Publishing Synergy: Blog, Twitter and Ulitzer

Vivek Kundra to Speak at NRO Showcase

By G C Network | June 8, 2009

On the 17 & 18 June, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) will present the premiere Innovative Solutions Showcase. Titled “Unleashing the Crowd in the Cloud: Igniting the Innovation Insurgency“, this event…

Secure Cloud Computing on Federal News Radio

By G C Network | June 1, 2009

Last week the Trezza Media Group, Flyzik Group and Federal News Radio combined to produce an outstanding Federal Executive Forum on Secure Cloud Computing. Moderated by Jim Flyzik, panelist included:…

My Meeting with Mr. Vivek Kundra

By G C Network | May 29, 2009

Earlier this week I had the distinct pleasure and opportunity to have a private meeting with Mr. Vivek Kundra. Although my time with him and Mr. Gary Washington (OMB/Egov &IT Internal…

Comments for Mr. Kundra (Thank you for the input!)

By G C Network | May 25, 2009

A little over a week ago I put out a request to my readers to help me with my meeting with Vivek Kundra.  The response has been awesome!! thank you…

Congratulations to Roger Baker !!

By G C Network | May 23, 2009

My congratulations goes out to Roger Baker !  I first met Roger a little over a year ago when he interviewed me for my present job at Dataline. At that…

NDU (IRM) and DoD CIO (NII) Co-Hosting Cloud Computing and Cyber Security Symposia

By G C Network | May 20, 2009

I’m proud to announce two important coming events. The Information Resources Management (IRM) College and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Networks and Information Integration)/DOD CIO are co-hosting…

Please Help Me Plan My Meeting With Mr. Vivek Kundra !!

By G C Network | May 18, 2009

A couple of weeks ago, I was offered a chance to meet Mr. Vivek Kundra at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in downtown Washington, DC. Needless to say, I was…

President Obama’s 2010 Budget Highlights Cloud Computing

By G C Network | May 12, 2009

President Obama’s 2010 Budget (pp. 157-158) has highlighted cloud computing as a key tool for improving innovation, efficiency and effectiveness in Federal IT. ” Cloud-computing is a convenient, on-demand model…

Federal Cloud Computing Heating Up !

By G C Network | May 7, 2009

As fellow blogger Reuven Cohen mentions in his post, Federal cloud computing is indeed heating up: Vivek Kundra held a US Federal Government Cloud Computing Summit yesterday The Federal CIO…

USA.gov “Flips the switch” to Cloud Computing

By G C Network | May 4, 2009

Last weekend, USA.gov shifted to a cloud computing platform. This move is expected to reduce infrastructure expenses by 90% and drastically improve flexibility. “‘We are flipping the switch tomorrow to…

Have you ever been given the task of building and executing an aggressive customer outreach program? Well I received my assignment about a year ago and trust me; the budget was not commensurate with the assigned goal. My particular need was to educate prospective Federal government customers on a new information technology trend. Known as cloud computing, this new approach blends service oriented architecture (SOA), virtualization technologies and a “pay-by-the-use” sales approach into a new IT delivery business model.

Although this new approach promised the delivery of better constituent service at a reduced cost, risk adverse Federal agency decision makers needed to know much more before they would even consider cloud computing as an option. During a time of economic collapse and fiscal crisis, competing security, governance and procurement requirements would also need to be adequately addressed. Unfortunately, “elastic computing” still needed an “elastic federal procurement” companion.

Our initial approach to this challenge was to rely on traditional media outlet tools. After first securing prominent positioning and ad space in an industry leading print magazine, we aggressively sought opportunities to also publish related print articles. Although we were very frugal in our negotiations during this initial campaign, creative development cost, content review timelines and limited publication frequencies all contributed to making this an untenable budgetary option. Attempts to salvage this traditional approach with parallel email campaigns were also less than satisfactory. High list acquisition cost, weak channel linkage and an inability to gauge our relevance to targeted readers led to very low click through rates.

After this dismal start, we finally made the jump into new media with the launch of a customer focused blog. This shift began to deliver results almost immediately. From a budget point of view, our burn rate reduced significantly. For the first time, we were also able to directly measure the efficiency of our outreach program (blog visitors per dollar spent). Creative development cost plummeted, content review times shortened and our publication frequencies increased dramatically. Since our visitors were self-selected, blog post relevance was also directly measureable. Even with this enhanced flexibility, however, the one obvious shortfall was distribution. Without an established readership or broad web presence our industry impact was minimal. That’s when we turned to Ulitizer.

We first linked up with Ulitzer through an author site. With Really Simple Syndication (RSS), blog post were automatically published on selected Ulitzer topic sites. This single move increase blog post readership from ~150 per week to over 150 per day!! These rapid results emboldened us to tackle the editorship of a couple of topics. This move doubled our readership yet again! With these two simple moves, we quickly addressed our distribution shortfall while maintaining high flexibility and a low budgetary burn rate. Recently, we’ve extended our foray into new media by “tweeting” links to our newest blog post and Ulitzer articles. Although detailed topic statistic are not routinely made available by Uliizer, they have told me that our two topics have a combined 1.2M views per month, 80,000 of which are from unique visitors.

In the six months we’ve been using Ulitzer, the platform has definitely demonstrated its value in the delivery of true publishing synergy with new media. Through it, we have built an effective, responsive and fiscally conservative customer outreach program. Industry thought leadership, as measured by article readership, has exceeded all expectations. We look forward to future enhancements and will certainly leverage the many other related offerings.

Follow me at https://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson

G C Network

2 Comments

  1. Sam Johnston on September 27, 2009 at 2:53 am

    You speak very highly of Ulitzer so I assume you are not aware of their mistreatment of others in the cloud computing community?

    Sam



  2. Kevin L. Jackson on September 27, 2009 at 4:13 pm

    As with many corporate organizations, I've heard both good and bad about Ulitzer. Not having first hand knowledge of any mistreatment, I started using the service with a great deal of skepticism and caution. To date, I and those to whom I've recommended the service, have been well served. I continue, however, to reserve the right to change my opinion at any time.