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Google has just announced the public release of Google Ad Manager, a hosted platform for the full management and optimization of online advertising campaigns. To access it one needs only to have an existing AdSense account.

Google Ad Manager has been designed to serve and track the performance of both directly sold ad units sold as well as those arriving from third-party networks you may be associated with.

What ad management problems is Google Ad Manager designed to solve? According to Google these that follow are the typical

• Confusing, slow, and complicated sales and trafficking workflows
• Inflexible site tagging
• Uncertainty about which ad source to deliver to optimize yield
• Unreliable inventory forecasting
• High ad-serving costs

In response to these challenges, Google Ad Manager has been designed to offer:

• A clear user interface: Increase your staff’s efficiency and productivity.
• Simplified tagging: Tag your site only once.
• Yield optimization: Automatically maximize your CPMs.
• Reliable inventory forecasting: Always know what inventory is available to sell.
• Higher ROI: Save costs, because Google Ad Manager is free.

Google Ad Manager is particularly useful if you fall in one of these categories:

• Operate a large website with reserved and remnant ad inventory.
• Sell your ad inventory directly to advertisers (or plan to sell directly to advertisers in the future).
• Want to improve the efficiency of the sales process and feel confident in your forecasting.
• Need a consistent way to deliver ads that make you the most money.
• Find that some of your inventory always remains unsold because you couldn’t accurately forecast availability.

A key characterizing point of the Google Ad Manager is that it can use AdSense to fill unsold inventory or compete on price against other ad networks, thus optimizing revenues for publishers by serving up the most profitable ads from campaigns competing for the same ad space on a web page.

Google Ad Manager key features include:

• Inventory Management
• Yield Optimization
• Ad Targeting
• Trafficking, Ad Delivery, and Order Booking
• Creatives and Rich Media Management
• Reporting
• User Interface
• Administration

Overall, Google Ad Manager appears to be perfectly suited for adoption by small and medium-sized professional web publishers who need a simple ad management tool that provides them with the opportunity to simplify ad maintenance and tracking while providing a way to further optimize and increase total ad revenues.

Here all the details:

Google Ad Manager Overview

Google Ad Manager is a hosted ad serving and management service for small business publishers.

Google Ad Manager key purpose is to help web publishers manage and optimize ad inventory in the best possible way by centralizing in one tool everything you need to schedule, enable, measure and delivery ad campaigns for your web site(s). Furthermore, the Google Ad Manager fully integrates with your existing AdSense account in order to fully optimize unsold advertising inventory.

In Google’s own words:

“Ad Manager can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and network-based inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with Google AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory.”
(Source: Google)

One thing to note is that Google Ad Manager is strikingly similar to OpenX, an open-source ad manager software which has been available since over a year. But while the Google Ad Manager runs on Google own servers, OpenX requires installation of its software on your own server.

One may also consider looking at Google Ad Manager as an effective complement to the Google-DoubleClick Revenue Center and to DART for Publishers, which have been marketed mostly to sites with large advertising sales forces, as it provides new and complementary opportunities for increasing ad revenue for all online media publishers.

Google Ad Manager - Key Features

Google Ad Manager integrates a long list of excellent ad management, targeting and serving features.

Here is a detailed features list to give you a better idea of the depth and scope of this new Google web service:

1) Inventory Management

• Ad Network Management: Easily manage your third-party ad networks in Ad Manager to automatically maximize your network driven revenue.
• Inventory Levels: Define inventory at granular levels for more efficient line item creation and trafficking. Use ad slots to generate Ad Manager tags for your pages, ad placements to group related ad slots, and ad products to bundle and sell inventory packages with the same cost and targeting criteria.
• Inventory Availability Tracking: Easily confirm whether ad impressions are available for specific dates, placements, and targeting criteria. Avoid overbooking and underselling.
• Simple Ad Tag Generation and Management: Copy and paste tags directly into your HTML. Avoid the need to re-tag your site when you change the way you sell your inventory. (Available upon request: iframe tags.)

2) Yield Optimization

• Optional AdSense Integration: Use AdSense to fill unsold inventory or compete on price against other ad networks.

3) Ad Targeting

• Day and Time Targeting: Don’t want your orders to run on weekends? No problem. With day and time targeting, you can set any new line items you create to run only during specific hours or days, or as little as 15 minutes per week. Use day and time targeting in addition to geography, bandwidth, browser, user language, operating system, domain and custom targeting.
• Built-in Targeting Options: Target ads to your site visitors’ geography, day and time, bandwidth, browser, browser language, operating system, and domain.
• Customizable Targeting Criteria: Target ad impressions by passing your own custom key-value pairs to Ad Manager.

4) Trafficking, Ad Delivery, and Order Booking

• Delivery Options: Choose one of five delivery types (exclusive, premium, standard, remnant, or house) to determine, automatically, how ads may be delivered.
• Frequency Capping: Set multiple levels of frequency capping, which limit the number of ads the same visitor sees over a minute, hour, day, week, month, or lifetime.
• Roadblocking: Deliver multiple creatives together on the same page.
• Proven Google Infrastructure: Enjoy fast, reliable ad delivery and load time.
• Support for Various Ad Pricing Models: Choose from cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM), cost-per-click (CPC), and cost-per-day (CPD).
• AdSense Integration (optional): Consistently deliver the highest-paying ad by enabling AdSense.
• Ad Network Management: Easily manage your third-party ad networks with network orders.

5) Creatives and Rich Media Management

• Rich Media Support: Use tags from a variety of rich media providers. Automatically detect macros.
• Free Ad Creatives Hosting: Save bandwidth and costs.
• Redirect Creatives Support: Easily track ads from a third-party network, affiliate provider, or other URL you provide.

6) Reporting

• Multiple Reporting Options: Run reports on order delivery, inventory performance, or overall sales.
• Detailed Reporting: Break down reports by date, line item, placement, advertiser, and other categories.
• Fast Report Generation: Create reports in seconds.
• Interactive Views: Sort data, add or remove columns, review different data subsets, and make other edits without having to leave the page or run a new report.
• Media Rating Council (MRC) accredited: Feel confident in Google Ad Manager’s ad impression measurement process, accredited by the Media Rating Council to be fully compliant with Interactive Advertising Bureau standards.

7) User Interface

• Creative Preview on Live Site: Preview the look and feel of ads on your live site to ensure ads look as expected before you start the campaign.
• Search Functionality: Locate order, inventory, or advertiser data from any page in Ad Manager.
• Intuitive Workflows: Quickly and easily create orders, approve orders, and review status of orders. Decrease training time and trafficking steps.
• AdSense Channels Integration: Import your existing AdSense channels into Ad Manager (optional).
• Browser Session Support: Use your browser’s ‘Back’ button and other built-in navigation without losing data.

Administration

• Access Controls: Set various viewing and editing permissions for your team.
• Contacts Organization: Store and manage advertiser and agency company information.
• International Language and Currency Support: Use Google Ad Manager in your native language and currency. Interface available in 32 languages.
• Automatic Macro Insertion: Save time and avoid tagging errors since Ad Manager now automatically detects and inserts macros from most popular 3rd party vendors.

How To Get Started with Google Ad Manager

If you’re already an AdSense web publisher all you need to do is to sign up for Google Ad Manager here. If you’re not an AdSense publisher - you will need to sign up for a Google AdSense account first.

If you have an AdSense account, you can sign in to Ad Manager today. A Google AdSense account is a technical requirement for creating an Ad Manager account.

When you create a Google Ad Manager account, this is automatically linked to your AdSense account. The two can be fully integrated so that AdSense can be enabled to serve ads to some of your unused online unsold advertising inventory.

In my initial tests Google Ad Manager appeared to be relatively easy to setup and use.

Once you have defined your own campaigns and selected ad networks, you can automatically backfill empty ad slots with AdSense ads.

