Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson do not only provide relevant and regular podcasts on For Immediate Release, they also read carefuly (through Technorati) the comments posted about their podcasts!

While listening to their podcast #10, I suddenly realised that they actually mention my name (4m15s from the beginning) because of the short summary that I posted a few days ago about the interview they made with Michael Wiley. Nice to hear!

Once again, I can only recommend to syndicate For Immediate Release and listen to these excellent podcasts.

Let us come back to GM FastLane, General Motors’s PR blog that we mentioned at the beginning of the year. Yesterday, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson proposed another very good podcast with an interview of Michael Wiley, Director New Media, GM Communications, General Motors, the man who is behind GM FastLane. The quality of the podcast is not very good since Shel and Neville are skyping out this time; however, the content is very interesting!

General Motors really appears to be one of the first “non-hitech” companies to implement PR blogging. “One of the main goals is to get a new direct line to the various stakeholders of General Motors; up until recently, PR communications were mostly transmitted by the media and there was no way for the customers to get back to General Motors“, says Michael Wiley. Now there is. Even their employees post comments! The blog created an excellent way to collect feedback and to encourage the dialogue. Since the decision was taken and imposed by Bob Lutz himself (he blogs with a BlackBerry!), the initial internal resistance was quickly put aside. Michael Wiley explains that they do not have any editorial calendar for the moment; when topics come up other senior executives will probably start to blog too. They have not planned any other blogs for the moment, there is enough work to learn and to respond to all the comments; every comment is read and they want a consistant and high level communication. As for the negative side of blogging: inappropriate or offensive comments, Mr Wiley says that they probably had to remove less than 10 (or even 5). Such an impressively low number should probably be used as an example for PR people and CEOs who are still reluctant to start a blog because of the comments.

Apparently, General Motors are investigating further to better use or to include other techniques such as podcasting (they actually started already), videologging, RSS. This week, their VP of global communication starts the first internal weblog of the company. Well done!

The complete conversation is available in the podcast or in writing.

Tomorrow 23rd February @ noon central time (GMT -6 hours), you can listen to session #2 of John Jantsch’s teleseminar on how to promote your local business on the Internet. The topic of this session will be “How to deliver your marketing message directly to your customer’s computer desktop - The basics of marketing with RSS”.

“It’s getting harder and harder to cut through the clutter and be heard. RSS technology allows you to develop a more personal relationship with your clients and prospects and gives you another tool to communicate. Again, this is still very new but by the end of 2005 every small business owner will understand it’s power - This session will make what appears to be a highly technical subject, very user friendly.”

You can subscribe here for this session (or for the upcoming sessions).

Think Equity Partners, an investment bank based in San Francisco and which specializes in technology and health care, is using a blog, named ThinkBlog, to build a dialog with the financial community.

Via Company Blogs.

Paul Otellini is the president and future CEO of Intel Corporation. He started an internal blog a couple of months ago on the company’s intranet, accessible to Intel employees only. Of course, there are always information leaks in companies the size of Intel. Some of the content is now available at different places on the web. More to read on Smart Mobs.

[Update on 02/18/2005 11:34pm] Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson give some good insight on the subject and on the evolution of CEO blogs in their latest podcast (02/17), starting as from 10:19.

Debbie Weil and John Jantsch, will be doing a live audio conference today, Wednesday, February 9, at 1 pm EST. They’ll be talking about how blogs can be used as marketing tools for business. The conference is free.

Via Radiant Marketing Group.

Rafe Needleman, editor for CNET.com Business Buying Advice, explains how RSS feeds give you the news you need, when and where you want it. Watch his 3m32 video as he helps you stay informed with more news from more sources than you could ever possibly read.

Via Mag-Zine.

“So the blogosphere waits for the corporate-mainstream Tipping Point to arrive, the point where blogging stops being the supposed realm of freaks, weirdos, unemployed marketing consultants, unpublished novelists, political junkies and underworked cube dwellers, and starts being HUGE! An essential pillar of any corporate strategy and execution etc etc.

The GM blog sent a signal that we might, might, might have reached the corporate tipping point (we reached the individual tipping point a while ago, methinks).”

Via BlogWrite for CEOS via gapingvoid.

Intel publishes a short page about RSS and provides three feeds:

• Intel Products
• Intel Press Room
• Software at Intel

What about Intel blogs? Via BlogWrite for CEOs.

Sandy Hamilton has spent most of his career in sales, marketing and business development. He recently started Corporate RSS -Applied, a blog to analyze the benefits of using RSS in the business world:

• as a defensive mechanism for companies as the frame that they operate in changes around them;
• as a sales management tool;
• as a sales reporting tool;
• what are the cost and benefits;
• the functional organisations on the revenue side within traditional businesses;
• the most fundamental needs of the more mainstream potential users.

Sandy believes (and so do we) that there’s some obvious ‘low hanging’ fruit to explore in terms of the applicability of RSS. Even if there are approximately 8 million RSS feeds (now growing at 1 million/month) out there, it’s a technology that is still relegated to the early adopters. Be it in the U.S. or in Europe, the business unit leaders or functional leaders (i.e. people with responsibility, authority and budget) are mostly naïve to this evolving technology. Sandy intends to structure his blog as follows.

• Getting started
• The situation
• The opportunity
• The actions you can take
• The results that will follow
• Real life case studies and white papers
• Products

This weblog is an excellent initiative which we will follow with attention.

You may have read that b-spirit.com has recently started a partnership with Traction Software. That is why the Traction TeamPage datasheet is now available for download here. Do not hesitate to print it and to e-mail it to your colleagues and managers and feel free to contact us should you have any questions. There will be more information about Traction posted here in the coming days.