Corporate blogging software

Acquisition vs Amplification

Tuesday, February 9, 2010 by Brian Millis

Often times I find myself in conversations about the benefits of social media marketing versus the search marketing benefits of corporate blogging. I do my best to keep up with the opinions of social media experts who are far more knowledgeable than I am. And today, I thought it would be helpful to highlight the insights of Doug Karr.

My favorite part is the quote he makes at the end:

"I’ve said before that social media is an amplifier for businesses online. Facebook is a big amplifier!"

That is a much more eloquent way of echoing my beliefs about the benefits of a business blogging versus the benefits of social medias like Facebook and Twitter. The corporate blog can be the content platform where an organization pushes out information, insights, and invitation to do business. Therefore, this content becomes an acquisition tool by driving greater organic visibility on the search engine. As Doug mentions in his post, he uses search engines far more than social networks when he has an intent to buy. Humanizing an organization through corporate blogging and leveraging that content as a search acquisition method is the true value of corporate blogging.

However, that does not discount the statistics that Doug highlights and the power of social networking. Those spaces can dramatically amplify online business. I think it is especially powerful when a company connects their quality blog content to these social spaces. This method allows organizations to amplify the message they find to be most important. If and when that content gets re-tweeted or shared among networks, it has viral potential and can dramatically impact the overall online marketing.

My opinion is that corporate blogging is an acquisition tool, while social media marketing is amplification tool (thanks Doug!). Compendium can help businesses connect and exploit these two benefits with our easy to use blog software. Call me at 317-777-6254 if you'd like to see a demo of the platform in action.

Humanizing your Marketing

Monday, February 8, 2010 by Ford McAlexander

I found another article to support my previous post about the importance of creating a

connection with your potential customers and people on the internet. The article is from iMediaConnection about tips for better corporate blogging. You can find the original article here. The purpose of the article is that a corporate blog is not a traditional news publication and you are not a journalist. It's about creating the blogging connection with the potential customer world by making a human connection.

The way to help your humanized blog get found is to use important keywords that people are looking for and by linking yourself to other places of interest. Corporate bloggers need to realize that their blog can't be a newsletter or just inside information that outsiders can't understand. Compendium Blogware helps you blog for business by utilizing important keywords into a blog that connects to your potential clients by making your marketing efforts more humanized. Who would have ever thought online marketing could do that?!

Congratulations to Debbie Weil

Monday, February 8, 2010 by Chris Baggott

I wanted to point out with pride that Lee Oden named my friend and collegue Debbie Weil one of the top 25 women that rock social media.

Debbie Weil @debbieweil – Debbie “wrote the book” on corporate blogging (The Corporate Blogging Book) when most online marketing and communications professionals were still trying to figure out what a blog was. She runs a successful corporate blogging and social media consulting practice, works as a strategic advisor for Compendium software and continues to share her insights via blog and public speaking.

Debbie is a strategic advisor to us here at Compendium and I'm thrilled for her to be recognized in this great company.

Blogging Tip Guru Alert!

Monday, February 8, 2010 by Jason Harvoth

As I scour the web this weekend looking for a things to keep my children occupied or to find the latest line on the Colts v. Saints game, I noticed many websites that include corporate blogging. Many of these companies look to be blogging just to blog; without a true purpose. As a sales professional I'm always looking for ways to make companies money & I have a suggestion. Many companies need to incorporate a deep and wide strategy with their blogging strategy. The free software that is available only allows the content to go deep with their blog content. Compendium allows the content to be delivered deep and wide across the web; attracting more visitors (shoppers) to your site to be found.

Google's ad below shows you just how complex and logical a searcher's mind can be. Use Compendium to take advantage of these organic results today.

Chris Baggott and Stephan Spencer will conduct a webinar on February 9th, 2010. You do not want to miss the blogging tips and search marketing content covered in this session.

Be sure to sign up for the FREE webinar.

Blogging is for SEO, Not Old People

Saturday, February 6, 2010 by Frank Dale

I read an article today in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled “Blogging is for old people, Pew report finds.” The title references the author’s conclusion after looking at Pew’s study of the millennial generation’s internet usage patterns. If I ran a consumer-to-consumer blogging service, I might be concerned. If we are talking about B-to-B or B-to-C blogging, the Pew study data does not apply.

