A New Perspective on Blogging

A website strategy:

What market are we targeting? What product or service are we selling? What factors are in our favor? What resources can we tap into? Does our site design represent our brand/company image?

These are all important questions that need to be asked in the preliminary stage.  Thorough analysis of these questions, and questions like them, will provide the best return on investment. Try this for a change: run a consumer feedback program for six-months on the existing website.  Ask questions that will return answers pertinent to age, income, gender, location, and buying habits.  This will help your company to extrapolate the important data; doing so will help build a better strategy and foundation.

Move to a plan:

Implementation:

Take the data return in the strategy forming phase and interpret it.  For example, the previous website design and strategy was aimed at 35 – 50 year old males who live predominantly on the east coast.  The data you have just received from this new survey suggests that 21 – 35 year old males from the Southwest are now the majority of site frequenters.  Takes this data and change the site content according to the data received while still keeping the integrity of the company’s brand image.

Now that the site is changed accordingly to target the correct market, how do you create site traffic? CNNMoney.com features a great article on Jan. 16, 2008 about some tips that will create website buzz.  “Offer something free-of-charge to those who do visit your site - and it can be as simple as information or advice…” For example, the website the targets males in the Southwest, offer links to other sites that offer: cheap flights to southwestern cities or ticket deals to sports games (NFL, NHL, MLB, NBA, etc).  This will give an incentive to this target market to return to the site.

Maintain the Traffic:

Maintenance:

Site traffic cannot sustain itself.  Traffic must be generated through maintenance of the website and the blog.  A good way of doing this is to re-evaluate the site’s target market and target demographic every so often.  In more volatile industries, a six-month review period may be the best solution; industries that have a less volatile environment, a one, two or three year review may pose the best option.  In this re-evaluation, rerun the survey in the strategy phase.  Find out who your customer is and why they are frequenting your site.  On top of this, find out what your customer wants.  Analytical programs such as Google Analytics can serve as a starting point to uncovering the most hit webpage on your website.  If the site begins to draw less and less traffic, switch it up! Feature new offers, games, videos, and other engaging activities that will hook the consumer to the website and, eventually, the company.

The kicker? This all costs less than any T.V commercial, magazine advertisement, radio spot, or SEO consultant. 

What does Compendium offer? The solution to all of the above, at a low cost, and feedback to help your company sustain this success and grow to the next level of customer conversion.

Compendium can help your company to get familiar with traffic...

I recently journeyed to the orient for two weeks to teach English, eat spicy food, and realize the potential of this fine country.  This experience left me with something more than a new posse of 3rd grade friends and a stomach full of Tums; it gave me a first hand look at the rise of a superpower. 

The city in discussion is Shanghai.  Anyone from a professor to a contractor can highlight the technical points of how the urban development plan is going to unfold, but you will never truly understand it until you see the massive skyscrapers being built as if they were going out of style.  The best way I can represent this to someone who has not traveled there is through this website: Shanghai Urban Development Exhibit.  This caption from the exhibit is one of the most amazing city displays I have ever seen.  The true nature of what is happening is outlined by this floor display.  I could go on and rave for days about this exhibit, but I'll divert you to this site as a deeper reference. Professional TravelGuide.

How does this relate to blogging? Well, the exhibit itself has only indirect ties to blogging.  The direct relationship is in the promise of the exhibit.  Construction is already underway on achieving this dream, which is projected to account for almost 19 million inhabitants in the city; compare this to New York City's 8.25 million.  Furthermore, the need for businesses to advertise to all 19 million inhabitants will certainly increase proportionally to the population size.  How could a company in Shanghai or a company planning on being in Shanghai cope with this advertising need? Business owned blogs.

It is already too hard for individuals in countries such as China to maintain a personal blog due to the restrictions of the government.  The only way a company could utilize such a blog tool would be through a monitored and code-conforming administrative layer.  By meeting certain criteria for posts, a company can ensure that all content posted is pertinent and meets regulatory standards.

In a city such as Shanghai, it is important to establish a well known blog image and gain a significant market share before the initial boom.  Doing so would put that blog name in the mouths of almost 19 million people.  Ask any U.S citizen who uses the internet on a daily basis about which search engine they use and I guarantee that Google, Yahoo, or MSN are the top three choices.   The reason being? These companies have been around since the early years of the internet and maintain a prestigious brand image.  Model a business blog strategy off this example and that blog may become the front runner in the industry.

