PostRank is launching a Discovery Engine to support dialog monitoring.  The announcement is not earthshaking news but the announcement is an interesting industry twist with individual collaboration vendors spinning out their own dialog “discovery” tools.  Finding dialogs is one thing but finding business value is another.

As Discovery Engines evolve from simple pointers that identify the location of a dialog to a reference tool that can be used to help initiate new conversations among individuals with shared interest you have to wonder about how marketing will evolve.  These tools could lead to content generators of segmented page content that shed light on the deep web of unranked and unindexed user generated information.

I think PostRank’s announcement also points to the beginning of the end for big monitoring vendors.  How does the army of PostRank announcements impact big dialog monitoring players like SM2’s Techrigy?  Who knows but I’m interested to see how PopUrls.com and Alltop.com (Guy Kawasaki’s aggregation platform #guykawaski) move from conversation clearinghouses that aggregate dialogs to businesses that become audience engagement generators.

Very exciting stuff… Here’s the announcement that has me think:

From:     info@aiderss.com
Subject:     Discover and share great blogs with PostRank!
Date:     April 7, 2009 2:19:57 PM EDT
To:     todd(at)audiencemachine(dot)com
Reply-To:     beta@aiderss.com

Hello, we have some exciting news about PostRank, and want to share it with all of our community!

We’re launching the PostRank Discovery engine, which enables everyone to:

- discover the most timely, relevant, and engaging content online
- search and segment content by specific topic areas and interesting and influential publishers
- create, share, and subscribe to the the best curated and auto-updated reading lists.

You already have an account on postrank.com, so you’re ready to get started. Head over to the PostRank website (http://postrank.com/register) and create a profile. You can use your existing login information — email and password or OpenID.

Check out these topic lists created by people in the know:

Marketing by Joe Thornley: http://beta.postrank.com/user/thornley/topic/marketing
Venture Capital by Jim Murphy: http://beta.postrank.com/user/jimmurphy/topic/vc
Ruby by Ilya Grigorik: http://beta.postrank.com/user/igrigorik/topic/ruby

And here are some of our most popular topics:

Moms: http://postrank.com/topic/Moms
Politics: http://postrank.com/topic/Politics
Technology: http://postrank.com/topic/Technology

Once you’ve created a profile, all the feeds in your account will be publicly viewable by default. You can make feeds private if you like. (That is, only you will be able to see your subscription to that feed, and only if you’re logged in to PostRank.com.) You can change your feed privacy settings on your account’s Subscriptions page once you’re logged in.

For more information on what PostRank Discovery is all about, check out the blog post: http://blog.postrank.com/2009/04/05/postrank-delivers-the-best-blog-discovery-engine/

And for a quick start overview: http://blog.postrank.com/introduction-to-postrank-discovery/

If you have any questions or problems, please let us know via:

- email: melanie@aiderss.com
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/aiderss)
- Get Satisfaction: http://getsatisfaction.com/aiderss

We hope you’ll love PostRank Discovery as much as we do!

The AideRSS Team

This email was sent to todd@audiencemachine.com.
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REQUEST FOR RECOMMENDATIONS!  Get Your Recommendations Published in the Workshop Handouts

On Wednesday, April 15th David Robinson of Birch Studio and I will be leading a 3 hour workshop for the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce.  The workshop is titled: How to Cost Effectively Drive Audiences to Your Website.  And, I need your help.

Would you be willing send me your recommendation on how to cost effectively drive audiences to websites? I’d love to plug in your recommendations into the workshop materials we handout to attendees and that will be presented during the workshop.  It is also a great way to demonstrate the collaborative power of social networking to attendees.

Each person providing a recommendation will get a dedicated slide in the deck.

When you send over your recommendation, please include a photo of yourself, your company name, URL and either a Twitter link or blog URL so that workshop attendees can learn more about you.  Please email me your recommendation to todd(at)audiencemachine(dot)com.

The handbooks are going to be printed on Monday — that’s the plan as far as I know — so please send me your recommendation before Monday, April 13th.

And, of course, I’ll give you a copy of the deck.

Many thanks!

When Dana Todd talks about the future of communication  strategies you can hear a distinct level of comfort in her voice.  It’s the voice of experience.

As a well-known pioneer in the search marketing area, Dana Todd is trailblazing again.

Dana’s recently launched - Newsforce — with a team of heavy-duty overachievers with a mission to expand the communication and monetization offerings of the news industry.

The company is not wasting any time.

Ms. Todd who is the firm’s CMO and co-founder is on a whirlwind tour delivering 100 demonstrations in 100 days sharing her own story about how Newsforce’s storytelling tools will revolutionize the online media industry.  The tool suite is

1.    Self-service search optimization tool for story and press releases
2.    The Newsforce Network

How will Newsforce expand the communication and monetization offerings of the news industry?

According to Ms. Todd, it starts with deconstructing press releases into editorial content so that advertisers can build-in longevity into the distribution of corporate communications.  Ms. Todd noted, “Newsforce’s storytelling media network compliments traditional PR initiatives, media buys and organic search objectives.”   And, according to Ms. Todd your campaign can be up and running in as little as an hour.

I think Newsforce’s storytelling media will also serve to enrich and renew the value of article marketing efforts.  In fact, a storytelling media network is likely to be great matches for the publishing industry as well as authors even if the platform is geared more toward supporting branding than a straight out performance buy.

One thing that is attractive about Newsforce is the simplicity of their model.

The ingredients for making a storytelling campaign are assets and processes that are already being used in the ad and PR industry that have been combined to create a new media offering:

Storytelling media starts with a simple persuasive story. Write for consumers rather than editors.  Create an editorial experience rather than an advertising vehicle.  Then, plug in non-traditional sources of content.  When you’re ready, syndicate your “advertorial story” content across 283 premium news platforms including Yahoo News and Los Angeles Times among many others into a “storyboard” module that appears on these sites.  Optimize content for search indexing.  Enable your content for social network distribution via tagging.  Set your budget.  Now sit back and measure the results.

And the results are compelling.

Eye tracking engagement studies have proven the Newsforce storyboard unit is nearly 3 times more effective at capturing attention over Google Adwords units and 8 to 12 times more effective than banner ads.

The Newsforce storyboard is also redefining our understanding of what an ad unit is online. The offering reminds me of YellowBrix’s content distribution model from 1999 that was based on the integration of contextual ad units into site content.

Newsforce has also productized part of the brand storytelling and constituent relations processes developed by storyteller practitioners like Michael Margolis of Thirsty-Fish among others.  It will be interesting to see how storyteller practitioners and media product vendors partner to expand revenue opportunities.

Let the storytelling begin.

To learn more about storytelling media opportunities visit Newsforce Network or follow Newsforce on Twitter #newsforce.

PHOTO CREDITS: thewebmama