?
  A Newsroom Solution that Unifies All Your Social Media
• Expansion Plus Social Media Newsroom
  This resources provides comprehensive access to social media about our company, our founders, and our staff and it features a social media search engine - the first of its kind.
• Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English
  The Store is a resource for influencers and educators to purchase and download licensed, higher resolution and improved versions of our videos for use in the workplace.

It’s true – things that are inherently designed differently (as compared with the status-quo) are typically not obvious and [sometimes] intentionally so. This is partially the case with the MyST Blogsite commenting design.

There’s no shortage of other products that have become more complex because they had to, or they wouldn’t be better than their predecessors. I prefer ultra-simple solutions to complex problems, but given the constraints, our clients expect extraordinary findability for anything that’s published in their marketing advertorials and this includes comments. To satisfy this requirement, all information objects (including comments) must include more meta-information; far more meta-data than typical blog commenting features and quite different from visitor expectations.

You could say we have a fundamental problem with doing it the way all other "blog” tools have done it in the past, partly because most companies really want to do more than just blog and get people to leave comments. While conversations are good, high-quality conversations are probably far more valuable in reaching your marketing objectives.

Intentionally, we expose three fields for commenting and n… options for adding link properties to a comment. This is far more comprehensive than any commenting system presently on the web, which typically include only a comment field. In fact, commenting (as we know it) constrains findability rather than increasing it. Why? Because most blog tools are so unable to control track-back and comment spam that they had to take a defensive posture by removing any incentive to publish off-domain links. Our platform and approach is exactly the opposite – for business advertorials (where brand matters greatly), we recommend that comments should always be moderated, and generally enhanced with keywords, clear titles, comprehensive summaries, quotes, images, and additional link properties where appropriate.

In our view, a comment is no different than a blog post – it is a class-A content element and it should enjoy the same power of a normal post. This achieves many benefits; two primary advantages - (i) a more search optimized comment attracts new visitors, and (ii) you can assist your commenters in making a clear point. Elevating the importance of comments by allowing visitors to include more meta-data pays big SEO dividends, but one advantage that you may have overlooked – it provides an opportunity for visitors (that comment) to feel special because they have been accorded the same publishing features that the authors of your blogsite use.

How special would you feel if your comment were given the “royal treatment” and enhanced in ways that really helped the you make a clear and concise point?

Ironically, we can see an example of how we treat our own visitors in this post about “channel conversations”. You can readily see that comments don’t have to be bland. Nor must they blend into the background - they can be loud and boisterous and they can include links and other enhanced publishing components, and tags.

A really simple commenting system (with just a field for text) is likely to generate a few more comments because there are fewer fields. However, constraining the opportunity for visitors to share additional meta-data makes it more difficult to understand what they are trying to say. Besides, how valuable is comment volume? Aren't we really looking for the gems of agreement and the controversial diamonds of dissent to help us tell our business and marketing stories more clearly?

Tell me how you make your commenting visitors feel special?

We recently upgraded all MyST Blogsite accounts with seamless access to our free content search engine. While creating a post, you can search for public domain and reusable images, videos and material to include in your post.

GimmeFreeContent.com's search box is integrated directly inside the Blogsite editor and you can perform searches without losing your new post content.

This is a new productivity feature for MyST Blogsite, a platform that provides many unique and useful publishing enhancements to make it faster and easier to create high-quality advertorial content.

Other business blogging tips for greater productivity can be found in the free ebook 7 Simple Steps to More Effective Business Blogging. Make sure you download a copy and use these tips to do more in less time.

See Also

• Gimme Free Content Search Engine
  A comprehensive search engine for free ideas, free images, and free articles.
• MyST Launches New Free Content Search Engine to Help You Create More Professional Posts | MyST Blogsite®
  A search engine that includes all of the best domains for finding free content for your blog, your website, or other content development tasks.

I was having lunch with a few of our customers last week and one of them remarked that it was a pain looking through all the free content sites for images, articles, and stories that can be reused for blog posts and articles. I had also experienced this - the Creative Commons directories are wonderful, but not as friendly as good'ol Google's format and layout. And the new Creative Commons filters in Google are excellent, but your searches include the entire web - not always ideal if you're trying to narrow your scope to professional produced images, videos, and text.