Editor’s Comments

For those having a hard time maximizing their sites’ ad inventory, Google Ad Manager provides a very cost-effective (read free) solution to maximize your online ad revenue on existing small and medium-sized web sites.

In essence, the Google hosted Ad Manager is a very useful tool to sell, schedule, deliver and measure directly sold and network-based ad inventory. The Ad Manager offers up a simple ad management interface and an effective ad serving and inventory management facility for serious web publishers.

Darren Rowser at Problogger reports:

“Ad Manager is going to be most useful to bloggers who have a decent amount of traffic and who are wanting to start selling ad placements directly to advertisers.

If you’re still at the stage of just running AdSense on your blog then this will probably something you’ll want to grow into. It is reasonably easy to use and set up however unless you’re wanting to sell your own ads there isn’t much point.“

Learn More

Get started with using Google Ad Manager.

Full list of Google Ad Manager features.

Read about Google Ad Manager success stories.

Originally written by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published August 27th 2008 as “Online Ad Management And Optimization: The Google Ad Manager Is Here”

How do you organize the content of a new web site or blog? Do you really need to spend specific time ahead of launching to organize the content sections and hierarchy of your web site? Can’t one simply identify the key content categories of his future site and be done with it?

Photo credit: a) Sitemap - Flickr / Shilpa13 b) Butterfly - Adrian Matthiassen mashed up by Robin Good

The best answer is always relative to where you want to end up.

So, if you want to launch a new site because you just want to have some fun, and have no desire or expectation to be very visible on major search engines, or to provide a meaningful navigation path to your readers, then you are very much OK to just click and start playing.

Fun is fun.

But, if you are after building a serious, professional-looking web site, where you are going to need as much relevant traffic as possible, good visibility on major search engines as well as lots of happy and loyal readers, deciding ahead of time how to organize the content of your site may be one of the most important activities you can invest your time on.

Thanks to Dev.Opera, a fantastic web resource for anyone who wants to learn more about tech-savvy creative web design and development, Jonathan Lane introduces today for you the very basics of what goes under the label of “information architecture“: how do you organize the contents of a new web site in a meaningful and effective way?

Here all the details:

Information Architecture - Planning Out a Web Site

by Jonathan Lane

Photo credit: Contens CMS

Introduction

Traditionally, the planning stage of a web site (or any project) can be a little stressful. Everyone has an opinion about how a web site should be built, and often their opinions will conflict with one another.

Your number one goal on any web site should be to build something that’s useful for the people who will be using it. It really doesn’t matter what your boss says, what that guy down the hall with a doctorate in software engineering says, or even what your personal preferences are; at the end of the day, if you’re building a web site for a particular group of people, their opinion is the only one that matters.

This article is going to look at the early stages of planning out a web site, and a discipline that is commonly referred to as Information architecture, or IA.

This involves thinking about who your target audience will be, what information and services they need from a web site, and how you should structure it to provide that for them.

You’ll look at the entire body of information that needs to go on the site and think about how to break that down into chunks, and how those chunks should relate to one another.

The sections below are as follows:

• You need to plan out the site you’re building
1. Introducing “The Dung Beatles”
2. Now what? Drawing a site map
3. Naming your pages
4. Adding some details
5. Summary
6. Exercise questions

You Need to Plan Out the Site You’re Building

Image credit: Robin Good - IKONOS sas

You’ll come upon the odd web project that you can just dive right into without any up front thought, but these are, by far, the exception and not the norm.

We’re going to take a look at a fictional band called “The Dung Beatles” and try to help them work through the early stages of planning out their web site.

We’ll talk with the band and find out what goals they have, and what they would like to see on their web site. Then we’ll dive in and start working on a structure for the band’s information.

Introducing “The Dung Beatles”

Photo credit: Austin Chronicle

The Dung Beatles (TDB) have a problem. They are the hottest Beatles tribute band in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, but they need to raise their profile for an upcoming North American tour this summer.

They’ve got venues scheduled throughout Canada and the United States, but they’re virtually unknown outside of their hometown. If only there was some way, using technology, to reach a large number of Beatles fans for relatively little money.

Lucky for TDB, we’ve got this thing called the World Wide Web, and they quickly decide that building a web site is the answer they’ve been searching for.

TDB needs a place to promote their tour dates, build a fan base in other cities and raise awareness of the band.

You’re going to work through their ideas with them and see if you can chart out a plan for their web site.

You schedule a meeting with your new clients to hash out the details of what they’re looking for and to decide on due dates and costs.

You open the conversation by suggesting that you talk about the goals and objectives of the web site in order to get an idea of what they want.

What does the band hope to achieve with their online presence?

Web Site Goals

Photo credit: Silvia Bukovac

TDB starts talking about their upcoming tour, and how they want to get the word out to Beatles fans in all of their scheduled stops. It’s February now, and they’re scheduled to kick off their tour in five months time.

Hang on a second! A web site alone won’t build it’s own traffic and publicise itself.

You extract from the conversation thus far that the main goal for the site is to provide a home for TDB fans online; a place where they can keep up to date on the latest news, tour dates and venues. Through the fans (word of mouth), and some other advertising venues, new people will be driven to the web site where they can download sample tracks, check out pictures of the band (in full costume) and find out where/when they can check them out live.

Raul McCoffee, the front man of the group, points out that it would be nice to be able to raise a little extra money for the tour through the sale of some CDs and band merchandise.

You gather the band around and draw out a quick sketch of what a visitor might want when they visit the web site. This is just a really rough brainstorm of ideas; it’s got very little structure at this point.

Identify Future Audience(s)

Figure 1: A rough sketch of what your web site should contain - What your web site visitors want.

There are two general groups of people who will visit the site—people who know TDB already and like them (fans), and people who are unsure. You’ve got to cater to both those groups in different ways; potential fans need to be “sold” on the group, whereas current fans want to “feed their addiction” (so to speak).

What sort of information is each of these groups going to be looking for?

Figure 1 gives an indication of this—this is a typical sketch of the type that you’ll want to make at this point in future web site projects.

From this, you’ll work out what pages the web site needs, and how they should link to one another.

You settle on a budget, and agree to launch the web site in one month. You promise to get back to the band in a couple of days with some plans outlining the direction you’re going in.

Now What? Drawing a Site Map

Figure 2 shows my attempt at taking the brainstorm and turning it into a site org chart: the first iteration of the site structure - This image shows the first attempt at structuring the example web site looked at in this article. The component pages are organized in a spider diagram, with the “Home” page at the centre. the pages linked to this central point are “Store”, “Biographies”, “Fan Discussion”, “Tour dates and locations, “Pictures”, “Discography” and “Contact”. The “Discography page has two further sub-pages spidering off it, “Lyrics” and “Sample tracks”.

A lot of people will throw together a site map at this stage — this looks like an org (organisational) chart. This is usually a pretty basic graphic showing simply the names of each page on the site and how they link into the overall structure of the web site.

Personally, I like to put in a little more detail and talk about the purpose and content of each page.

For example, a page may be labeled “Home”, but what is the home page? Is it a cheesy “welcome to our web site” message (yuck!) or is it a more dynamic page containing news items and enticing images?

Take a few minutes to think about what pages the above sketch might turn into, and what might be contained on each page. Have a go at drawing your own site map before moving on to the next section.

Now let’s get started with the basics: one of those org charts that I mentioned above.

That definitely captures all of the pages we’ll need, but there’s no real grouping going on here. It’s just a big mess of pages now, and at this point I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to what things are called.

I did one more pass and try to “chunk” the information into slightly larger groupings — Figure 3 shows what I did: the site structure grouped more logically

Figure 3: Site structure, revised. - This images shows a refined example site structure. The “Home page now has the following subpages spidering off it: “Contact”, “Store”, “About TDB” (which links to further “Biographies” and “Pictures” subpages), “Band news” (which links to further “Tour dates & locations” and “Fan discussion” subpages), and “The music” (which links to further “Lyrics” and “Sample tracks” subpages).

