Advanced Business Blogging

Client Highlight - Indy Partnership

Thursday, October 8, 2009 by Sarah Sedberry

This week has been an exciting one for our client Indy Partnership and their blog program.

Indy Partnership is an organization here in Indianapolis that helps provide answers for businesses and bring new economic opportunities to the Indianapolis region and surrounding 10 county's. They also help provide knowledge and guidance to local companies in industries such as life sciences, advanced manufacturing, logistics, technology, motor sports, and more! Indy Partnership is the voice of the Indianapolis region when it comes to a trusted advisor for businesses looking for a great location to complete.

After recently working with their Director of Marketing, Joshua Hall, their business blog has started to see some great success with their program. Below is a recent email from Joshua regarding their blog program:

"Blog is working BIG TIME!

If there was every any doubt about the value of our new Indy Partnership Compendium blog, this should help put it into perspective.

967 people visited the blog in the last 30 days!!!

Compared to overall website traffic, that is equal to more than one-third of our total unique visitor count. Looking at our overall visitors including both blog and website, we topped 3,500 for the month. Just wanted to make sure you know that people are reading what we put out there and it brought nearly 1,000 people to us who may not have visited us otherwise."

On top of that, their website recently won 3 Excellence in Economic Development Awards for Best Website, Best Newsletter, and honorable mention for Best Magazine in the country. The blog serves as a central point of their website home page, as well as, fills their news feed with recent blog posts. They have done a fantastic job of integrating the blog and the website to aid in their online marketing strategy and are starting to see huge pay offs.

Great job to Joshua and his team! We look forward to continued success!

Advice On Adding Pictures To Your Blog

Thursday, September 17, 2009 by Jenni Edwards

I was recently attempting to clean out my Inbox and came across an internal note that discusses using properly sources or purchases photos for your corporate blog content. Now, I know I am not the only one guilty of grabbing pictures from a website or Google Images (oftentimes copyrighted); however, I bet you did not realize that even if you offer to take down an image you can still be charged for the use of it in the past...and it can be PRICEY!

My advice? Use something like iStockPhoto; the images are of great quality and you'll never have to worry about being charged at a later date for the usage. Another option is to use the advanced search options within Flickr and find Creative Commons photos that are allowed for commercialized use (just to be safe).

I'm not sure if I plan to go retroactively and change my photos out quite yet, however, on an ongoing basis - for your own business blog I'd recommend going one of these more legitimate routes!

Engaging Readers with Images

Monday, September 14, 2009 by Abby Brosmer

While content is the most important piece of blogging for search marketing, it is still important to engage your readers. One easy way, is through images. I completely understand the concept of using imagery to quickly engage readers in your post, as it is often the way I am first engaged when reading other blogs. But, when using images in a blog post, you do want to always ensure that your images are safe for use and that you are not publishing someone else's material.

Google recently improved their Google Image Search by allowing searchers to specify "labeled for reuse" images. Now, this is not currently something that is listed on the main search page, but you can click to the Advanced Search Option and Select "labeled for reuse" from the Usage Rights drop down.

If you are creating your own images, Google's Webmaster Blog provided some great information about how to code your images to let people and Google know they are free for use.

Links for 2009-07-07

Wednesday, July 8, 2009 by Blake Matheny

Links for 2009-07-07

Simply Scheme: Introducing Computer Science - The entire 'Simply Scheme' book online. This is an excellent book for the beginning schemer.
Tom Williams: Hired by Apple at 14. His full story. | Derek Sivers - I was recently in Vancouver Canada for a week, considering moving there, when my friend Ariel Hyatt said, “You have to meet this amazing guy Tom Williams. He got hired by Apple when he was only 14. I think the company had to, like, legally adopt him to do it. He’s a go-getter like you. Plus his wife, Jessie is an awesome country artist.” I met Tom for dinner, loved his story, and wanted to share it with everyone. Especially in this environment of 10%-25% unemployment, his story and philosophy have some inspiring lessons about how to get a job or make huge deals despite a lack of experience. So I recorded a phone call and let him tell his tale in his own words:
A Comparison of Open Source Search Engines « zooie’s blog - Later this month we will be presenting a half day tutorial on Open Search at SIGIR. It’ll basically focus on how to use open source software and cloud services for building and quickly prototyping advanced search applications. Open Search isn’t just about building a Google-like search box on a free technology stack, but encouraging the community to extend and embrace search technology to improve the relevance of any application.

