Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

I attended an interesting panel at SXSW09 on what teens want in a web site. Unfortunately there were not many tangible strategies offered that audience members could take home and implement from this panel.  However, it was interesting to hear teens talk freely about how they use the web in general.  Since there wasn't an abundance of specific leaning to take back with me, a few interesting comments are paraphrased below for your knowledge and/or enjoyment.

1. "It's funny to see my teachers on Facebook; it shows you that they are really people too."
2. "Me and all my friends use MySpace and not Facebook, its way cooler."
3. "Us high school kids have so much drama in our lives.  It's like, why am I not in your top 20 friends on MySpace? That's rough."
4. "I use Wikipedia most of the time for my research papers."
5. "Internet explorer?  Ew please, I only use Firefox." 
   
6. "Me and my friends all just looooove Facebook Mafia Wars! (Cough, Cord.)"
7. "Wait, an RSS what?  What happened?"

For one reason or another, I neglected my feedreader between 1pm on Friday the 18th and around 7pm on Tuesday the 22nd. During this unintended vacation, nearly a thousand posts were published and were waiting for me in Google Reader.

I thought about that number for a second, then clicked "All Items" and then "Read." There was no way I was going to get through them. Why even try?

Up to this point, I've declared RSS bankruptcy a few times. Toss 'em out and move on. Blogs and news alerts find eyes other than mine.

But today I subscribed to another feed. It was different this time though. Normally, I categorize my subscriptions into the following categories:

• Arbitrarium - Wired , Kottke , Subtraction, Seed Mag, Anil Dash, Venture Beat, Bent Objects, etc.
  
• Design - New At Pentagram, Design Observer, I Love Typography, Ace Jet 170 etc.
  
• User Experience - Boxes and Arrows, A List Apart, Copyblogger, Findability, Good Experience, etc.
• Development - Ajaxian, Joel on Software, 456 Berea St, Y! User Interface, etc
  
• Clients - various client blogs and feeds
• Life Logistics - Meetup, Upcoming.org, Gen X Finance, Web Worker Daily, Del.icio.us tagged "toReview", etc.

This time, I added two new categories, bringing the total to eight.

• Daily
• Whenever

Now, each feed gets placed in one of the six above, and in on of the two below. If I get backed up, I click into "Whenever" and then click "Read". Dump the fluff. Since probably 95% of the feeds occupy the "Whenever" bucket, I feel better removing just these rather than all of them. 

Or, so I tell myself.

   

To me the goals of the corporate blog are to develop our employees as thought leaders in their individual practice areas, attract the attention of new clients, and engage current clients in dialog. While talking to ourselves is fun, I see the primary audience as our colleagues and clients.

But this is, as a whole, the blog of an integrated marketing communications company and it is a beast of many colors. We have people blogging about programming, PR, lobbying, design, and more.

In a world where there are specialized blogs that talk about the most niche subjects, how can a blog that talks about everything from Python programming to peep jousts be relevant (as a whole) for anyone but ourselves? So while search engines may pick up specific posts that may reach specific audiences, can you imagine anyone outside of Capstrat subscribing to our general RSS feed?

So I ask, is part of our strategy to get people to subscribe to the blog? Or do we want to focus on search engine pick up of specific articles?

If so, can you imagine anyone subscribing to a blog that covers such a broad range of topics (besides ourselves)?

Do we need to categorize our posts and feeds so readers can see more relevant discussion?

If so, what mechanisms can we devise to do this?