I’ve done a couple of things with the revised site structure.

a) The “Band News” page gives TDB a place to post anything they want to share with their fans. Even after their summer tour is over, and the “Tour dates and locations” page is no longer relevant, they’ll be able to post stuff.

b) Adopting a blog format here will let fans comment in context on the various stories, and will help to build an online community around TDB. News and tour events will likely spark the most discussion, so let’s group that all together.

Additionally, the word “News” is a simpler, more general word that people will be able to recognise faster if they’re skimming a page for the information they want.

Our new “About The Dung Beatles” page groups together the band members’ biographies as well as their pictures. Going this route gives us a jumping off point for individual band member biographies.

Following a similar argument to the one we made above, “About” is a common term used on a lot of web sites. Anytime a visitor wants to learn more about a company, a product, a service, or an individual, they usually look for an “About” link.

Finally, the term “Discography” is a bit of a technical term. It’s possible that less people will understand what the term than “The Music”. Also, it opens up this page to additional content: sources of inspiration, history of a particular song…you get the idea.

I think we’re ready to roll. After I’ve talked a bit about naming pages sensibly, we’ll move on to add a little more detail about each page.

Naming Your Pages

Page names can be one of the most crucial decisions you’ll make during web site design.

Not only is it important for your visitors so that they can find their way around your web site, but it is another thing that dictates how easy your site is to find using a search engine.

In general, search engines look at the text included in a web page, the URL of that page, and the text of any links to that page when they’re deciding “how important” it is.

Giving your pages sensible names and sensible URLs will encourage anyone linking to your pages to use sensible descriptions.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re a car company, and you have a model called “The Speedster”. You’ve got a web site to promote your automobile, and one of the pages lists available features. Do you call this page “Features”, “Available Features”, “Features of the Speedster”, or “Bells and Whistles”?

I would suggest that “Features of the Speedster” is the best option from this list.

It’s specific to what the page contains, chances are that the title will be displayed high up on the page and will be prominent (good for search engine indexing), and you may even be able to fit it into the URL (something like “www.autocompany.com/speedster/speedster-features/”).

Adding Some Details

Figure 4: Page Details for the Home page.

You don’t have to figure out everything at this point, but you need to at least provide a brief description of what you have in mind for each page.

After you’ve got the site structure, number each of your pages and provide a brief description for each page, like I’ve done in Figure 4 for the home page (you’ll get a chance to do this for the other pages in one of the exercises questions at the end of the article.)

This is about as involved as you want to get at this point. You don’t need to describe page functionality, the technology you’ll use to build it, or the design / layout in great detail. Just describe what you have in mind in general terms.

Your goal here is to communicate what you’re thinking to your client and to force you to think things through.

It’s not uncommon at this stage to come to the realization that you have too many pages, and you’ll never be able to find content for them. You can go crazy in creating a hierarchy of pages.

For example, if the band members just wanted to publish one paragraph about themselves, it wouldn’t be necessary to create separate biography pages for each member. They could all be combined into a single page.

Summary

This article has looked at the web site as a whole, and how you should think about structuring it.

1. First you decide on the content of a web site, and decide how to structure that content into pages.

2. Next you decide on the functionality that will actually be used on your web site.

3. The last thing you do before you actually start going ahead and coding your web site is work out the visual design of it—the page layouts, and the colour scheme, etc.

Exercise Questions

Photo credit: Pablo631

• Look back at Figure 1 and try to develop a similar brainstorm for a web site about a car (pick any current or imaginary car).

• What will visitors to the web site want to know?
• Is there anything at existing car web sites that you see as essential? Frivolous?

See also:

• Web standards—beautiful dream, but what’s the reality?
• What does a good web page need?

This article is part of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, the ultimate client-side web development teaching course) and was first published on July 8th 2008 for Dev.Opera as “Information Architecture - Planning out a web site”

About the author

Jonathan Lane is the President of Industry Interactive’a web development/web application development company located on Mayne Island, British Columbia, Canada. He got his start in development working for the University of Lethbridge Curriculum Re-Development Center as their web projects coordinator for many years. He blogs at Flyingtroll and is currently developing Mailmanagr, an e-mail interface for the Basecamp project management application.

From Steve Rubel to Sepp Hasslberger, many beginning bloggers as well as a good number of experienced ones like to publish (especially on weekends) posts that are nothing else but a collection of recommended links they are offering to their readers. These digests of links have gotten over time different names: link posts, linkstream, best links of the day, news grabs and so on, with a thousand different variations.

Screenshot from Steve Rubel blog

If you look inside a link post, sometimes the links in it are just a series of article titles, while other times they may include an excerpt from the actual post, a short introduction or a comment by the blogger who has selected them.

Such link posts are a relatively fast and easy way to share valuable resources one has discovered online without getting into the task of writing a full post for it. Time restraints and a desire to share more are generally the driving motives behind these link posts.

As I wrote recently, such linkstreams are by all means a simplified and primitive form of newsmastering, (an emerging news selection and re-publishing practice that gives way to making more people into individual news editors (what I call newsmasters) for very specific audiences).

Once you realize that, you may consider as well to take the bull by the horns and instead of having such “filler” posts, transform your normal day-to-day news reading into a very valuable news publishing activity.

Here’s how:

From Posting Selections of Links to Full Newsmastering

Sepp Hasslberger makes his links posts more SEO friendly by prefixing the generic title with one specific keyword set that focuses on one of the news in his links - too bad that the title is not representative of all the actual contents… but how can you when you cover so many different topics?

Unfortunately, the basic link stream post approach, has many inefficiencies, and while it is definitely better than not posting anything, it is not the most efficient way to produce news content and since it is not in many cases a daily feature, it offers moderate value to your readers who during the other days have no selected news digest to look up to. Furthermore a link stream post does require as much time to be published as a pretty professional newsradar (what is a newsradar), and this is why I invite you to give a serious look at taking up this option.

Link Posts Limitations and Problems

1) Not SEO friendly - titles are generally very generic and the collection of very diverse links makes these posts not a good search engine reference as they are about too many different things. The link stream is good only for loyal, repeat visitors to your site or feed but it is basically useless for visitors coming from search engines. (See Sepp Hasslberger example above).

2) Not RSS friendly - people scanning titles of news inside their RSS reader will likely skip over titles of link collections like “Link Grabs” or “Best Links for 11/11/08″

3) If you make your hand-picked news into a weekly generic mix post that brings all of them together, you are basically already doing a news curation job. The problem is you are not serving it as such and you are not doing daily.

Advantages And Key Reasons for Doing Newsmastering - Creating Newsradars

1) To Create a unique news channel
Providing your original filtered news selection of what is to be read out there on a systematic basis can be of great value to your readers.

2) To Increase Authority
When you start being a resource for news to others you gain in credibility and authority in your field of interest. Just like for newspapers, people view the ability of selecting and identifying relevant news to publish a high-authority trait.

3) To Offer Great Value for Your Readers
People can subscribe specifically to your news selection if your focus matches their specific interest and save tons of time in not having to scan each and every news story from all the site that cover their interest.

4) To Support Diverse Marketing and Business Opportunities
Newsradars can be used in a number of ways to provide both extra value to your readers as well as to create more content on a topic, introducing a new content space for sponsorship, enriching an existing guide and more.

My Suggested Strategy: Abandon Link Posts, Start A Your Own Newsradar

What I recommend to do is to create thematic news channels (what I call newsradars) as they serve a fantastic double purpose:

a) Keep you on top of the news on a specific area of interest
You need to read those news anyhow for your interest. So why not making of the process of keeping yourself informed the base process for creating a valuable news channel for your readers?

b) Provide a unique and valuable news service to your readers - select and share the very best and most relevant stories from your daily scan into a dedicated news channel for your readers

In this way you keep doing what you are already doing (scanning specific sources for news of interest to you) while adding the benefit of creating a valuable news channel for your readers and saving yourself the time of creating that weekly link collection posts which you now have no more need for.

