Just saw on Twitter that Emily Chang had posted about RSS feeds for archiving your own personal history. She’s created a feed, using Expression Engine, that follows her flickr, blog, del.icio.us, upcoming, last.fm, etc. She went the extra mile and created a mySQL database on her end to archive this feed.
This is fascinating, but even more so is the comments on her post. People from 30Boxes, AIM, etc. are telling how their service does something similar. That’s interesting in that I had no idea there were companies doing this AND in that these companies know that these comments will resonate to a targeted audience that they want to reach.
From a marketing standpoint, this clearly demonstrates the need to follow not only your name online, but conversations that are of import to your company. No search feed would have clued these people into Emily’s post.
These are likely either 1-regular readers of her feed or 2-regular Techmeme readers (being that the post is now on Techmeme). Either way, they are plugged in enough to know how to mention their company without sounding spammy at all. In fact, they have added their commentary to a blog post that is very relevant to their company.
No advertising will give these companies what these guys just gave them:
1. The real attention of a vocal, and well-read, blogger
2. The focused, relevant attention of all her readers
3. The attention of all the Techmeme readers who clicked through to read Emily’s post
Impressive on all accounts. Make it someone’s job to follow relevant feeds and comment when appropriate (and only then). If you don’t have someone on your team to do this, hire someone. This is WOM at its finest.
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