Our MyST Blogsite generates highly qualified leads compared to other venues of online lead generation. One of the primary reasons is we have a trust factor, which we built (and continue to build) by providing dependable and accurate information through the blogsite. As a result, actions are more meaningful for business and the customer."
While MyST Topic Cloud™ and services like TagCloud begin with a similar user interface element (i.e., weighted keywords presented as a "cloud"), there are many functional differences. Here are a few of them:
MyST Topic Cloud™ uses a rich set of content meta data including human-authored keywords and key phrases, machine generated keywords, create/modify timestamps, author identities, etc. TagClouds use only machine generated keywords.
MyST Topic Cloud™ supports the concept of "untagged" content, making it easy to discover content that is not easily identified (through traditional search tools) . This is particularly useful for authors and content managers. TagClouds do not support this concept.
MyST Topic Cloud™ present a multifaceted UI—cloud views, tag taxonomy views, and tagged content views—to help you discover and navigate between related subject matter. This becomes increasingly valuable as the amount of content grows. TagCloud presents a single-level UI—there is one cloud and each tag in the cloud tag leads to a traditional search result.
MyST Topic Cloud™ supports random search functionality with advanced options such as regular expression pattern matching and topic type filtering (e.g., search author names, modification dates, etc.) TagClouds do not support random search functionality or discoverability based on types of tags.
MyST Topic Cloud™ honors the underlying MySmartChannels permissions model, allowing both secure and public presentation. Each users sees only content for which they have appropriate permissions. TagClouds do no have an underlying permissions model and are based on public content.
MyST Topic Clouds™ are "mergable" — Multiple MyST Topic Clouds can be merged to form larger, more comprehensive clouds that map a collection of multiple blogsites and/or other content sources. The underlying topic mapping technology uses each cloud's taxonomy to guide the merge process. TagCloud does not support merging.
MyST Topic Clouds™ can be downsized — Every "topic" in the Topic Cloud is available as a sub-cloud. This offeres greater discovery options as users navigate from abstract topics to less abstract topis. Tag clouds offer no such UI agility.
MyST Topic Cloud™ includes an integrated topic server that supports "tag" URLs (similar to services such as Technorati, del.icio.us, etc.). The topic server is branded to your blogsite domain.
I spoke with a group of bloggers in Phoenix recently. What I found is that very few had any business from their blogs despite a lot of effort. I have 5 closings and 7 active buyers directly from [our MyST blogsite] in 2008. I know because I ask. One person told me they have been reading my blog for almost a year before they called me to buy a property."