Blogging is still very much about communication. It is just not primarily focused on C-to-C communication anymore. Blogging is now in its third generation. We have moved past blogs dedicated to cats and into an era of blogging for customer acquisition.

Business blogging works, because it is an easy way to provide relevant content that search engines love. Search engine providers like Google and Microsoft need to provide relevant results to keep searchers happy and loyal. Blogs are particularly good at providing relevant content, because blog content is topical and easy to update. It’s a great match, because the incentives are aligned for the search engine provider and the blogger. Bloggers provide topical content that search engines use to keep searchers happy. Search engines provide bloggers with prospective customers already interested in the product or service the blogger provides. We know this because the searcher specifically entered keywords corresponding to the topic that interested them. You don’t type “business blogging software” into a search box for fun. At least I don’t. You search based on your interests or needs.

Millennials may not blog, but they will certainly read blogs. We trust search engines because they help us solve problems. When you use a search engine to solve a problem, you are looking for a relevant, credible answer. If the best solution to your problem is found on a blog, you are going to visit that blog not a random twitter page. At Compendium we know this is true, because we use our own corporate blogging software to acquire customers. If you would like to learn more about blogging for search engine optimization, you can download our free whitepaper on Third Generation Blogging.

Business Blogs Are Highly Targeted Landing Pages

Friday, February 5, 2010 by Frank Dale

When I meet people they often ask me where I work. I could say “I work at a high-growth, SaaS start-up that serves online marketers and social media experts.” If they are still interested, I could tell them more about our corporate blogging platform for search engine optimization and social media. Generally unless the person is a marketer or a tech entrepreneur that shares my passion for both topics…we are going to end up talking about something else.

Those interactions got me to think about the way we position Compendium. This is a fantastic company with an innovative product. We turn the marketers that use our product into stars. How can someone not be interested in what we do? As an operations person that is interested in efficiency (and a former business development guy), I had to find a better message. After much thought and reflection…actually probably only two minutes. I came up with something that I think this is a good start:

• Compendium clients use our software to create lots and lots of highly targeted, search optimized web pages

At a high-level that is what we do. We help our clients get found in organic search and communicate to potential customers that are already interested in what our clients do. That last piece is the important part. We connect our clients with people that are already interested in what they do. That makes Compendium one of the best acquisition marketing solutions on the planet. For now, that is going to be my answer to the usual “so what do you do” question. If you want to learn how Compendium can help you, we are happy to answer questions and provide some initial coaching. This whitepaper on the value of Third Generation Business Blogging is a great start.

Raising the Bar: Business Blogging Software

Thursday, February 4, 2010 by Brittan Bright

Being a sales professional and new to Compendium, I've had to wrap my mind around my personal perception of blogging. I had never fully understood it's function as a business tool. It's cool, it's trendy, it has potential to engage our current clients, but who cares? I, like many of you, didn't get the point because I couldn't see any measurable way that corporate blogs drive business, a.k.a SHOW ME THE MONEY!

I also had to overcome my perfectionist (blog)writer's block caused by my B.A. in English. Thankfully, my competitive sales nature trumps the literary standards that stood in the way of my understanding the actual function of a business blog: new client acquisition.

I am not here to write a book, I 'm here to win your business. What company, sales pro, or marketer, is not trying to do the very same thing?

Being open to a new perspective, a new idea, service, or tool, isn't that where innovation comes from? Don't we all want to be, or be part of, or believe in, "the next best thing"? Isn't that what any business needs their potential client's to do?

Seth Godin writes, "You can raise the bar or you can wait for others to raise it, but it's getting raised regardless."

Compendium is raising the bar, let us show you how. Be as open to new ideas as you would like your potential customers to be. Think of all the people out there with a problem that you have the expertise, product, or service to solve. Now think about how you got to my blog and consider giving us a shot.

How do you Measure Your Business Blogs' Success?

Wednesday, February 3, 2010 by Heather Benfield

The beauty about working at Compendium is that not all of our clients have the same goals and objectives, but we are still able to provide a solution to whatever their business blogging need may be.

For example, I was writing a case study today about a successful client of ours, Indium Corporation, and while I was gathering information about what makes their corporate blogging program so great, I noticed there was no ROI information available.