How To Create Your Own First Publishable Newsradar

Create a newsradar on a very specific topic or theme it is not so difficult. You do not need to know any programming languages and if you follow closely the steps listed here below you could probably set-up one in less time than you may have thought.

1. Make a list of the news sources you want to tap into
This should be a list of URLs, listing all of the RSS feeds from those news sources that you want to keep monitoring for relevant news o your theme/topic.

2. Input them inside Google Reader, Blogbridge or Mysyndicaat
If you are a starter, just go to Google Reader, setup an account, and input all of the RSS feeds you have put together at point 1.

3. Scan regularly all of the incoming news as a river of news
Now, when you log into your Google Reader you can effectively scan the river of news coming in chronologically form all of your trusted sources.

4. Pick and select the most relevant one for your readers
And here comes the important part. You now need to play the news editor, the news jockey, and hand-pick the news coming from those sources that are relevant for your specific theme / topic / audience. How do you “pick”? Just click the “Share” link below each one news story that is appropriate. By doing this you will be automatically creating a new RSS feed which now contains only your hand-picked selections. This is the feed you want to publish. You can get the address of this feed by looking at the top of your Google Reader page

5. Publish the RSS feed generated by with your own picks
Now you can use a number of different solutions to embed / publish your newly created newsradar inside your blog or web site.

Here a few detailed screenshots of where to find the “Share” button inside Google Reader as well as the Shared Items RSS feed and its URL.

a) This is the “Share” link button you find underneath each news story inside Google Reader.

b) This is the “Shared Items” link in the left sidebar of Google Reader where you need to click to see all of the stories you have “shared”.

c) Here is the top of the page in Google Reader when you have clicked on your Shared Items link. Note the highlighted link to a public web page where all your shared items are published.

d) This is the public web page Google Reader automatically creates and which contains your newsradar made up of all of your shared news stories.

e) And here is where you need to click if you are using Firefox to access and find your newly created newsradar RSS feed address. Click that orange icon in the address bar and the next URL you land to is the RSS feed of your newsradar.

That’s it! Now take that RSS feed and publish it / embed it on your selected web pages and you can say you are a newsmaster.

Want More?

Not completely clear on what you need to do? Have more questions? Post a comment here below or if you want to see me in video showing you how to do this in a step-by-step demonstration, just sign-up for my updates via RSS or email and you will soon find out.

Originally written by Robin Good for Master New Media and first published on August 19th 2008 as “Web Content Formats - Links Posts: How To Convert Your Link Posts Activity Into Effective Niche News Publishing”

Live video streaming services are a specific category of video publishing tools that anyone can use to stream live video from their computer, just using a fast Internet connection and a web camera. In this Sharewood Guide, Robin and I have picked for you the best live video streaming tools out there.

Photo credit: Digital Lifestyles

Here is a list of typical live video streaming features to help you determine which of these free video streaming services could be best for your specific needs.

• Multimedia/Playlist integration: Allows you to video stream other content, such as YouTube videos, presentations, images and more, in live or scheduled shows
• Text chat: Integrated in the player or in the show page, lets you message with your visitors
• Co-hosting - Multiple web cameras: Host can decide whether to let other people show their webcam and actually mix them in like a real television channel
• Record: Lets you record the live show and, if you want, to embed a player with the recorded show on any page

Here the live video streaming tools we have selected for you:

Live Video Streaming Services - Comparison Table

go to the table!

Live Video Streaming Services - List

1. UStream
   
   UStream is a web broadcasting system that allows you to stream live content to the Internet from your webcam. In a matter of seconds you can create your own live station, and start streaming live images from anywhere: people can watch and chat with you on your UStream page, or simply on any site where you will embed your player. The service is free to use.
   http://www.ustream.tv/
2. Mogulus
   
   Mogulus is an online social tv service that anyone can use to create his own professional web tv show. With no technical knowledge, you can create your own channel with multiple live cameras and videos from major sharing websites (like YouTube), that you can easily mix with a click of a button. Players can be embedded on any site, and can stream live or recorded media. Free.
   http://www.mogulus.com/
3. Yahoo Live
   
   Yahoo Live is a website where everybody can stream video from their webcams. After a free registration, you can create you own streaming channel where you can broadcast right from your PC with an Internet connection, images from your webcam or any video source. Viewers can follow you, talk in the channel-chat-box, and also engage in video conferences between themselves, and obviously with you. Free.
   http://live.yahoo.com/
4. BlogTV
   
   BlogTV is an online live video service that you can use to put yourself live with a computer and a webcam. You can broadcast live video from your cam, record your sessions and embed the player anywhere you want. Your viewers can send you feedback via the integrated text-chat in the player, without even signing up. Free to use.
   http://www.blogtv.com/
5. Justin.tv
   
   Justin.tv is a video streaming service, originally featuring Justin broadcasting his life 24/7 from a hat-webcam, that lets people stream their own video. With a simple registration and a webcam, you can broadcast live video at absolutely no cost, embed it on any site and chat with your viewers. Free.
   http://www.justin.tv/
6. Kyte
   
   Kyte is a multimedia broadcasting service that lets users put any type of content online. To start a new channel just register for free, decide whether you want to stream pictures, videos, or live images from your webcam, and embed the player anywhere so that people can watch your show and send you feedback via integrated text chat. Free to use.
   http://www.kyte.tv/
7. Stickam
   
   Stickam is a live video streaming solution that allows you to interact with your viewers. After a free and simple registration, you can create your show, both with live and pre-recorded material, and embed it on your site. People can interact with you with text-chat or by adding their webcam and microphone to the conference, up to 6 guest video spaces. Free.
   http://www.stickam.com/
8. Operator 11
   
   Operator 11 is a website that lets you create video shows. You can stream live with your webcam and other participants can go themselves live with audio and video if the host decides so. Pre-recorded video clips can be mixed in or they can be broadcast live by anyone. All the live shows are automatically recorded so that you can embed them on your website right after. Operator 11 is free to use.
   http://operator11.com/
9. LiveVideo
   
   LiveVideo is a free website where you can create your own video channel and stream your webcam video. After you create your channel, users can start watching you and add their own webcams to create a conference room where you can talk and text-chat. Registration is needed in order to use the service.
   http://www.livevideo.com/
10. Veetle
    
    Veetle is a video streaming service that allows you to watch and broadcast live video in high quality. After a free signup, you can create your channel and start broadcasting both pre-recorded and live images from your camera. Viewers will need to install Veetle TV in order to watch you, and they will be able to join the show text-chat. Free.
    http://www.veetle.com/
11. Yaika
    
    Yaika is a free video platform that anyone with a laptop and a camera can use to instantly stream a breaking story or share an experience, live on the Internet. After you register, you can put yourself live on the Internet with a click of a button, and stream live video instantly to the world. Shows get automatically registered and stored on the site. Free.
    http://yaika.com/
12. Veodia
    
    Veodia is video streaming solution that you can use to broadcast live and on-demand video. With a webcam and a microphone, you can start your live sessions anywhere you are, with the possibility of uploading MP4/H264 videos, and people will be able to watch you through a multi-platform player. When you press Stop, your recording is instantly available for on-demand playback. To use it you can start a free trial or .
    http://www.veodia.com/
13. Streamavideo
    
    Streamavideo is a free portal that allows you to stream live video or upload recorded ones. You can send and stream live video right from your camera and have a live preview of how your video will look. You can also chat with your viewers, record video from your camera and have video conferences. The service is free to use.
    
    http://www.streamavideo.com/

Originally written by Nico Canali De Rossi and Robin Good for Master New Media and first published on August 17th 2008 as “Live Video Streaming Services - Sharewood Guide”

“If you have mastered the blogging paradigm, have made your blog an authority and a reliable source of information, commentary or news in your selected field(/s) of interest, it is about time to “scale yourself up” - Work Less and Look More At The Bigger Picture (= See the Future). ”
(Source: MasterNewMedia, 2006)

Photo credit: Solarseven

I have first thought about newsmastering and newsradars over four years ago, in 2004, when RSS feeds were taking off like wildfire in the early adopter community. As I had been using them for many months already, I had strong feelings against what Robert Scoble was promoting at the time, trumpeting his ability to subscribe and follow to over a thousand different RSS feeds.