This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-07

Links for 2009-07-05

Monday, July 6, 2009 by Blake Matheny

Links for 2009-07-05

Postini: Google's take on e-mail security | Security - CNET News - To identify and block spam and viruses, the automated Postini system looks for key words or phrases that indicate it's an ad or something dangerous, as well as looks at the structure of the e-mail message and the headers, said Kevin Lund, a software engineer who developed a lot of the code the Postini system runs. The system scores each message on numerous combinations of criteria, assigning a weight to each and then comparing the score to those in a database of several hundred thousand message types that have been flagged as good or bad from Postini honey pots and customer spam reports. The system identifies and blocks more than 99 percent of the spam campaigns, according to Lund.
What Is Keyword Density? | LazyTechie - Keyword density is the ratio between the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page to the total number of words contained on it. The normal range of keyword density is around 4-5% ,but it varies among search engines.
Compas Pascal: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance - Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance. Jeff Atwood likes referring to his blog post about Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive. where he writes: "Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law, when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always." I totally disagree, of course, but here is why
Brewer's CAP Theorem - The three requirements are: Consistency, Availability and Partition Tolerance, giving Brewer's Theorem its other name - CAP.
What does a CEO do? A CEO Job Description by Stever Robbins - What do CEOs do? A CEO Job Description. Responsibility, duty, and all that… * Part 1: A CEO Job Description * Part 2: Measuring Success as a CEO * Part 3: Pitfalls and solutions for the CEO * Part 4: Coaching tips to stay sane and skillful at the top of the heap.

This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-05

Trusted Content Developer: Element Three

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 by Compendium Client Marketing

Trusted Content Developer: Element Three
Website: www.DiscoverElementThree.com
Blog: blog.discoverelementthree.com

Who is Element Three in their own words:
Element Three is about business. Specifically, your business and how to grow it. We are a brand development, marketing strategy and creative execution firm focused on integrating business insights to measurably advance our clients' business objectives. If you're a business leader with growth objectives you just might be interested in what we say. Or, more importantly, what we will do to help your business achieve more. Our clients' needs vary; from re-establishing lost market share to creating a new brand identity to packaging design to market analysis. All come to us with the singular goal of helping their businesses grow. Element Three. Business first.

Who is Element Three currently working with on Compendium’s platform?
Element Three and Compendium have had a relationship for a little over a year. Element Three blogs on Compendium’s platform and is the agency of record for That’s Good HR that also uses Compendium.

While Element Three does not write the blog posts for That’s Good HR. They do provide monthly content strategies session with That’s Good HR bloggers in order to encourage quality content creation.

When Element Three brings a new client on what process do you use/work though to get to know and create content for the client?
When working with a new client, we have a questionnaire that they would need to complete, we would review and then have face-to-face meeting with them to outline the content strategy for the upcoming month. We would not engage with a client for less than 6 months. It would be a set amount to help write the content strategy and to write a pre-determined number of posts.

The Language of Search Engines

Tuesday, June 9, 2009 by Compendium Client Marketing

Keywords are the language of search engines. As a result, we need to ensure we educate our clients on how to speak so search engines can listen.

Here are some tips for keyword usage:

Try to use a keyword within the first sentence or two of your blog post. Search engine results display your post title and the first sentence of your post. Ensuring a keyword is in the first sentences will help with placement and the number of search engine users who click-through to your site.
If your keyword is an important part of your blog post, mark the keyword bold to give it emphasis.
Try to concentrate on using no more than 3 keywords or key phrases in a single blog post. Using an excessive amount will actually dilute your messaging.
Search engines will find exact matches first, then combination of matches - ignoring unimportant terms like or, and, it, if, is, etc. Be sure to try and match the exact phrase if possible.
Take advantage of the descriptions in images and links to include keywords or key phrases.

Post Idea:
Select 2 to 3 related keywords or key phrases and write your post utilizing the advanced techniques discussed above.

All Things Digital defines Web 3.0

Tuesday, June 2, 2009 by Chris Baggott

The Wall Street Journal hosted the seventh annual All Things Digital Conference last week in Carlsbad CA. The meeting opened with a discussion of the emergence of new concepts around Web 3.0

"The real arrival, after years of false predictions, of the thin client, running clean simple software, against cloud-based data and services."

What does this mean for your business?   Think about that phrase "cloud based data..."   That's you. We live in a world of data on demand.   How do people call up data?   They use search engines.

The old world of marketers focused on interruption. They find a destination where you might likely hang out (bus stop, TV show, Social Network) and try and interfere with an offer or a pitch.

Web 3.0 says that you no longer need the middleman.   You now have to be the one providing the information and organizing that information in ways that help the people searching the cloud for solutions to their problems.

This is why corporate blogging software is such a fast growing category.   Business is recognizing blogging as a tool for SEO and that in order to compete in this 3.0 world they are going to have to come at the ideas of content creation in a different way....a better way.

I love the other sentence in this description of Web 3.0   "The complete integration of computing into every part of our lives in a way that is seamless, ubiquitous and, ideally dead simple."

Search rules the 3.0 world because it fulfills all those requirements.   If you want to play, you have to advance your thinking regarding blogging best practices.