Errrr...uh oh. What do I do now? WELL...after talking to the company's Client Succes Manager, Jess Wehner, she said that Indium measures their blogging success on organic search exposure and online lead generation. So I went back to gather more information and realized they are rocking it out!

755% increase in online presence and 83% increase in online lead generation!

Check out what else they're rocking out on by reading the success story below:

Indium Corporation develops and manufactures electronics assembly materials, but that’s not the only thing they developed before meeting Compendium Blogware. Indium had 9 blogs in operation with 12 contributing authors however; blog scalability, organic search exposure and lead generation were all missing from their blogging success equation.

Indium chose to integrate their old content into Compendium’s corporate blogging platform in order to manage and organize content in one area as well as increase their number of blogs from 9 to 68. This solution allowed the company to increase organic search exposure without increasing resources.

After transitioning to Compendium’s blogging software, in less than a week the company increased their online presence by 755%. Within the first four months, 30% of Indium’s keyword blogs were ranking in the top 10 Google search results and 65% ranking in the top 50. This boost in organic search exposure directly resulted in an 83% increase in online lead generation.

To learn more about Compendium Blogware's corporate blogging platform, sign up for a free, 20 minute online demo!

I wish I was Jake Greenbaum!

Wednesday, February 3, 2010 by Chris Baggott

So...what does this have to do with Blogging Best Practices? Well not a whole lot.

Let me take that back. A big part of using Compendium as a content management system is the idea of humanization. What makes blogging and other social media such great tools for business is the ability to act like human beings instead of faceless Brands or Institutions.

So here is the human Chris Baggott green with envy because young Jake Greenbaum gets to spend this winter in Chile paddling his a-- off and running amazing waterfalls!

So now you know something more about me :-) I am one jealous Corporate Blogger!

IR Update in Chile from stephen forster on Vimeo.

Is social media and search marketing important? You tell me

Wednesday, February 3, 2010 by Brian Millis

The video below blew my mind! Not only are the statistics on social media incredible, but the statements made about what searchers care about rings true to so many businesses out there. Check out min. marker 2:20 and beyond if you are short on time. If you are a business and after watching this video, still think that search marketing, blog content, and user generated referrals or stories don't impact you're bottom line, you're crazy!

With that video fresh in your mind, I would encourage you to email me and set up a time to see how our corporate blogging platform acts as a content management system for your blogging. Compendium bridges the disconnect between great, human-to-human marketing and the vast interactive social world who may be looking for your brand.

Find New Kids on the BLOGk...

Tuesday, February 2, 2010 by Jason Harvoth

If you are looking to acquire top talent to your organization, how do you do it? You search for that ideal candidate who can type 1,000 words per minute or can solve world peace...yesterday. The key is that you search. Or, you have someone search for you.

How can your company create a more content-rich experience for job seekers? Many companies try to tell their story through About or History sections of their websites, while the truth behind the "stories" come from your current employees.

Effective, corporate blog software empowers those closest to the product (your company) to give their opinions directly to a captive audience (job seekers).

Compendium's affordable blogging software will help you attract and retain top talent. Schedule a demonstration of this game changing organizational blog software by clicking on this button.

Another Compendium Client Achieves Rockstar Status!

Tuesday, February 2, 2010 by Heather Benfield

One of the best parts about my job is writing and sharing client success stories! I love spreading the word that another company was able to become a Search Marketing Rockstar by using Compendium's corporate blogging software!

I won't keep you waiting any longer...here's the story:

Aprilaire manufactures whole-house solution products for indoor air quality problems. But, this organization had a problem of their own… reaching fresh online prospects on a daily basis.

The company sought a solution to help them achieve two impactful goals: to continuously increase unique traffic from organic search and locate new prospects online. Aprilaire selected Compendium’s software which helps target hundreds of pertinent searched keywords through blogging, to accomplish and surpass their initiatives.

So, how’d they do against their goals? By January 2010, the company experienced a 1,000% increase in unique visits to the blog (80% resulting from organic search). In addition 96% of all visits were brand new prospects, just waiting to be turned into opportunities!

Congratulations, Aprilaire! Keep up the good work!

