Well, I finally figured out the way to capture blog readers: mention their company in your post. Since I blogged about Network Solutions the other day, I saw on my Google Analytics page that the person from Arlington, VA, (HELLO ARLINGTON!!! WOOHOO!) did a search for the phrase “network solutions”, found my post, and then apparently went to the bathroom because they spent 12 minutes looking at the one page. I don’t even spend 12 minutes writing these things! And, now I am going to purposely add the phrase to the title, the meta and the SEO stuff to see if it happens again. As I read in the Denver Post not too long ago, some companies are sending people out to Twitter and the blogosphere to try and discover what customers are saying about them. Perhaps the internet is the democratization of commerce. Or from a cynical point of view, perhaps these companies are doing market research without having to actually contact a person. Hmm.
The other day, I posted a metablog about Seth Godin, hoping that my “trackback” would appear on his blog. No dice. I wonder what I did wrong? There is only ONE trackback under that article. I suppose one must wait for Godin himself to approve and release the post. (Oh my GOD: WAITING FOR GODIN! THAT”S AWESOME!)
Zemanta HQ is definitely searching me/checking me/ something. I like Zemanta, but not having received much attention before this is a bit odd. Cool, but odd. Hopefully they won’t have to start CHARGING ME.
Back to work, and hopefully after my jefflazerus.com Holiday Marketing Blitzorama, I will have a few more regular readers. (Hi MOM!)


7 Comments
I hope to be adding more posts about this kind of stuff. The article about marketing spending in 2009 has been the most popular… I tried Google alerts also back when I wrote this, and I didn't have too much success, either. If you are someone like Zemanta or Network Solutions, and you want to know what bloggers are saying about your company, it's probably a good thing. I was just curious about how these readers found my blog. How did you find the blog? Curious…
I been reading your blog today, .. got a good collection of posts, I tried google alert, and sort of tried to incorporate it in my daily routine but I do not why couldn't find it very intersting may be because I was used to other trend and bookmarking tools…
that's the important thing about google analytics, we can write what they want from the searching on search engine. after that they can come again and again to search and read about what they search for. like we search network solutions…. you can grab to write about it and sending them to your site. really easy with stats from google analytics.
That is very cool, Jure. I admire your forthrightness. It takes guts to actually seek feedback on new product. But, then, you can have some confidence with Zemanta. I'm still discovering cool new things about it, it works seamlessly with WP, and I recently found out you care about what your users think
Hi Shashi,
Thanks for the comment. I've been really happy with NS and plan on continuing next year. Keep up the good work! I love that you have Wordpress and Joomla, which a Regular Guy (like me) can just install easily from the account manager dashboard.
Jeff
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
I work for Network Solutions, I second Jure's excellent choice of Google Alerts. Thanks for mentioning Network Solutions. We monitor brand terms to see if we can reach out to people in every possible channel.
Thanks,
Shashi Bellamkonda, Network Solutions
smedia@networksolutions.com
Google Alerts are incredible thing. I wake up in the morning and check whoever mentions Zemanta and click through their blog. Then I see if I can help them or at least record their feedback into our bug database so that it's going to get acted upon in next version
Regarding charging for Zemanta, we have no plans yet to charge for our free version, but we're looking into providing some “pro” versions for bigger publishers. So no worries here
Jure Cuhalev, Zemanta
jure@zemanta.com
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