Sooo... I decided to build a comprehensive aggregation of all the great content sites that are free (or mostly free) and host it at GimmeFreeContent.com. Like the content it recommends, it is free to use so please spread the URL to your friends and colleagues.

Be sure to submit your suggestions and comments - I'm sure this could be greatly improved and I'm confident many of you know of some great resources.

Enjoy. Cheers! --bf

See Also

• Gimme Free Content
  The sites included in this search engine are compiled from Creative Commons directories, general research, and suggestions from users. Feel free to recommend sites that you know that provide high-quality content for free and open use.
• Creative Commons
  Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."

With the release of MyST/VS™ (vertical search) and its relevance in developing and maintaining enterprise search applications, Bill French, CTO and Co-founder of MyST Technology Partners, Inc., will be presenting a session on Enterprise Search at Search Engine Strategies, August 18 in San Jose, California.

The presentation will focus on organizing and planning an enterprise search strategy as a framework for success. The session will cover topics including...

• Unified enterprise search
• Planning a search engine
• Design and implementation strategies
• Managing a search engine with little effort
• Creating a search engine in 90 seconds

Most businesses have many Internet domains; a web site, a blogsite, a media room, and perhaps other sites for support or special marketing content. Some of the content may be secure and some is intended only for discovery through extranets or intranets. Internet-based businesses may also have a social forum, a product catalog, or perhaps marketing partners with high-value content about their products and services.

According to Bill, "Creating and managing a multi-domain search solution that comprehensively addresses user requirements present a number of security, technical, and usability challenges. These challenges can be addressed with good planning and design. But the key requirement is to provide your visitors with an on-domain search solution that is comprehensive and leads your visitors to the information that will help them regardless of which content application it happens to reside."

Register today to hear Bill and many other experts including Matt Cutts (Google), Chip Heath (Stanford), and Satya Nadella (Microsoft) covering topics about search engine strategies.

See Also

• SES: San Jose Convention Center August 18-22, 2008
  SES San Jose affords delegates the largest learning and networking opportunity of the year, as the 70+ sessions (80% of the sessions are new to the agenda) will cover everything that is search related and the numerous networking parties are back, including the famed Google Dance and Search Bash.

Recently, a client with an integrated Google CSE contacted me and said - "Hey, my search engine is busted; it won't bring up a post that's in one of my blogs!".

This client is using MyST Blogsite as well a few other blogging platforms and he also uses our newest product MyST/VS™, integrated custom search solution powered by Google. It turns out his custom search engine is fine; but what isn't fine is the content he was searching for is not in the Google index.

Many people believe that the simple exercise of creating a custom search engine (CSE) for a blog or collection of web sites automatically causes all content in the domains of the CSE to be included in search results. This is not the case at all; a Google custom search engine can only perform as well as the content that exists in the Google index itself.

As many of you know, I'm a big proponent of a large and dominant footprint in Google. I won't rehash my viewpoints on this matter except to point out that with the increasing importance of second-tier search, deep and thorough indexing of our content is even more important. If every bit of your content isn't in the Google index, you will experience an ever-growing competitive disadvantage.

Many people have challenged my philosophy about thorough indexing in the past; they handily dismissed the benefit of a large Google footprint as a business requirement. With the importance of comprehensive second-tier search, this subjects emerges again; the consequences of a partially indexed body of content are clear - visitors aren't given accurate search results. Missing pages in search results are simply lost opportunities to provide a complete visitor experience that offers up all your content. An incomplete picture of your marketing message may mean the difference between acquiring a new customer, and allowing a prospect to wander off.

Can you Overcome This Problem?

Yes. Fortunately, Google engineers count on the possibility that your content architecture isn't designed well enough to achieve deep and thorough indexing. You can use the Google Sitemap capabilities to submit your unindexed pages directly into your CSE. But, this requires that you know all the URL's of your unindexed pages - a task that could take a fair amount of time to complete. This is not ideal though because you'll have to babysit this process time-and-again to make sure it's kept up to date.