Read how other Compendium Clients achieved Rockstar Status:

Fairytale Brownies
Widen Enterprises
Virginia State Parks, Monon Coffee Company and Avectra

Don't be Afraid to Ask Questions

Tuesday, February 2, 2010 by Ford McAlexander

One of the biggest trends I have seen since working at Compendium Blogware is that it seems that people are confused on exactly what we do here. Compendium Blogware offers the only corporate blogging software as a service to companies. However, even though that statement makes a lot of sense to my 22 year old knowledge, I know it doesn't necessarily make sense to people who haven't grown up with computers.

For instance, I believe my father has asked me over seven times in the last two weeks what I exactly do as the marketing intern at Compendium. I always say the same answer but it still seems to not make sense. If you are confused on what blogging can do for your busniess, please check out a demo or read some of our Whitepapers. Don't be afraid to click on a few links and find out some more information or talk to one of our blogging experts so you can clear up your questions!

Blogging to Win

Monday, February 1, 2010 by Ford McAlexander

Since I'm an Indiana native, I admit that I'm an absolutely ridiculous college basketball fan.

Its kind of our thing for Hoosiers and one of my habits is to always check the rankings of my teams, Indiana and Butler University. It's kind of interesting to see how important rankings are to people and how rankings also affect someone's business.

Compendium Blogware utilizes ranking software, that I check every week by the way, to see how our clients are doing and to help them continuously increase their ranking. Clearly, the higher your ranking, the more leads you will generate and the more business you can close on.

If you imagine your business world as the March Madness tournament, it's noticeable that the #1 seeds have a much easier chance to win the championship than the #16 seed. Blogging is your scoring play so check out a demo of Compendium's affordable corporate blogging software so you win your business championship this year!

Why you need an Enterprise Social Media Platform

Monday, February 1, 2010 by Chris Baggott

Do you use Corporate Blogging Software? Twitter, Facebook? It's been well reported here and pretty much everywhere else that spending by business on Social Media efforts are exploding. Are you keeping up with the best tools for business? What's shocking is the rapid adoption of free or consumer oriented Social Media tools by business with very little diligence into the very real risks posed by incorporating these tools.

Most hopefully remember the well publicized security breach exposed by Robert Scoble in his blog last September where he reported:

Anyway, this time (hackers) they also put some malicious code on my archive pages. Google sent me an email saying they had removed my blog from its index. That got a whole team to look into how they broke in. Now thanks to TechCrunch and Mashable you know there was a vulnerability in Wordpress which let them break in.

Today ZDNet reported on a new release of the annual Sophos Securtity Threat Report 2010 which outlines the results of their survey sharing the current thoughts on Social Media Security.

Here is a great observation by Sam Diaz, senior editor at ZDNet:

"Here’s something that struck me as interesting: 72 percent of the firms surveyed said they’re concerned that employee behavior on these sites puts their infrastructures and sensitive data at risk. Yet, 49 percent of these firms allow their staff unfettered access to Facebook..."

There is no question that there are amazing opportunities for businesses leveraging social media. But, like all other business software, we have to use the right tools that maximize the rewards, while minimizing the risks. Businesses can't afford the free-for-all that all this openess has bred.

The best blogging software is SaaS based, incorporates workflows for control and compliance and integrates sharing to other social networks.

Save Money by Blogging

Monday, February 1, 2010 by Ford McAlexander

Are you trying to generate more leads for business or increase your businesses exposure? If this is the case, you're like everybody during these economically tough times. You know you need business to make money, but you don't know how to market your company when you have no money and no one to sell it to.

Well luckily, Compendium Blogware offers affordable blogging software that is a software as a service to marketers. It's easy to use blog software that is made for corporate blogging. I hope you know that you don't need to spend thousands of dollars to increase your ability to be found when you can easily maintain a blog that saves you money. Compendium has an interesting Webinar about blogs being your #1 search marketing tool. Just click here. Enjoy and get to blogging soon!

Winning the #1 Spot in Organic Search: The Long Tail Approach

Friday, January 29, 2010 by Heather Benfield

I ran across an interesting Compendium post that said 56% of all keyword queries are now three word phrases or more. Wow.

So, why should corporate bloggers pay attention?

A few reasons. Third Generation Blogging (a term coined by our CEO, Chris Baggott) is all about search. Specifically using blogs to get in front of peoples intent when they type in keywords and phrases into that little box. Using long tail keywords in the titles of your blogs and within the content will not only expand the amount of traffic you reach, but the terms are also much, much easier to win.