Scaling yourself up means transforming your role from one of contributor, writer to one that is more focused on being a filter/collector/aggregator of news from other sources.

Newsmastering is a new and emerging skill that involves gathering, filtering and selecting from the chaos of information that saturates the internet, and delivering the resulting news feed to niche-targeted audiences.

The internet is so vast, that finding what you are looking for is becoming increasingly difficult. Google searches, however well refined, can produce hundreds of thousands of results.

With the amount of news and information arriving to us daily, this is a space that someone will need to fill in any case. The value provided to others by having someone filter and select ahead of them relevant news fitting a specific topic/ theme will increase its value by orders of magnitude in the near future.

And while it takes really no special cognitive skill the process of subscribing to so many feeds, you can easily imagine the result of such an approach. You need more time to scan / browse all feeds, you have less time for inspecting each one item, and as a consequence the quality of information gathering and analysis you can perform goes down with each new feed you add (unless you have unlimited time in your normal days).

If you missed my past writings on the topic of newsmastering, I am just going to provide you with a short refresher intro to what RSS newsmastering and newsradars are all about.

Here the details:

What Is NewsMastering

Newsmastering is the process by which a human being identifies, aggregates, hand-picks, edits and republishes a highly-focused, thematic news via RSS. Newsmastering allows dedicated news editors (newsmasters) to remix and contextualize the existing tsunami of breaking news for very specific audiences in one thousand and more ways.

Can you be more specific?

Sure.

What do print newspapers do? They gather stories from newswire feeds to which they subscribe to and pick up selected stories that fit their readership and rewrite them in their newspaper style and format. Additionally newspaper editors pick up news stories to cover from other newspapers (very much) as well as from their own direct sources, which pass to them specific news tips and pointers.

What I have named “Newsmastering” is a process by which you do something very similar to the above although in a fully virtual newsroom (your computer) and with the speed and efficiency that new media tools can afford you.

So a newsmaster wanting to provide coverage on a specific topic / industry / issue would basically do the following:

1. Research

Search and identify a good number of reliable news and content sources on the very topic of interest - gathering of RSS feed or creation of custom RSS feed for them when not available (Dapper is a good tool to do that but there are other ones too)

2. RSS Feed Creation

Create of a number of RSS feeds based on custom “persistent searches” on the different content areas of the Internet (blogosphere, web, news, directories, forums, social media, etc.) to scan wider and the deeper the Internet for relevant stories on your topic.

3. Aggregation

Aggregate of all the above-created RSS feeds into one “master” raw news feed, in which all content coming from all the RSS feeds you have identified and created is mixed into one chronological stream.

4. Filtering

Filter out duplicate content, spam, news in other languages and other non-relevant or must-be-excluded news content.

5. News Selection and Editing

Select like a DJ the best and most relevant news stories for your readership. Save them a huge amount of browsing time while trying to provide them always with relevant stories from new alternative sources. The editing part may consist only in the fixing of badly formatted stories, titles, or in the minor editing of news descriptions.

6. Syndication - Publishing of Newsradar

Publish, and re-distribute your final product as a content newsradar on a specific topic. Integrate it on your site home page or internal side columns and offer the opportunity for other sites in related fields to also re-use it and include it in their pages.

In summary: Newsmastering is the ability to identify, select, aggregate, filter and distribute/ publish news and information on very specific themes / topics.

What’s The Big Deal? Role / Value of Newsmastering

The key value of newsmastering is in understanding its role not as an opportunity to for easy and indiscriminate syndication of other people’s content but as a missing vital role for the social network to scale its need to make sense of the huge amount of information it creates.

In other words: you and I are under a tsunami of information coming at us. It increases day by day and shows no signs of stopping. The number of interesting sources and blogs we like to follow increases daily and so the time required then to separate what is relevant to us from what is not.

The newsmaster plays a vital role in this information economy. It saves you from having to go out and check all of the relevant news sources that publish news that may interest you. SHe acts as a filter and saves you from reading ten stories from Techcrunch or Mashable when there is only one from each that is relevant to your specific audience.

The unique value that the newsmaster brings into the information economy equation is the more formal acknowledgement and introduction of a human-based news filtering into the news distribution mechanism. The newsmaster helps the system scale, provides higher quality and more relevant content to be accessible by a greater number of people, does the dirty job of categorizing, ordering and separating news according to specific audiences and interests.

My Case

For example, in my case here at Master New Media, I and the other newsmasters in my team work hard at one very specific goal: finding breaking news stories, resources and new tools that are specifically relevant to people who want to be professional web publishers.

When in the news selection session I look at that infinite stream of news in front of my eyes, the only key criteria I have for hand-picking relevant news for my readers is asking myself: how is this story relevant to someone who badly wants to improve its online communication skills? Is this just another cool item, is this something that appeals to me (and not to my readers) or is this story specifically relevant for my readers? If it is, I hand-pick that news and include it for my readers. If not, I’ll use it for something else, but I will not dilute my newsradar focus and quality selection just to have more stuff.

See, that is exactly what Techcrunch and Mashable do. They give you tons of great stuff, but the focus, the thread line that pulls it all together is very, very broad. Whatever falls under web 2.0, social networking, new media and technology they cover.

What would be the benefit for my readers, if I cater to an audience of people who want to learn more about professional web publishing, that I tell them about each new web 2.0 tool that comes out or about the new 5 million dollar financing round that a new social media company has just closed? Unless you are in the business of making business out of other web companies I would not think this stuff would be of much use to you in the real world.

Isn’t Normal Blogging Already A Form Of Newsmastering?

Well, you may say, “but isn’t this what most tech and media bloggers do?”

Most tech and media bloggers try to make as many news into their own stories to gain extra page views, visibility and traffic. They are just echoing the PR news machine. Nothing more.

The exception to this are link posts and link blogs in which straight lists of interesting news stories are shared publicly by an author.

See, you really don’t need to make the story yours if your goal is to gain extra value and credibility to your audience.

Who do you perceive as having a greater command of a topic? Someone who writes a news story for a news company or someone who picks up the best news from all of the authors of all the news companies?

If you are great at finding some the most interesting news in your field, why not make a valuable content resource by publishing / sharing it as an actual news feed? That is what I would call a newsradar.

Think about it. This is an extremely valuable news service you can give to your readers. If they like the news you select for them, they are going to come back to you to get more of them.

What Is A Newsradar

A newsradar is an aggregated set of RSS news feeds on one specific topic.

I have chosen this name to describe the fact that such a feed scans the Internet for relevant, compliant news and as a consequence allows to track and closely monitor any specific topic, product, event, person or brand that gets mentioned on the Internet (even when, the source does not publish an RSS feed.)

You can have a newsradar on just about any topic.

Actually there are a number of companies that have created and used newsradars to enhance the value of the information they provide to their customers. Most do not call them news radars, but what they do is exactky what I have described for you here.

The difficult part in creating effective newsradars is that they require some time to be setup, good knowledge of the field to be covered and personal time by a competent person to maintain them. Rare traits to bring together, believe me. And one more reason why newsmastering is a valuable opportunity for creating a marketing advantage over competitors if you are in the position to do so.

How Can You Create A Newsradar

Anyone can create a newsradar by utilizing any software or web service that allows both the aggregation and manual filtering of multiple RSS feeds into one. This means that not only the service you use must allow you to subscribe easily and mix together any number of different RSS feeds, the same tool must also allow you to play the role of the news jockey who selects, orders, remixes and plays the best and most relevant news coming under his specific area of focus.