MyST Products Work Together To Solve This Problem

MyST/VS™ solves the the issue of incomplete indexing because it has the ability to locate and automatically include unindexed pages left behind by Google's crawlers. And it does this regardless of the blog tool or content management system used. MyST Blogsite™ itself works in concert MyST/VS™ to provide the most comprehensive indexing possible for Google crawlers.

There are some other tricks that can help, so if you're interested in learning more, feel free to contact me.

When someone says "you should blog in your business", what does that really mean? Most people know that blogging is like a personal diary; the domain of young people; perhaps politically motivated; or someone who is fascinated with cats. However, if someone is telling you to blog for your business, they’re probably right; they realize that you could achieve greater organic search visibility; or they might understand that you could connect with your target audience at a deeper level; or they instinctively know that you could sell your products or service your customers with less effort and better results. The next question is how?

If a friend advises you to get on a plane and fly to Boston to sell your latest product to a recommended prospect, one of the first things you'd probably do is book a flight. Did you consider building your own airplane? So why do so many businesses (when advised to blog) immediately assume they should build and maintain their own blogging solution?

This is a difficult question to answer; more likely it’s because people typically hire products to perform jobs that products can do better than they could. This is no different than renting a backhoe when you need to dig a ditch, or renting a car when you arrive in Boston. Businesses make good decisions about outsourcing every day. Choosing the right solution for your advertorial marketing tasks is no different.

MyST Blogsite™ is an advertorial marketing platform that can do the job far better than you could ever hope to achieve on your own with a free blog, a cheap blog, or your own internally-developed blogging application. Why? Because the blogging component of advertorial marketing and participating in the conversational web is a small fraction of the tasks required for success.

This is an important distinction because (as a business), you also have far more important tasks and obligations to attend to than all of the details and nuances of “blogging”. At MyST we've raised the bar on business blogging and transformed it into advertorial marketing science - behind every detail, is another detail that you don’t have to think about. Every day we look closely at the challenges that business and marketing organizations face, and we improve the solution to make it possible to do less and achieve more with your blogsite.

Businesses and marketing organizations should never aspire to be “bloggers” unless they are in the business of blogging. Instead, they should remain focused on what they do well to earn money, and how to benefit from participating in the blogosphere and the conversational web. Do you want to be a "blogger" or a business person that blogs?

To really understand how we’ve advanced the science of advertorial marketing, you need to spend about 45 minutes in a free (and interactive) online technical immersion seminar designed specifically to meet your business and marketing requirements. We’re happy to provide these presentations because we know how important the business blogging decision can be. Complete this form and well design a presentation that’s relevant and informative for your staff.

In the seminar we’ll cover the topics listed below and answer direct questions that will help you shape your advertorial marketing strategy while gaining a deep understanding of business blogging and how our platform will address your business requirements.

• Introduction of blogs, business blogging, and advertorial marketing.
• Participating in the blogosphere and the conversational web.
• The science of content publishing and findability.
• Simplifying your tasks.
• Amplifying your effort.Maintaining high content quality.
• Doing less while achieving more.
• Behind the scenes (the stuff you needn’t worry about).

Give us a shout; challenge us to educate you in context with your business objectives; fill out the form today.

Deltina Hay recently wrote about social media newsrooms citing (among many things)... the quote at right.

Her vision is not unlike the general vision of a common newsroom. The premise is that [organizationally], everything about a business or a person is collected into one location for easier findability. This is a noble undertaking – something that will typically pay big dividends if achieved. However, the topology of Web 2.0 creates (and even rewards) the reverse polarity of this idea.

Memberships in various social networks have managed to scatter your information, not aggregate it. Publishing a blog that is fundamentally separated from your website creates additional content separation; many business people have multiple blogs or regularly contribute in a variety of publishing forums. A del.ici.ous page adds one more place that contains lots of links, but it’s still one additional place where your “presence” is represented. Your Twitter timeline adds to the horizontal disparateness of who you are, where you are, and what you think. Your Jott account scatters information about your future business tasks, and Google Docs (and Google OS) will soon toss another layer of separated business information to the wind. ;-).