The #1 Underutilized Marketing Strategy?

Tuesday, April 28, 2009 by Douglas Karr

When I attended the eMarketing Association Conference out in San Francisco last week, I moderated a panel and the question came up:

What is the #1 Underutilized Marketing Strategy?

Overwhelmingly, the response was organic search engine marketing. If you think the panel was composed of SEO companies, though, you'd be mistaken! Sitting on the panel were:

Loren McDonald - Vice President , Industry Relations Silverpop
Philip Smolin - Vice President, Product and Marketing, Turn
Kayden Kelly - Managing Director, Blast Advanced Media
Kevin Akeroyd - COO, Jigsaw
Holly Reville - Founder and CEO, Xpressive Mark
Susan Delz - Ion Interactive

All agreed that the majority of companies weren't earning their full potential with organic search engine marketing. People are looking for your products, services and solutions online at this very moment... are they finding you when they search for them?

It's why Compendium Blogware was founded! Compendium Blogware is doing to organic content creation what Henry Ford did for auto manufacturing... we've developed a production line to optimize and leverage your content for search engines with minimal effort.

We've developed the efficiences in our system to assemble content for maximum findability on search engines!

Straight from the horses mouth. The horse, is Google.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 by Lindsey Bailey

Please see this post from our CEO and co-founder Chris Baggott. Compendium Blogware and Duplicate Content.

What Google (and all search engines) want to see is organized content in ways that are more useful to the searcher. Voila! This is what Compendium Blogware does! Google won't penalize anything that makes searchers happy. Compendium can be proud to say we have some of the most advanced online marketing companies on the planet and they're extremely savvy as far as this issue is concerned. I do hope this issue is finally put to rest!

The Energizer Bunny of Companies!

Friday, April 3, 2009 by Douglas Karr

It doesn't matter what department you're working at or with in Compendium, we're always moving and never standing still.

Our sales team recently expanded to include an outside sales team to connect directly with large corporations in major cities.
Our development team continues to push features on a weekly basis that differentiate us from any other platform. We have a very exciting feature launching soon that everyone will love!
Our marketing team has fantastic reaction time and continues to perform with design, events, whitepapers, cases studies, etc.
Our client success team continues to modify processes to better react to our customer strategies, minimize timelines and improve the results of our clients.
Our education team is launching Content Quest... a 9 week program to turn anyone into a great blogger and to get their blogging productivity up quickly and part of their daily business process to maximize results.
Our research team is analyzing the impact of canonical URLs, backlinking strategies, advanced analytics strategies, and developing a content network program to connect writers with companies to supplement their post productivity.

Since arriving at Compendium, I've had the pleasure of helping all areas of the business - but my primary responsibilities center around education and research to increase the output of our clients' corporate blogging results.

We used to concentrate on quarterly goals - then monthly... but now we're working with goals at a weekly basis. We are moving to proactive strategies rather than reactive strategies.

It's a fantastic change in the business and feels like we're getting far ahead - where our clients need us.

Clients who signed on to Compendium should be very excited - our goal is to ensure their success and we're doing everything possible to crank out our productivity to ensure they get the business results they expect.

A Tale of Customer Support

Thursday, April 2, 2009 by Blake Matheny

As VP of Product at Compendium Blogware, I am also responsible for Product Support. As such, I'm always interested in seeing what companies with big budgets do when it comes to their own support offerings. This past week, I was witness to two customer service/customer support incidents that I thought I would share on my blog. I think these examples also highlight the fact that customer service, both good and bad, can be the difference between simply trying to be helpful and just trying to do your job.

Example of Negative Support Experience
Last Tuesday I came home from work to notice that my cable internet was out. I called my provider, and was told that the soonest they could come out would be Friday between 8 and 10am. After explaining that Friday wasn't soon enough, because I often worked from home and required Internet access to do so, I was told that Friday was the best they could do. After Friday 10am came and went, I noticed that there was a hanger on my door indicating that they had come by and left because I wasn't home. I was of course home, just in the basement and unable to hear to knock. The customer service representative who scheduled my appointment had not verified a contact phone number for me, and, since it had changed, the service technician was unable to reach me.

So, I rescheduled for this Tuesday, again between 8 and 10am. This time they had the correct phone number for me and the technicial showed up and was able to fix the issue in under 30 minutes. The technicial indicated that the cable had been disconnected at the pole, and that this probably was an accidental disconnect. He also suggested that I contact the provider to get a service credit.

Soon after he left, I contacted my service provider. The person on the other end of the phone started off by suggesting that perhaps 'someone' was mucking around on the pole trying to get free cable. If you know where I live, you would understand how improbable this scenario actually is. So I suggested that I be given a service credit for the week I was without service. At this point the representative told me they couldn't give me a credit because I already had one on my account. When I pointed out that, I didn't actually have a credit, I just had paid my bill in advance, the representative still couldn't make the change.