There are now very many tools that allow you to do this effectively. I only recommend the ones that I know and have used and in this light I have three basic ones that you can consider using:

a) Google Reader

Google Reader is a web-based RSSreader which allows you to subscribe to all the RSS feeds you want and see them as one stream of news inside your browser. By utilizing Google Reader “Share” function you can create a news RSS feed can be created that will include only the specific news stories you have selected to “share”. This gives you effectively the basic newsmastering ability to choose sources, aggregate and then play the news editor by selecting only the ones to publish in your news stream. Simple, free and easy.

b) BlogBridge

Blogbridge is a great cross-platform open-source RSS feed reader, aggregator and publisher. It can hook up directly to your existing blog publishing system to create a seamless bridge between your news production and your more traditional site publishing chores. BlogBridge has a cool interface, many valuable features and great support. Read more about BlogBridge newsmastering potential and other related newsmastering services such the BlogBridge Feed Library (this remains a cool idea to further cultivate).

c) MySyndicaat

MySyndicaat is the most sophisticated and powerful one though it doesn’t come without its own idyiosyncracies and limitations. Not an easy to use tool, as it requires some getting used to, MySyndicaat has some really powerful functions and it is targeted at professional news publishers who want a powerful and scalable corporate-grade tool to manage all of their news aggregation and republishing. To get a free account you need to contact gianni [at] kipcast (mentioning you have read this news on Robin Good’ site) and provide some good reasons for which they should give you an account (they are not interested anymore in freewheelers and are activately marketing to serious news publishers).

If you want to know more about the tools and techniques that expert newsmasters use check Marjolein Hoekstra of http://cleverclogs.org/CleverClogs (I now realize should have included her in the list of past MasterNewMedia glories in my internship article the other day, as I can’t miss seeing how much Marjolein has picked up from his internship / collaboration experience at MasterNewMedia) and John Tropea of Library Clips blogs who have long surpassed me in their competence and familiarity with such tools.

What Is A Newsmaster

We need something of an entirely new order of magnitude to manage all of this information. Search engines, open directories, and millions of bloggers are not enough.

We need a multi-layered, self-organizing approach that allows the load to be highly distributed and the focus and depth to be guaranteed by the combined result of many highly focused individual efforts.

As Stephen Downes correctly explained: “The layered mechanism works because at no point is the entire weight of the filtering process concentrated in a single individual or a single resource.

The network can and will do the rest.”

The newsmaster is a like a disc-jockey for the news. It manually selects the best and most relevant news stories according to a specific theme / focus.

A newsmaster is anyone who while utilizing automatic RSS aggregation and filtering tools acts a news curator, digest editor in hand-picking and selecting exclusively the stories, coming from external news sources, that are particularly relevant to his audience.

Difference Between Automatic Aggregation and Newsmastering

Automatic aggregation and filtering of news can be applied only to the most basic part of a newsmaster workflow. The real added value is specifically in the ability of the newsmaster to manually pick the very best and most relevant stories for its target audience. This is why newsmastering is so valuable to those publishers who address a very specific market niche and have invested significant time in profiling their audience characteristics, interests and news needs. To republish cool breaking news from a broad spectrum of sources offers little or no value to your reader as most everyone has already identified broad, mainstream news sources which serve reliably that type of content.

Techmeme is an automatic aggregation and filtering web new service which is very popular but which covers a very wide range of technology and media related news while basing its news selection algorhithms more on popularity (which news have more of a news chamber effect) than on originality, relevance (too broad an audience) or inherent information quality. You just need a live human being to do that.

Linkblogs Are A Primitive Form of Newsradars

Link blogs, linkrolls, daily link lists, linkstreams or collected selection of links, a content many bloggers and small web publishers like to put out (especially on weekends) is a primitive form of newsmastering itself.

In many cases small publishers create link blogs because of the limited opportunity they have to give coverage to interesting news and announcements they run into during their news gathering and reading tasks. In order not to waste such relevant content encountered many web publishers put out short blog posts in which they include a short list of titles and links they have run into during their online wanderings. Morale: the interesting news found don’t go lost and can be used as a valuable content asset for the publisher audience.

Newsmastering is just the formalization of the linkblog attitude into a systematic, daily news selection and curation process that allows the publisher to create a highly customized news content stream. Instead of a post containing a bunch of links, you create a news feed, which if updated regularly, can have its own permanent space on your web site.

Want To Know More? Ask!

Of course there is a lot more to say about newsmastering and newsradars.

For example the whole topic of how to identify and create a cool pool of news sources it’s worth a whole discussion, as much as how to create and utilize the power of “persistent searches” to be alerted of breaking news on specific topics and to discover new unknown but relevant sources.

Want to know more? Not clear about some of the aspects of newsmastering? Know of a specific tool that could be helpful to create effective newsradars? Have some great example of newsmastering to show?

In each and every case use the comments section here below and contribute your own ideas and suggestions. I’ll be happy to reply and comment back at every opportunity you give me.

Originally written by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on August 15th 2008 as “What Is Newsmastering And What Are Newsradars? RSS News Aggregation And Re-Publishing For Beginners”

What differentiates a professional online article from just another blog post? Nothing? Both are published contents that just utilize a different writing style. If that is your answer, let me challenge and show you how many differences there can be between a “typical” blog post and what I would call a professionally written and formatted web article.

Photo credit: Konstantinos Kokkinis

What is the purpose of this analysis? Understanding more of the variables at play for web content publishers. While getting content out may be the first frontier for many, other key elements do come into play when you want to make the jump from amateur to pro.

Here is how I see it:

What Differentiates Yet Another Blog Post From a Professionally Published Articles

The unique characteristic and peculiar original advantage of blog posts is that they are easy to publish and therefore allow for great immediacy when you have hot news and do not want to wait a day or a few hours for the whole “newspaper” wheel to get in motion.

And that is all true and fine. If you are breaking the news and utilize the blog as a means to let the information you uncover get more rapidly to your readers, then that it is certainly a proper use of a blog unique strengths.

Same applies for the writing and formatting style. If you are in a rush to write some breaking news, it matters a lot less if you have a spelling mistakes, formatting overlooks, missing or no images to complement your writing. The immediacy of that breaking news is what matters to us readers, and your ability to get it out fast to us is probably what in many cases we value most.

But are all online publishers, bloggers and web reporters all in this same, “breaking news“, high immediacy situation?

I don’t think so.

I find it rather a lack of professionality, or better yet a lack of appreciation for what makes published information valuable that often limits the opportunities and potential of many otherwise talented bloggers and web publishers.

For such small publishers a “typical” blog is often all they have been exposed to in their short online publisher careers and the fact that they have been seeing professionally built publications and media for all of their lives seems to be completely oblivious to them.

Not that printed publications or other more established online media have always something to teach in terms of writing and formatting, but utilizing their evident strengths and weaknesses to create a more effective way of communicating and publishing information online, should be a natural for anyone claiming to be a pro web communication publisher.

The Seven Key Differences

1) Content Formatting

Photo credit: Norebbo

Blog post: Formatting inside most blog posts is practically non-existent. Text is just rolled down the blog text column as it comes. A rare sprinkle of bolds and a few links generally complete the standard post.

Professional web article: Takes advantage of all available information design variables to create content that is more legible, better organized and easier to scan. Utilizes spacing, bold, links, line length, text size and style to make the content reading experience as effective as possible. It may go often unnoticed but when you compare an article from a pro site and one from a typical blog the difference is evident.

2) Spelling and Grammar Mistakes

Photo credit: Head-off

Blog post: Often characterized by many uncorrected spelling mistakes.

Professional web article: Error free. With the free tools available today to check your content, even as you type, there is really no excuse even for someone running with a bomb in his ass not to correct his words before pressing the publish button.

