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What services does GreenMonk offer?

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Tom Raftery speaking at Web 2.0 Expo

A couple of people have been asking me recently what services GreenMonk offers, so I thought it might be a good idea to put some of them down in a blog post so Google knows what they are and so I can link to them when anyone asks in the future.

Advisory Services:

GreenMonk helps client companies with advice on

  • Message testing- helping to bulletproof marketing campaigns, before launch activities.
  • Product strategy and advisory – we can suggest enhancement and product directions based on trends in business sustainability.
  • We will also suggest alliances or partnerships that can enhance your product offerings or increase distribution channels and sales.
  • We will also undertake to ensure executives are aware of significant industry news, trends and events that will impact current and planned business models.

Video Services

Video is a medium which is becoming ever more popular, particularly in the post-pc age. GreenMonk videos are kept brief and to-the-point to maximise impact and reach. Also, to increase find-ability, GreenMonk TV videos are transcribed and the text is published alongside the video.

The GreenMonk TV YouTube channel, with over 150 uploaded videos and in excess of 78,000 views, drives traffic to GreenMonk’s clients. Clients are free to use video purchased in any format/media on any web property, or even offline.

GreenMonk –

  • Helps with content creation for marketing/messaging purposes
  • Showcases executive thought leadership on niche/emerging topics
  • Highlights customer success stories using trusted third party, customer interviews and
  • Documents new products/services

Blog Based Research:

One of GreenMonk’s primary publishing vehicles is the GreenMonk blog. Blog content benefits customers in the following ways:

  • The analysis can be more timely than traditional analyst reports
  • The analysis is freely available to anyone; line of business, IT staff, students, etc. at no cost
  • The analysis is given high ranking by Google, making it easily discoverable
  • The analysis can be further supplemented by comments and contributions from parties external to GreenMonk, thus enhancing its value
  • The two way nature of blogs allows for RedMonk to serve as an early warning system for potential issues with products and services and
  • The blog can also be used to re-publish video and podcasts, recorded separately furthering their reach

Twitter Based Research:

GreenMonk makes extensive use of Twitter as a research tool as well. Twitter benefits our clients in the following ways:

  • Twitter posts are immediate so it is possible to see/track stories rapidly
  • Breadth of accounts we follow means there is unlikely to be a related story or trend we are unaware of
  • Our extensive followership and many years experience of the Twitter platform means we can disperse a message quickly and effectively
  • Twitter can be used as a testing ground for messaging as well as a driver of traffic to web resources
  • The conversational nature of Twitter means that posts are often commented on (replied to) adding to their value and
  • Twitter posts are freely available to anyone; line of business, IT staff, students, etc. at no cost

Consulting Services:

GreenMonk analysts will be available to answer questions concerning competitive positioning, understanding the wider market context and providing dedicated research and information regarding emerging trends and competition.

These analyst-hours can also be applied to custom research projects, advisory and speaking engagements.

Press Availability:

GreenMonk will take the time required to understand your products, announcements, and initiatives. When questioned by members of the media, we will be ready with accurate and up-to- date information on your products, announcements and initiatives.

Image credit Tom Raftery

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Blogging for social sustainability – the why’s and how’s

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WordPress.com blog's Add New Post Screen

This is another blog post cross-posted from my Social Sustainability blog

In my first post on Social Sustainability, where I talked about the importance of sharing, I mentioned that I had been thinking of writing a post about blogging – well, here it is!

I know this will be the proverbial “teaching granny to suck eggs” posting but seeing as blogs are such a fundamental tool in your social media armoury, I couldn’t leave them unaddressed. In fact, there are so many things to write about blogs and blogging that I can see many more posts on the topic in my future. This brings me to a question – what aspect of blogging would you like me to write about next?

I’m going to start off though with a quick ‘why blog’ and then a discussion of whether to go for a hosted or a self-hosted blog (and the differences between the two).

I won’t spend too much time on the ‘why blog’ question – I’m assuming if you are reading this it is because you are interested in Social Sustainability – if that is the case, then you probably already know that the primary tool of social media is a blog. I wrote a bunch of posts a few years ago on the advantages of blogging for a business – here’s one to have a firkle through if you are still not convinced (read down through the comments as well to get full value).

On the question of whether to go for a hosted or self-hosted blog, I’m not going to make a recommendation either way – rather, I’ll list their relative advantages and let you decide which is more appropriate for you:

Hosted blogs (like WordPress.com which this blog runs on, and Blogger.com) advantages:

  • Speed – a hosted blog can be setup in a matter of seconds
  • Reliability – hosted blogs are very rarely offline (the last time WordPress.com had an outage was in June 2010)
  • Simplicity – hosted blog providers generally look after hosting, updating, security, spam and malware protection
  • Branding – hosted blogs now allow you to brand your blog with your own domain name (e.g. no longer tomraftery.wordpress.com, now simply tomraftery.com) and
  • Price – most hosted blog platforms are free

On the other hand Self-hosted blogs (such as GreenMonk.net)have these advantages:

  • Flexibility – With your self-hosted blog you can extend the functionality of the blog with themes and plug-ins
  • Ad free – most hosted blogs will display ads in your blog – with self-hosted, you can go Ad-free, or roll out Ads and benefit from the revenue yourself!
  • Cheap – although you have to pay for the hosting – there are free blog platforms (such as WordPress.org) you can download to run your blog and
  • Security – if you can control the country and hoster your blog is hosted with, you run far less risk of falling foul of spurious (or otherwise) take-down notices

One possible suggestion, if you are still undecided, is to start off with a hosted blog. If, after a while, you find the limitations of your hosted blog too frustrating, you can always export all your blog posts and comments and import them into a self-hosted one and go from there.

Either way, happy blogging.

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Photo credit Tom Raftery