NewsGator and Edelman Create New Community & Advertising Solution

This morning NewsGator and Edelman (the world's largest independent PR firm) announced Hosted Conversations, a next-generation community and advertising platform. The solution includes two components, topic-based communities that allow companies to sponsor moderated conversations on topics that relevant to their brands, and dynamic conversational advertising through embedded community content residing within an ad.

Hosted Conversations, which is part of the NewsGator Private Label Platform, because it's yet another example of how social media content such as RSS is really changing the way that companies interact with customers.

With Hosted Conversations, sponsor buy topical ads that function as embedded widgets on a site, branded with their product's logo and messaging.  The content is hand-picked from news sites, blogs and other sources and managed by Edelman employees, who are experts in that area. Visitors can then become part of the discussion by commenting on the posts or even publishing their own posts on a separate blog. This provides a much richer, more valuable, advertising solution than traditional static ads and encourages the use of communities. Our technology is running in the back-end, but the consumer doesn't need to remotely understand RSS to use it. Edelman's Steve Rubel has a great description of this on his blog.

As Rick Murray, president of Edelman's me2revolution global media lab notes in a ClickZ article, "We're taking something consumers are already interested in, taking quality content from that and putting it in one place for advertisers to sponsor it," He adds, "This is an ad designed as a call-to-action to entice people to partake in a conversation."

We have a screenshot below and you can also learn more by reading some great stories from PR Week, DM News, GigaOm and MediaPost.

Technorati Tags: Conversational Advertising, Edelman, Hosted Conversations, Newsgator

NewsGator Podcasts Now iPod Ready

We have been recording podcasts about the growing popularity of RSS and the NewsGator platform over the last year. Now you can find those podcasts on iTunes to download and listen to at your leisure on your iPod. Up on the site right now are discussions with NewsGator founder Greg Reinacker, Brad Feld, a NewsGator power user whose Mobius Venture Capital invested in NewsGator and other RSS companies, and Nick Bradbury, founder and architect of the popular FeedDemon desktop reader.

Vice President of Production Karyn German talks about agile development in creating our products, General Manager for Private Label Walker Fenton explains the ever-evolving media world, and Go! guru Kevin Cawley discusses our mobile product's latest features.

See the full list of podcasts on our website or to listen to a podcast click here. If you use iTunes, click here to download. Subscribe to the feed and you won't miss our upcoming podcasts in 2007!

New Display Options in NewsGator Online

We've added some new functionality to NewsGator Online, allowing users to choose the way they view their articles. We now offer a choice of Headlines, Summaries (new) and Full Posts views. The aim of these new views is to enable you to quickly look through large numbers of posts without having to scroll for hours  This should allow you too read more relevant information, and easily skip posts that don't interest you. The reader defaults to the Summaries view. To toggle between the different views, click on the "Display Options" menu at the top of the screen. (See graphic below for more details).

Don’t Miss NewsGator’s Holiday Discount!

We are already knee-deep in the holiday spirit here at NewsGator. Our floor is littered with decorations (one office had so much glitter that it finally had to be evacuated), and a ten-foot snowman breathing hot air towers over our Enterprise support team just across the hall (no circuits have blown yet).

In keeping with the spirit, we are offering a holiday deal on our products. To take advantage, all you have to do is enter the promo code NGHoliday in the shopping cart, and you’ll get $10 off any NewsGator product, including the new version of FeedDemon and NewsGator Go for Windows Mobile, throughout the month of December. Buy two and you get $20 off.

Look for our nifty holiday mascot (some call it a penguin – I say it's a duck), or the red HAPPY HOLIDAYS on the NewsGator homepage to take advantage of this offer. NewsGator products make great stocking stuffers. Happy holidays!