3) Use of Images

Photo credit: Hypermania

Blog post: Makes rare use of images. When images are used they are often decorative or not immediately relevant / matching the subject being exposed. Quality of images is mediocre. When utilizing multiple images in the same post they are generally very dissimilar in quality, shooting style, framing and more. In general, it appears most obvious in this area than in the writing that skill in selecting and placing quality images that complement and enrich the value of the content is not water.

Professional web article: Uses quality stock or custom shot images to complement and / or illustrate the points presented in the article. Images are always accompanied by a photo credit. Images well complement, inform and enrich the article by providing additional information to the one presented in the text. Images are rarely decorative. Images are high quality and generally consistent in quality, framing and shooting style. Images are generally published in a larger format (than on blogs).

4) Spacing

Photo credit: Norebbo

Blog post: Text is often cramped in many consecutive paragraphs with little or no spacing between them. In my memory, only handwritten in-class school assignments done under time restrictions were worst than these. Little attention is given to spacing within content and around it as if content by itself could win no matter how badly served.

Professional web article: Content is properly spaced as to clearly guide the readers to easily find separate sections at a glance. Ample space around content makes the readers experience less demanding and more focused / enjoyable.

5) Legibility

Photo credit: Mike Flippo

Blog post: Text size is often set ot the minimum legible dimensions, usually with the rationale of “it does look nice” as the only logic driving it. Little or no attention is planning for optimum legibility, and audience needs and characteristics generally come in only as a second thought.

Professional web article: Attention is paid to all relevant variables that make text more legible and easy to read. Line length, font style, typeface, type size, titles and sub-titles dimensions and style are all evaluated with careful attention in order to create an easy to browse through continuum.

6) Structure

Photo credit: Norebbo

Blog post: Unstructured. Generally inspired and written on the spur of the moment. Emotional. Gut driven.

Professional web article: Structured. Follows a precise formula to deliver information in the most effective way. Content of an article is divided into various components, from introduction to recommendations, conclusion, reference and each one serves an orderly specific purpose. Very rational. Driven by logic.

7) References

Photo credit: Norebbo

Blog post: Inconsistent. Some references offered. Often utilizes poor linking strategy by not leveraging text anchors and not helping new readers dwell and understand unfamiliar terms, tech or buzzwords.

Professional web article: Good, many references offered. All events, people, products and services, tech terms and buzzwords are systematically linked for reference to explanatory articles.

Conclusions - Recommendations

Photo credit: Robert Mizerek

The above are just some of the most important and visible differences between quality web content and the typical, run-of-the-mill, average blog posts.

Again, content does a play a key vital role in all this, but since an increasing number of bloggers and small web publishers are really not operating under an “extreme immediacy” or “urgency” need, it is for these very publishers that it is particularly important, to recognize the extra value that the above components can provide to their readers.

In the growing sea of content that the Web represents, the ability to provide a high-quality, rich and “professional” user experience is right now a very valuable factor. Due to the large number of “improvised“, “just-in-time” bloggers and web publishers, getting above the mediocrity of their publishing skills is not that difficult. And while it is definitely true that people will NOT find you online thanks to your “professional” layout or cool content delivery format, it is also true that often what I find by doing a Google search is not worth more than a glance after landing on it. The appearance of a blog or site with short content, lots of advertising and an improvised look conjures immediately ideas of amateurish, approximate work. You may read some of its contents, but it is likely you will not bookmark or come back to that site.

If you are not breaking news, (and even there, as competition rapidly increases, you will soon have to start paying attention to this staff) you need to understand that there can be more to publishing information than just typing the latest news and posting them out on the web.

If you are into creating a growing community of loyal readers who appreciate the extra-mile you go to offer them not only the info they want but also the way in which you deliver it to them, then paying growing attention to this otherwise apparently secondary elements can pay back nicely in building the toughest side of your online business: its credibility.

Yes, by placing greater emphasis on the quality, accessibility and usability of the content you deliver to your readers, you automatically place yourself/ site on a step higher than competing blogs who do nothing but spitting out breaking news of new tools at every breath. A better and more in demand publisher is not automatically the one that puts out the most content or news, or is it? Not everyone is looking for the latest news only.

Many of those who are seriously searching for information, advice, help, products, want generally something more than the shallowness of a short breaking news and a link. Yes, that is useful to get moving, but right after discovery of something interesting there is the need to know more in depth the issue at hand, and to have a variety of options viewpoints to consult.

And that is where a blog site that wants to stand out in terms of quality and “professionality” can more intelligently direct itself. Toward greater content quality, depth and presentation effectiveness. These three are the areas that offer the greatest margin of creating a tangible market advantage over much of the existing web publishers.

Originally written by Robin Good for Master New Media and first published on August 4th 2008 as “What Differentiates Yet Another Blog Post From A Professionally Web Published Article?”

The brand ambassador is an advertising model that leverages the authority and credibility of online personalities to create a powerful direct marketing strategy. A respected followed authority, a blogger or small publisher targeting a specific audience niche can be a much more effective vehicle for marketing communication that the most expensive advertising campaign.

We do not trust brands anymore. We trust individuals: friendly, familiar authority figures with who we feel great affinity. These are the people we trust and those from which we would always welcome honest suggestions and tips, and when they are spontaneous or clearly disclosed even those of commercial nature.

Here’s my vision:

The Brand Ambassador Idea

The principals of Italian “vertical” web advertising agency Adv-it with whom I first discussed the “Brand Ambassador” idea - from left Massimiliano Flotta, Paolo Pettinato e Michele Ficara (board advisor)

People do not trust brands anymore. The bigger the brand, the larger their advertising campaign and visual presence, the less trust people place in the company behind it. Yes, it may not be every company’s reality, but if you look carefully this is an increasingly familiar scenario.

Why?

Simple. Brands have squeezed us in each and every possible way. Most brands, intended as typical commercial corporations, have spent their best budgets and brains to basically sell you and me an imaginary, glamorous view of life that magically comes to life when you or I decide to buy or use that product or service.

The harsh reality, in most cases, is right there to destroy this carefully crafted picture in much less time than it took the original company to build it. Buy a defective product and get to interact to an unresponsive or unpolite customer service representative and the beautiful picture the company had created crumbles at once. Offer a service and deliver it badly and today’s customers will proactively take action to not only abandon your services but if possible even to discredit them so that others don’t get burned like they did. Personal media, blogs, forums, online communities, today give them ample options to satisfy such desires.

The discrepancy between promised scenario and reality is often so huge that commercial companies can commercially survive only by working on attracting systematically new customers and / or stretching the promised paradise picture further and further

This is, in my opinion, why most active, critically thinking, analytical people do not like most big brands and are very suspicious of buying in accordance with television or magazine big campaign commercials. They just prefer to use their heads to think and choose what suits them best when in need of something specific.

And since they trust less and less the big brands and the advertisements and messages they produce, where do they for marketing advice?

To their trusted, reliable, authority friends.

If I am to buy a new motorbike, and I will have to do that soon, what do you think, that I am going to check out what television ads recommend or what I may glance at by browsing through a men’s magazine? Positively not.

I will seek authority, reliable friends who are passionate motorbike users and will ask them for advice and suggestions. Some of these people are going to be people I know physically and some others will be reporters, journalist or bloggers I have come to respect and rely upon when in need of advice in a specific area.

This what not only I, but many others like me and you do when in need to make a commercial decision.

We seek a trusted, reliable, authority friends that we believe is an expert on the topic and who we think has such integrity not to ever promote or favor a brand over another unless he really had good logical reasons for it.

What we look for in such a person is integrity above all: someone who has repeatedly shown to have high transparency standards, openly shared ethics, and a consistent behavior in providing always valuable verified information above his personal interests and advantages.

The New Way

The “new way“ is “let your product be discovered by your potential customers via whoever loves and uses it already!“.

