AMA Launches More Blogs
04/05/2006
American Marketing Association (AMA) is on the blog band wagon. AMA is no stranger to blogging - after all they did launch a blog in 2005 to support the Hot Topic Workshop Blogs: Marketing Beyond the Website. Now AMA is launching a series of blogs tied to its publications: Marketing News, Marketing Management and the Journal of Marketing.
Sidebar: In full blog disclosure style I was the chair of the Hot Topic Workshop.
I was curious to find out: Why blogs from only publications? Why not members? Why not staff? So I asked the James Heckman, Director Internet Communications, to fill me in on the back-story. Here's our email conversation.
Diva:
James, why an AMA blog related to AMA's publications versus a corporate AMA blog about the organization or one authored by your members?
AMA/James:
That actually is in the works. This idea started with the AMA Publications and has expanded from there, on paper, if not yet in practice. We produce 8 magazines and journals. These publications go out to the top marketers in the country, but that audience as yet has been an untapped resource. We produce magazines, publish them and send them out into the world to be read...and that has been the end of the process.
We're trying to find ways to tap the expertise of our members. Collectively, you know more about marketing than we ever could. The blogs serve as a discussion forum that will allow our audience to join the conversation. Maybe one of the articles in Marketing Management missed a point ... maybe an additional example would strengthen the case made in one of the columns..etc.
It's a baby step, but one that we're due to take.
Diva:
So tell me about the blog authors.
AMA/James:
For Marketing News and Marketing Management, it's Lisa Keefe and Linda Zid, the editors of those magazines (respectively). The discussion tends to follow one or two of the major stories in that issue.
For the Journal of Marketing, we're going to have a discussion blog for each of the papers hosted by one of the authors. We expect that this will be an opportunity for the authors to expand on and debate their ideas with peers. Particularly for academics, the entire reason for conducting research and publishing in academic journals is to get a discussion started. The discussion blogs is another tool from AMA that will help them accomplish that goal.
We are planning to create a number of ongoing discussion nodes that we're calling Marketing Soapbox that will work on a similar idea. It will group content on a particular topic, say RSS feeds, into one location on the site. Some of that content will be audience generated, some will come from other sources. Content can be anything from a written article to a podcast or Webcast. Each Soapbox will be anchored by a discussion blog dedicated to that topic hosted by a volunteer (typically, one of the content contributors within the Soapbox).
Diva:
I noticed that there is not an RSS feed. Do you intend to include that?
AMA/James:
We do. We have plans to work with RSS feeds on various AMA newsletters, as well as, create ones tied to the AMA Publication discussion blogs and the Marketing Soapbox sections.
Diva: The American Marketing Association is a marketing association. What plans do you have to promote the blogs and integrate into AMA's marketing strategies?
AMA/James:
The blogs we have now are really a baby step toward making the site more of a Web 2.0 experience. We have some promotion in place - within the magazines, etc. - but the primary way we're looking to promote this is to walk the walk. We will be looking to blogs as a potential content providers - say a blog author has an interesting idea, that person can produce something for a new Marketing Soapbox, or we could pull in an RSS feed of his blog, etc.
Toward that end, I've started a blog of my own focused on exploring some of these audience generated content ideas. We'll see where it goes.
Diva:
Thanks James. One more for the road...what's your take on biz/marketing blogs?
AMA/James:
It took me a long time to understand blogs. I come from a journalism background and all this blog activity just seemed so...unprofessional. It turns out that the blogosphere IS the ultimate editor and fact checker. The expert is not someone we call for a quote in an article; the expert is the person running a marketing department every day, who is sharing ideas with peers on a blog. Some of the smartest people in the marketing world are part of our membership, and it's a long past time we gave them a forum to share ideas.
AMA Blogs
Marketing News
Marketing Management
Journal of Marketing - June 2006
Marketing Soapbox - in development
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