Some blogs that I found along the way in my research of China:

Shanghaiist
All Roads Lead to China
Technomic Asia

Check these sites out for more information on the developing nation.  You may be surprised at how fast this nation is growing.

With my upcoming trip to China and seeing as that I am an international management major, I have put a lot of thought into how a business could blog for international purposes.

The U.S population is currently totaled at 303.57 million individuals, with a net gain of one person every 13 seconds.  In the overall global environment, the U.S population is almost 4 percent of the total global population.  As a company, you would be missing out on 96 percent of the world population by not addressing the questions:

• Do we go global? 
• Do we wish to attract business from foreign companies? 
• Are we confused about the business environment in other countries that could potentially benefit from your product?

All of these questions will need to be answered at some point or another.  The move from domestic markets to foreign markets isn't a walk in the park when your company can’t apply standardized marketing techniques.  On top of that, it is expensive to hire consultants to conduct in-depth analysis of some markets.  What if you aren’t sure that this market is right for you?

There is a way, however, to save money and time on researching the market of a foreign market: Try searching business blogs.  Furthermore, blog about you company with the intention on attracting foreign business.

Creating a blog solely intended to target foreign business is not a bad idea.  In other words, could it hurt? The answer is no, it can’t hurt.  Paying for a blog service is cheaper than investing millions in marketing campaigns.  If a marketing campaign were to flop, your company incurs large sums of costs; blogs acknowledge the risk in investing.  The reasons being:

• Blogging is cheap
• Blogging increases SEO
• Blogging is effective
• Blogging is fun

For an example of this, let say your company sells high quality widgets in the U.S. You start blogging in order to expand sales to China.  Targeting keywords in your blog, such as: U.S Widgets, U.S Widget Company, Widgets United States, U.S and Chinese Widgets, High Quality Widgets, and Quality U.S Widgets will allow you to win over the most relevant and specific keywords for your strategy.  Blog at it every day for three months and your U.S widget company will be visible to anyone with an internet connection looking to buy your widgets.

On the other side of this, blogs about global issues and regional issues are great resources for information.  If your company is worried about a region in which you are invested, it is important to know the facts.  International Herald Tribune is a great site that contains blog posts about all regions of the world.  It could be helpful to read some of these articles if you are currently or planning on doing business abroad.  This site shows the power of international business blogging.

What about the product that acts like a dog instead of a star?  It would seem pointless to invest heavily in this product when it is returning, if any, a small amount of cash.  What is a marketing outlet that a business can utilize at a low cost but with effective results?  Try blogging.

 
Allow your marketing division the ability to talk about the features of that 'doggish' product.  It is obvious that if a business had the time to determine that a product was in this category, then large ad campaigns, commercials, or any other big budget investments are out of the question. 

Save the money that would be used to market that product and invest in low cost blogs.

Here's a great example of the effectiveness of blogging for sales.  Study: Blogs Trump MySpace for Selling Music is a great article that describes the relation between blogging with record sales.  It is amazing that blogging pre- and post- release of a product could beat out a social networking site for effectiveness.  This can be superimposed onto your product.

The fact of the matter is: There is always a group of individuals out there that will enjoy this dog product.  Attract this audience by learning what keyword(s) are associated with this product and revive the product’s life cycle.  Increase the image of the product through a blog and you never know, this product might be a star in disguise...

Searching the student version of the Wall Street Journal, I came across an interesting article, "How Blogs Are Changing the Recruiting Landscape".  Now although the link in WSJ did not work, I took it into my better interest to search for it on the Internet.

The article discusses the success that many young, college-aged individuals receive when conducting a personal blog in an appropriate manner.  One example from the reading describes how a twenty-something maintained a personal blog about his business experience, intellectual topics, and other discussions.  The blogger received a job offer because of this.

