NewsGator and Edelman Launch New RSS-Powered Ads
Public relations firm Edelman has teamed up with RSS software company NewsGator to create a new form of advertising widget for enterprise customers.
The "Hosted Conversations" widget tracks web chatter about pre-determined topics and displays them inside a branded advertisement. These widgets fit into normal box and banner ad slots, so they look like regular advertising. The conversations fed into the widgets come from blog posts, news
stories, and comments from the blogosphere or RSS-enabled news sources.
Edelman will assign one human "host" to each of the service’s clients,
and it will be the host’s job to manually track the conversations and
cherry-pick the best ones.
If a user sees a conversation displayed
inside the ad widget that she feels like participating in, she can
click on the conversation and add her own comments. The widgets can
expand to show more detail and accept comments, but Edelman will also
create branded pages where clients’ relevant conversations can be
browsed on a regular web page. Participants will also be able to post
comments via email or instant messenger.
The idea is that companies can move away from traditional branded
marketing and into participatory marketing that actually lets the user
get involved discussing a product.
Edelman’s Steve Rubel has more details on his blog. One thing I’ve noticed while reading about this at the NewsGator site and on ClickZ,
which has more coverage, is the following: Visitors get a seamless
experience with no mention of feeds, RSS, blogs or syndication.
This is the same approach that some web services, like Yahoo’s MyWeb,
are already using and I think it’s the direction that RSS is moving.
Acronyms aren’t all that user-friendly, especially for technologies
that are difficult for less-techincal users to conceptualize. The
simpler and more "one-clicky" software developers can make syndication
tools, the more quickly they will be adopted by their users.
The first campaign for "Hosted Conversations" is supposed to launch
in early 2007. No client partnerships have been announced yet.
