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Blogs as Viral Marketing: TrackBack & Pingback
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| Categories: Information Mangement, Business Perspective, Business Life Blogs can be a great form of viral marketing. Why? The functions in web logs that separate them from a bulletin board or discussion forum and allow blogs to intermesh. Specifically, I'm referring to TrackBacks and Pingbacks. What are these functions, how do they work, and why do they allow blogs to be non-intrusive viral marketing tools?
Follow up:
TrackBack is an open specification, first released in August 2002. It is a protocol that can be easily implemented in any web logging tool. The TrackBack ping (a machine-to-machine messaging system between webservers) allows discussion threads to be connected between web logs. One example of this would be a TrackBack notifying one webserver when a response or comment to a post in a blog on that webserver has been posted in another blog on another (or the same) webserver. Another example is where an aggregation site collects posts on a single topic, such as reviews or announcements about a product or service, and notify those people who are interested in that item.
You can learn more about TrackBack from "TrackBack Explanation" by Mena and Ben Trott.
Pingback is simlar in concept (linking blogs) but different from TrackBack. From the PingBack 1.0 specification abstract: "Pingback is a method for web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. Typically, web publishing software will automatically inform the relevent parties on behalf of the user, allowing for the possibility of automatically creating links to referring documents." A pingback is tranparent to the authors of a blog (bloggers), depending on how the protocol has been implemented. Essentially, the web logging software allows any link in a post to pingback (notify) the webserver and web logging software supporting the original post, allowing the original post to create a link to the referring post.
This makes for a far better form of viral marketing than email, especially as it is unlikely to be considered spam. After all, the person receiving/reading a blog that is linked through TrackBack or Pingback to the original blog, is already interested in the product, service or subject matter. They have chosen to read more. The intermeshing of related blogs can expand exponentially throughout the blogosphere. This radically expands the number of people who know about you, your expertise, your product or service. Explosive viral marketing!
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