Now you may be asking, "Well, how does this help business?"  The article got me thinking about how to apply this to the business realm.  Through effective blogging, a business can attract young, spirited, motivated, and just plain curious college students to the company’s job opportunities.  Being a college student myself, I know that many individuals like me are constantly searching the Internet, high and low, for full-time jobs.  What do we find? A career websites that pool all the employers into a search database.  I can go to a career website and type in "Marketing Jobs" and return hundreds of hits from pertinent and non-pertinent employers.  Not only does this waste my time, but it wastes the company's resources on a mass marketing device that limits the customization of the company’s efforts. 

The Solution: Have your company maintain a separate blog for recruitment.  The next time I, or any other college student goes to type in, "Marketing Jobs" or other related keywords in the search field of Google, there is a better chance of your employment opportunity popping up.  Skip the capital investment in allowing a massive database to assist the company.  Trust only your employees when it comes to showing a recruit about the corporate environment; A job database website can’t convey the social environment of a corporation.  Parallel to this, your company won’t be competing side-by-side with other “employee hungry” companies on a database website.  Specific keywords designated to your blog will give you a better chance of being in that number one spot.

How to Implement:  Uniqueness of your blog, interactive posts, and staying on top of the trends.  Many college students today are logging on to YouTube to find the next big video to circulate around his/her friends.  Tap into this!  Compendium Blogware allows you to upload videos, such as YouTube, and other files/links to your blog post.  Separate your company from the others by showing that you know the college psyche.  Most of us college students are looking for a company that knows how we think and what we like to do.  Blogging for recruitment gives that job opportunity a voice, as if talking to the HR director one-on-one.

Next time you are looking for a recruitment strategy that will maximize resources and decrease costs, think about blogging.  It’s inexpensive, customizable, easily updated every minute, and allows you to know what is recent in the life of a college student. 

After my first day here at Compendium Blogware, my mother, my roommates, and my girlfriend all asked me the same question within an hour of each other, "So, what exactly does Compendium do?"  That day I had been immersed in so many different aspects of the company I answered, "We build business through blogging."  I had still been piecing together my first day and didn't have the brain capacity to say more than 5 words.  Furthermore, I had asked myself, "Am I really a blogger?"  I had jumped into the social networking scene my freshman year of college and felt that this was credential enough to know how blogging works.  I was wrong.

Blogging, in its infancy, received the same reaction from almost everyone; the word "blogging" meant some adolescent boy or girl would type on their website about the newest gossip in their middle school.  Still today, many of the individuals in society do not realize the extent of which blogging has reached.  The first reactions of my fellow college students were, "So you sit at a desk and type about how you feel that day?"

I can safely say that today, I have a more organized response to what Compendium Blogware does:

With the growth of the internet in the 90's came the need to organize all the information the was being created at incredible rates.  Search Engines were created to deal with this problem and to turn the internet into more of a virtual library then a stack of papers on a desk.  Soon thereafter, businesses jumped on to the "dot com" wagon in order to reach their customers.  However, how could businesses make sure that their investment dollars were being funneled into a marketing plan and not a sink hole?

This is where Compendium raises its hand and says, "I can answer that."  Compendium Blogware supports companies with their marketing and PR via the internet.  We all know that a website can be updated whenever the web master wants, but why limit it to one person adding content to the site?  Why not let ALL the employees add their ideas? Corporate blogging acknowledges this.  An Account Executive, for example, could have a great new idea or news about the company he/she wants to share.  Compendium Blogware allows this individual to share his/her mind with the rest of the world via a blog.  Through the efficient use of desired keywords to "win over" a search engine, an employee can create multiple posts on a blog, throughout the day, and increase the company's website ranking according to the standards of search engines: Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  The higher the ranking of a website, the more noticeable it becomes.  On top of this, Compendium offers tracking tools where said individual can track the market that their blog is reaching.  This allows the company to either increase efforts toward a certain market or adjust its marketing plan to reach the desired target population.

My job at Compendium Blogware is to create our client report cards where we analyze the tracking data of the blogs and return the results.  We give recommendations and important data in order to help businesses to make strategic internet based decisions.  Over the time of a client’s blogging, we can determine how different factors such as time of day, time of the year, events, news, and other external factors may increase/decrease the traffic of a website.

After all is said is done, I guess that my response on my first day here at Compendium Blogware was not completely wrong:  We help to build business through effective blogging practices.