Take one of our clients Fairytale Brownies as an example. They’re an eCommerce gourmet brownie business, accomplishing this goal by utilizing Compendium’s blogging software. Employees throughout the organization generate blog content that the Compendium platform automatically organizes according to keywords.

For example, instead of targeting high search volume (and highly competitive) keywords such as “brownies” or “chocolate brownies”, Fairytale focuses their content around lower search volume keywords such as “delivery brownies” and “order brownies.” This strategy allows Fairytale to obtain the coveted #1 spot in organic search when consumers search with keywords such as these.

By having a search marketing strategy that focuses on generating many pages of content housed in blogs, specifically targeting as many long tail keywords as possible, this allows even the smallest business to be successful in organic search without big company resources.

E-marketer says Consumers Demand Engagement

Friday, January 29, 2010 by Brian Millis

I just read this extremely interesting post from E-Marketer thats says:

"Marketers must move from a focus on siloed campaigns to an emphasis on listening to and communicating with consumers across channels.

More than one-half of marketers worldwide reported directing at least “a fair amount” of effort toward integrating their communication strategies to emphasize multichannel consumer engagement."

This is good news for Compendium. Many of our clients use their corporate blog as the content creation platform. We make it easy for them to be strategic with their content and language in order to leverage the blogging and social media strategy as part of their greater search marketing effort. This allows a business to create safe, helpful information for their target audience, and auto populate spaces like Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In. This allows effort and ROI to be easily managed, measured, and communicated.

So this type of data is wonderful news for Compendium. However, one thing that does worry me is the lack of qualified personnel who understand how to effectively implement and manage blogging and social media marketing strategies. I would suggest to companies in this situation to seek providers who can easily explain and demonstrate how to be successful in this mult-channel consumer engagement space. I'd be happy to share how we do it here with our clients.

Online Marketing Panel

Thursday, January 28, 2010 by Allison Bowen

Last night I had the opportunity to be a part of an amazing online marketing panel at Butler University, hosted by the Butler American Marketing Association. As a recent graduate of Butler, I always jump at any opportunity to return to my alma mater. I knew our panel would be interesting, but I had no idea HOW interesting!

The other two participants in the panel were from local online marketing companies ExactTarget and Bradley and Montgomery. While it may seem like we all do very different things (ExactTarget focuses on e-mail marketing and BaM focuses on campaigns), in reality all of our companies connect with each other through the world of online marketing.

I was very surprised to hear the questions that the students had about blogging for search and what search engine optimization is. I discussed Compendium's corporate blogging software and how easy it is for companies to win search results through the use of a blog.

The woman from ExactTarget discussed how much information companies really have on their clients and how they can customize e-mails based on a customer's profile. Who would have thought?

The BaM participant spends much of her time focusing on search marketing and various SEO tools for her clients and discussed how quickly the trends in social media change. She even receives phone calls from L.A. at midnight at times when a Twitter trend changes!

Although we are all from different areas of online marketing, one theme rang true throughout the evening. If you want your company to succeed in today's market, you need to have an online presence in some form. You may have a Facebook page or a Twitter account, but that's simply not enough. Why not try Compendium's simple blogging software today? It could prove to be cruicial to the success of your business!

The Importance of Stable Software

Thursday, January 28, 2010 by Jenni Edwards

I assume everyone has heard now --- but the Apple iPad was revealed yesterday. A day that should have, would have and could have been a great day for CoverItLive's blogging software platform.

Well, on the heels of one of the biggest buzz's of technology, the iPad, the live blogging software failed. It's something that we often take for granted here at Compendium --- up time and stability. I figure today is probably a good day to say "thank-you" to our great development team that keeps our corporate blogging software platform up and running everyday.

I'd also encourage you to take a look at James Litton's blog where he discusses some of the innovative ways Compendium is addressing issues such as hosting and storage of data for our blogging solution.

Now, CoverItLive is in a different business than Compendium and have some great clients such as ESPN, I am by no means taking a jab at a competitor here...they have simply made a different business out of the ability to instantly communicate information online, such as live blogging and I am sure there are issues with that beyond my scope of comprehension.