It has been awhile since I have written about an area that Robin Good called newsmastering when he wrote
his series of seminal posts on the topic several years ago. Back then I covered KipCast, a newsmastering technology company, and still use its MySyndicaat solution on this blog to publish a news stream (the one I have in place now finds and publishes articles that mention Twitter and PR). See my post Newsmaster Flash for additional details on newsmastering)
It is an important topic, and one that I had planned on revisiting. So, my ears perked up when the name HiveFire was mentioned in a client meeting recently, within the context of blogging platforms that make it easy to launch and maintain content-rich sites via built-in newsmastering capabilities.
Keeping your blog fresh and interesting takes a serious commitment and hard work. Solutions such as HiveFire's alleviate some of that pressure by making it easier to surround your posts with relevant news and topics. They can make your site more dynamic, interesting, and increase its appeal as an info rich destination.
So I went to the Web site and could not find any way to kick the tires of the service unaided, but did put in an inquiry, which resulted in a prompt response, and a demo which I took in earlier this week.
The demo was indeed impressive - it showed me how you can surround your posts with content from a variety of sources and easily create and maintain news sites or company blogs. Having so much related content does a number of things: it boosts SEO for your site, and takes the pressure off of making your posts the sole focus of the site.
This functionality comes at a price, and it is more expensive to use HiveFire than, say, TypePad. But time is money, and it seems that HiveFire can reduce the time commitment needed to keep your site humming with fresh and relevant content.
Regarding the time commitment required, Taariq Lewis, the executive who demonstrated HiveFire said:
We've studied our customer usage of HiveFire and on average, customers spend 20 minutes, a day, using HiveFire to impact their industries and their customers.
That time does include education about current industry issues and discovery of new blog topics. Our customers do tell us that HiveFire makes them and their organizations smart about what's happening in their industries. As such, it's easier to blog, write, and craft relevant marketing messages from their HiveFire usage.
Here is an example of a site that uses HiveFire: Green Data Center News (see the screen shot above).
In addition, the platform gives you a way to build a list of email subscribers and keep in touch with newsletters. I definitely think HiveFire is worth checking out.
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