Posts by Greg Dowling (bio)

Greg Dowling | July 17, 2006, 09:28 AM
Planet Blogbeat Aquired by FeedBurner Overlords

In an interesting move to consolidate blog and RSS analytics, FeedBurner, an RSS feed management service provider, has acquired Blogbeat, a blog analytics vendor. While the financial terms are undisclosed, this acquisition is fantastic for existing customers as it allows existing FeedBurner customers to gain greater insight into the performance of their blogs and allows existing Blogbeat customers to take advantage of a robust feed serving platform - all for free. Current Blogbeat customers will receive a refund and Feedburner is planning "additional and optional fee-based enhancements" slated to launch in 2007.

The combination of FeedBurner and Blogbeat creates a very compelling free "blog-centric" marketing and analytics package. Existing fee-based Web analytics packages could be construed as overkill for small to mid-sized blogs and currently lack built-in RSS tracking and marketing capability (typically requiring users to code these events manually). As a result, FeedBurner is also looking ahead to a commercial offering that would integrate and or leverage existing enterprise Web analytics vendors.

Greg Dowling | July 12, 2006, 03:21 PM
Corporate Weblogs - methodology redux

My recent corporate Weblogs report (or more appropriately the press release) raised the ire of several members of the blogosphere and has several bloggers crying foul. Well, in an effort to provide "transparency" to the survey methodology and answer some of the questions posed here and here, allow me to provide some additional data clarity.

The data point - "...nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006." was derived from survey data collected from 251 respondents across all industries. The survey was fielded to Web site decision makers from companies with more than $50 million in revenue. The survey respondents were selected from the E-Rewards, Inc. executive panel and sent an email with a link to an online survey. As an incentive, respondents were awarded with frequent flyer miles.

It should also be noted that "Weblogs" in the context of this report (and press release) does not differentiate between external Weblogs or internal "dark" Weblogs and is referring to the deployment of Weblog authoring technology not the creation of customer facing Weblogs. To reiterate, the survey respondents were Web site decision makers with budget authority asked about technology deployments, not marketers asked about their use of Weblogs. However, marketers were surveyed for the data point, "Only 32 percent of marketing executives said they use corporate Weblogs to generate WoM around their company's products or services."

I hope this dispels some of the controversy swirling around the blogosphere after this recent press release.