Luckily, all these platforms share one thing in common – XML. They each recognize the benefit of content sharing. However, none of them can serve as the central location where all content can be aggregated – not even Wordpress (as suggested by the author).

To collect everything suggested by Ms. Hay and present it in a unified way, you need an aggregation server; a piece of technology that can collect, sort, transform, mashup, and present all these disparate information objects as “proxy” objects. You can’t copy the objects because they frequently change – you must aggregate them in a way that allows them to change in their native locations, while also allowing new conversations (comments) to occur on their representational forms in your social media newsroom.

To demonstrate (a little), if you point your browser to Global Technologies Corporation (GTC), you’ll see what appears to be a normal website. But the upper right nav pane includes Guest Weblogs – two of which are mine. Blogsite: What’s New exists within the GTC site, and also Peripheral Vision, another completely different blog that I write. Each are separate blogs but both are available as seamlessly aggregated content into my consulting company website. Note the URL’s – they are each using the MyST aggregation engine.

You can see a more pronounced example at Health Commentary, a blogsite designed to aggregate in authors from around the world on the subject of health care. Instead of forcing all the contributors to learn the Health Commentary platform, we simply “aggregate” select information from wherever these authors are already writing their articles and blog posts.

Building a unified collection of content about a specific individual (for social media newsrooms) is approximately the same challenge. But it’s not all a bed of roses – consider that many social networks are not making feeds publicly available. This represents another challenge for the social media newsroom – you need another piece of Web 2.0 machinery – the ability to harvest content via secure means; we do that as well.

Deltina is most definitely on the right track concerning social media newsrooms. If you'd like to explore the idea of your own social media newsroom, give me a shout.

See Also

• Social Media Newsrooms: The Ultimate Web 2.0 Tool for Your Business
  Imagine having just one place to send the media, prospective clients, book reviewers, or anyone who wants to know all about you, your business, or your book-a place...

While Google is big, their notions and philosophies about doing business online are relatively simple and straightforward. Recently, the Google User Experience Team (UX) convened to publish the principles that ought to guide Google design teams worldwide. There are only ten guidelines, and they are indeed simple.

A reputable design consultant told me in 1995 – “Never underestimate the power of whitespace.”. The Google homepage obviously embraces this philosophy, although iGoogle represents a slight shift away from the simplicity of this irresistible search solution.

However, there are some that believe the Google user experience is a bit outdated, perhaps needing an AJAX face-lift. This is especially the sentiment for applications such as GMail. I think there’s a big difference between a search engine and a business application – GMail and other Google Apps need to address usability issues that are fundamentally different from user expectations involving search.

Principle #1 - Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams.

With this principle in mind, consider how you use search in your daily work. Are you a “ruthless” searcher? Do you use Google and other search tools to find and focus on exactly what you want?

Typically, you start with Google (worldwide) and you find a domain (preferably a specific page) that provides the exact content you were looking for. Bypassing a home page and going directly to the page that meets your information quest is far more desirable than starting at a home page and browsing for answers. You aren’t alone – in 2008, about 75% of Internet users behave this way because they have learned how to find and access deep-links that provide answers. Part of the reason this percentage is so high is the advent of perma-links – these are page links that represent a specific idea or answer, or topic. Largely, blogs are responsible for creating perma-links but many content management systems are now using this approach to create more findable and sustainable content.

Terry Heaton recently wrote about this in concert with new statistics from Jacob Neilsen. The data is clear and supports my past hunches about searchers that hop over short tail terms to access the long-tail of content. These newly recognized trends also support a hunch I had about the new definition of a home page - every page is the "home page". ;-)

See Also

• Web users 'getting more ruthless'
  The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when they go online.
• MyTH: Organic Search Rankings Lower Than Page 3 Achieve Little. | MyST Blogsite®
  Consumers are adapting to the changing Internet topology by using search queries that are more discrete and browsing well beyond the first three search page results to find what they're looking for.
• The Cost of Interaction
  COST OF INTERACTION: A form of web currency ? the price users are required to pay to view, use, consume or interact with web content.