My name is Chris Baggott & I'm CEO of Compendium Blogware. 
Can I buy stock in eMarketer? Every day they send me this great email with relevant content to my business....and yours.
For example, I had a blog in my email marketing days called "Email Marketing Best Practices" and I think I still win that search most of the time today.
There are some important lessons for the travel industry to be found in this eMarketer graph on consumers attitude towards travel. These trends present interesting opportunity for those who choose to embrace them. 
Bobby Stark the President of Parthenon Publishing in Nashville posted the other day about a talk Southwests Paula Berg gave in October. I pulled this key insight from his comments:
Seth's Blog pointed me to some great data out this week from Jack Loechner of MediaPost. Read the story, but here is the punchline in the very first paragraph:
.....Still, social media sites are only sending a tiny fraction of traffic. An earlier Chitika Study concluded that “the overwhelming dominance of search engines is facing little, if any, threat from social networks.”
The company looked at the top sites sending traffic to the publishers in its network and found that Google alone accounted for 76.13% of referrals.
Taken together, search engines made almost 98% of all referrals, while social networking sites made up just 0.55%.
What else can I add? Most Corporate blogging traffic doesn't come from repeat 'readers' it comes from first time visitors. And most of those first time visitors come from search.
Seth had a great post the other day talking about the goal of High School being basically to draw as much attention to yourself as possible. 
Represented in this graph which show that the average searches per person is increasing dramatically year over year.
Marketers....Search Marketing is still the biggest opportunity to impact your business.
For all the talk about competition from the likes of Twitter and Facebook, people are searching
more than ever.
More then a threat to the social networks however, this should be worrisome to traditional web
site marketing. The site is quickly becoming an obsolete notion in the age where most of
your traffic is coming from searchers.
(just thought of my next blog post) My general point is that the web is becoming On-Demand.
The Searcher expects instant gratification. It's a world where they tell you what they want in any
of thousands of different ways and you only have to show up. No domain, no URL to remember,
little branding....
This is why Blog Marketing is growing so rapidly. As the web moves beyond the 'site' it's moving
towards specifically targeted pages....full of human relevant content to satisfy the searchers and
build real relationships.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Generating Unique Content from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
Not let's dissect what Rand Fishkin is saying here and how it relates to Search Marketing via Business Blog Software...
The Need For Unique Content....the search engines want new content because that makes the searchers happier. At the end of the day, the more fresh content, the better.
I love how he talks about the search engines desire for fairness. He says with linking there is a problem of "only the rich get richer" and you need to counter that by showing a lot of "diversity in the results." This is exactly why every organization should be doing what Gartner advised and starting a widespread Corporate Blogging program.
Let's start with what Rand calls Editorial Content. Seth Godin calls these stories. At Compendium Blogware, we advocate freeing all of your employees to blog. Let them tell the stories of the company, the customers, the problems they solve and the people they help. Even developers or guys on the loading dock can be potentially valuable content providers. The video talks about how Editorial Content is hard to scale, but don't overlook your fellow employees.
He talks about Machine Generated Content as well. Of course any content can feed into your blogs and should, so I'm not going to talk too much about that here.
Finally, Rand discusses User Generated Content. What he misses is how easy it is to get UGC if you only ask. Rand talks about building community etc... but the simplest and most reliable way to get User Generated Content is to use your email program to simply ask.
I've seen many successful programs that trigger an email after an experience (a sale) "Hey how do you like your new xxxxxx?" "We have this blog and would love to feature your story...visit this link and tell us all about it.." (see example here....)
Something that simple can generate literally hundreds if not thousands of user submissions. You just have to make it easy (something automated email does) Check out this example:
2nd Generation Blog Software makes this all pretty easy. Give it a try and see for yourself.
I came accross a post by Chris Brogan that is about a year old. Still relevant LOL. He's reviewing a book called: Branding only works on Cattle and makes this point:
“Search is a larger, behavioral reality that impacts corporate strategy.”
Baskin rightly points out that marketing strategies that don’t include a heavy element of search won’t work well for us. One of the reasons that I advocate content marketing, such as writing a compelling group blog, is that it’s an opportunity to build search equity. Writing about things that people might search for is a great way to find some new people at your door who might want a look at your product.
Exactly. Although the world has evolved beyond the Group Blog to more widespread employee blogging, Blog Marketing is moving mainstream as a corporate marketing strategy for the simple reason that you can drive very high ROI by winning search and solving problems for your customers.
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Hosted by Richard Cunningham, VP Marketing of Right On Interactive and Chris Baggott Co-founder, CEO of Compendium Blogware. Thursday, December 3rd 2009.
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