Approaching online marketing campaigns by leveraging the credibility and direct communication abilities of brand ambassadors seems such a natural way to do more effective marketing that you may wonder why no-one is using it already.

A few guesses:

a) We have been using traditional mass communication marketing approaches for so long, it is very hard to start thinking and acting in new ways. Most companies simply innovate their marketing approach by superimposing the facade of new direct marketing approaches to their traditional communication strategy. They open a blog, a web site, but they smell as fake or more than they did before.

b) We tend to resist to such ideas because we assume that if someone is getting paid to promote and market a service / product he/she cannot be credible. But again we make here the same mistake I just described at point a). We mix up the old and the new as we see fit and we superimpose ideas and concepts of the past on a new different paradigm.

When like on traditional mass media, you get paid to be a sponsor, you are a passive vehicle sending off a message to an audience that has no way to respond, comment or talk back to you publicly. There are no checks and balances in place to verify your claims and credibility. You just get more popular and visible by selling yourself as a testimonial while you lose little or none of your credibility as everybody knows that it is all fake, staged, unreal.

In traditional advertising you (your site, radio, etc) are placed on a podium with a sound blasting system and you scream as loud as you can whatever you get paid to scream for. Worse you need to scream with the voice, words and language your sponsor has chosen. Total fake.

But when the scenario changes and you become an active brand ambassador for a brand you like, and you communicate in first person to an audience that can respond, comment, suggest, complain and interact with you in multiple ways, it becomes extremely difficult for you to be a sponsor for a product or service you don’t believe in or that doesn’t deliver what it promises and to maintain at the same time your credibility and authority you have previously gained.

It becomes extremely difficult in this situation because now it is your own reputation and credibility that are at stake.

You may discover that just like in real life where we have trusted friends that have earned our loyalty by never giving us advice based on their personal interest but always by looking and listening to our own specific needs, so online there can exist authority figures, experts or opinion leaders who may be perfect brand ambassadors, that do give extra exposure to specific products / brands, without not only ever placing their credibility at risk, but by actually cross-pollinating each other’s values and image.

Though my vision may prove impossible in reality, I tend to believe that it is possible to maintain one’s own integrity while being an evangelist for a brand. What it takes to achieve this is to clearly choose not to be a passive vehicle for corporate messages but to act as a branding ambassador capable of finding a delicate equilibrium between providing the same honest, credible advice to your own audience and giving due extra exposure to your selected branding partner.

But I think there can be ways around this too. here a couple of initial ideas:

a) The sponsoring brand could simply “fund” a selected brand ambassador and let him/her decide the ways and venues by which to provide credible extra exposure to their advertising partner. Candidate brand ambassadors could offer a free test period to selected brands as to let advertisers evaluate and compare results before committing any serious budget.

b) Would be brand ambassadors could pre-opt publicly on a specific section their sites or blogs the brands / products and services they fully endorse and would happily take up as a brand ambassador.

The Brand Ambassador Profile

The Brand Ambassador is a new type of advertising model / format which I have come up while in search for my ideal advertising scenario. These its key characteristics:

1) The Brand Ambassador is someone willing to be the paladin, the flag, the evangelist for a specific company or product which the ambassador personally endorses, uses, likes.

2) The Brand Ambassador acts as a direct communication channel between the company and his target audience. That is: if company X wants to promote its line of products and Brand Ambassador Y is a potential match (being him an already an active and enthusiastic user of company X products), the company Y will pass on to the Brand Ambassador all of the information and promotions that it wants to deliver to its select targets, but it will be the Brand Ambassador himself who will decide which ones to pass onto its community of followers.

3) The Brand Ambassador is the one that chooses how to deliver informative, marketing or promotional messages coming from company Y. If it is true that the Brand Ambassador has lots of affinity with its audience it would seem certainly more logical that it should be him and not company Y to design all marketing communications going to his audience rather than, as it happens today, having company Y design a set of visual ads that will need to address a thousand very different communities.

4) The Brand Ambassador is the perfect marketing communication vehicle for a marketplace made up of many highly different niche groups, characterized by very different traits, aspirations, habits. Which if you look at it with open eyes, is each and every market. Addressing marketing communications while still utilizing traditional mass communication approaches, it is positively going to deliver less and less results and an increasingly lower return on such marketing investments.

5) The Brand Ambassador (generally) marries only one at any one time. Unlike motorbike and car racing drivers who wear for marketing reasons logos from many different and often unrelated companies, the Brand Ambassador marries only one brand at a time, and one that he / she would have promoted, talked and said interesting things about even without a formal Brand Ambassador agreement (I understand this is difficult to verify, but what matters here is the “spirit” of the idea - pay attention also to the fact that unlike what happens on traditional mass media like television, if someone decided to repeatedly be brand ambassador for a specific line of products out only of financial interests, he would have a much tougher time keeping his figure credible and consistent in the eyes of his audience. In other words, for a trusted friend who is also a respected, authority figure it is much more difficult to fake in front of his community, than it is for a public celebrity for an anonymous invisible audience he really never interacts with.

6) The Brand Ambassador realizes his / her role of marketing and communication vehicle in multiple ways:

a) by having his wear directly sponsored

b) by participating as a performing guest at events organized by brand sponsoring company

c) by branding in some exclusive way his site with the sponsoring brand (and it should be the brand amabassador to design such messages so that they use the language and visuals that his specific audience find affinity for)

d) by promoting specific publications, events or other information-based products that are relevant to his specific audience-community

e) by branding his video clips with a logo from the sponsoring brand

f) by creating a series of video clips that showcase best effective uses and applications for the sponsoring brand product/service

g) by physically branding objects and tools the Brand Ambassador typically uses such as his portable computer, work bag, motorbike, car, and more.

h) by authoring one or more newsradars (thematic newsfeeds edited by hand on a specific topic).

Final Considerations

As you have probably guessed by now, I think this model can work, just as much as I think that advertising as it still done by most agencies distributing ads on the Internet needs to change a lot.

I also am curious to hear your irated or scornful comments, and even better your rational and analytical critiques. I can learn a lot from them.

I don’t think the issue is being a “shill” or not. I see the issue as looking at innovative and more effective, natural ways to make relevant information flow from product makers to end users and potential customers.

It looks to me that allowing a few companies to scream from multiple podiums I place on my site real estate isn’t that much less “shillful” than saying out right why I honestly think a certain product is great and endorsing it in multiple ways.

Yes, you say, but you are going to be influenced by those who pay you. Yes, I answer. But so do you with the people that spend big money on your site with traditional advertising. And if that is not so, how in any case can people tell? How can they find out whether the new review, article or link you did was a consequence of a return favor you are doing to an advertising agency or to a past direct advertiser who would want to come back? Unless you have some very strict, and public disclosure policy about this info, it is going only through your actions over time that people will be able to tell whether you have your own integrity or whether you are simply a marketing puppet at the service of whoever pays you more.

In essence: I see a possibility for highly credible and authoritative bloggers that target specific audiences and niches to become brand ambassadors of product or services they really like.

In the spirit, it should be bottom-up advertising with publishers selecting the favorite brands they would want to endorse. In reality bloggers or other similar online authority figures could publicly pre-elect companies and brands that they would want to be brand ambassadors for. They could this directly on their sites and/or via their representative advertising agencies.

This advertising model would provide companies embracing it with a communication vehicle with much higher impact and effectiveness that anything they have done so far via traditional advertising. It is likely that such brands would need multiple such brand ambassadors addressing the many different target audiences making up their potential customer base.

To independent publishers and online bloggers this advertising model would offer the opportunity to re-synch communication with marketing, instead of keeping them tightly separate, while guaranteeing also a longer and more stable revenue stream. It would also offer the opportunity for individual publishers to leverage their authority and influence to convey messages and promotions for products and companies they truly believe in.

Originally written by Robin Good for Master New Media and first published on August 1st 2008 as “Advertising 2.0 Model: The Brand Ambassador”