In summary, the representative starts by accusing me (or a neighbor) of stealing and finishes off by telling me that because I was a good customer and paid my bill early, I couldn't get a credit! I was actually being penalized for paying my bill early! After escalation to a supervisor they were able to apply the credit properly.

Example of Positive Support Experience
On Wednesday I went to the BMV. Knowing their reputation for waits, I scheduled an appointment in advance. When I arrived, someone was able to immediately help me. This person not only was able to immediately help me, and explain everything I needed to do, but they actually suggested a couple of things I could do to save money! That's right, they suggested renewing my license early so I would save $10. They also provided me with tape for my temporary license plate, filed an out of state request for me AND took care of getting my voter registration moved to my new address. All in all, taking care of a license renewal, an out of state title and plate change, and changing my voter registration took 15 minutes.

A process that most people dread, going to the BMV, was about as enjoyable of an experience as you can have.

Summary
The difference between these two instances to me seems to not be so much about the organizations or the requests, but about the individuals I interacted with. These two situations just highlighted for me the importance of not just doing your job when it comes to customer support, but going out of your way to be helpful. That's what we strive to do here every day at Compendium, and based on some of our customer feedback, it shows.

The Limits of Limiting Blogger Free Speech (or: You're Worrying about the Wrong Thing)

Tuesday, March 17, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Here's a nice way to make use of that "schedule for future release" feature that we added to our blogging application a couple weeks ago... Every once in a while, I'll see an article that I want to blog about. I'll create a draft and drop in the link so I can work on it later. Most of the time I wind up finishing the post, but other times I don't get around to it, so the post winds up languishing in drafts, never to be finished.

Prior to the future release scheduling, I had little incentive to finish the post because once the content was submitted and approved, the post would appear based on the date that the post was first saved as a draft. The older the post, the less likely the post would be seen at the top of blog listings. By changing the publish date, I am able to revive old posts that still have relevance and put the finishing touches on them. The following post is a good example of this technique.

Back in December of last year, the regional business website NJBiz ran an article about corporate conduct policies and blogging. The article has renewed relevance because it dovetails with the post I published yesterday regarding online reputation monitoring and defense.

In the prior post we took a look at marketers worrying about how adverse comments by third parties could damage the reputation of a company. In the NJBiz story, the focus is employment law attorneys who sound the alarm bell about the threat from within -- online indiscretions by employees that could harm the company's reputation.

While I understand the importance of discretion and decorum, the tone of the article rubbed me the wrong way. Before I lay into the parts the bugged me, I will summarize where I do agree with the article.

For any business, there exists a pool of information that provides the company a competitive advantage. It could be a trade secret, a strategic plan, or a list of customers. It is in the best interest of that company to ensure that this information remains non-public, and it is reasonable for a company to proactively have their employees sign agreements to protect that secrecy.
Employees oftentimes find themselves representing the company to the public in some form or another. It is in the best interest of the company to communicate to their employees the expectations of conduct that the company believes will help develop and maintain a good reputation.
If an employee is participating in a forum as a private individual, there needs to be clear disclosure that he or she is not representing the company.
Under no circumstances should an employee write content that would affect the company's interests under a pseudonym, as was the case with Rick Frenkel at Cisco.

Now that we've established the points of agreement, let's talk about why I didn't like this article. The article stirs up a cloud of mistrust about employees and paints this picture of where the employer's interests reign supreme. I could imagine a heavy handed manager using this advice to assert the need to invasively police the personal lives of its employees.

It's bad enough when the high school mentality pervades a business' perception of external parties. When the mentality drives management to treat all employees as potential threats from within, it really poisons the well of the workplace. Cracking down too hard on employees will worsen morale, stifle authenticity on blogs, and possibly backfire in the public eye.

These are tough economic times. Your business is probably being challenged on many fronts. The last thing you need is an adversarial relationship with your employees because their energy and vitality is part of what helps set your organization apart from the competition. Motivated employees put their heart into their work and have a shared interest in the continued success of the company. Treating them like they are the enemy is not going to foster the loyalty that attorney Helen Tuttle is quoted as being owed to the employer.

On the blogging front, as has been mentioned so many times before in this space, authenticity is essential. Press release posts are a recipe for corporate blogging failure. If you take John Sarno's advice too much to heart:

Companies may create their own blogs for employees to address the public in an official capacity, though Sarno said if an employer encourages blogging for marketing purposes, the content will likely be strictly controlled. Blogging under such terms “is a tool for business. It’s not a tool for free speech,” he said.

you will wind up with posts that sound like substance-free marketing messages. Content control has its place, but it should be wielded with grace, not brute force.

Finally, let's take on the question of business reputation management. Let's put the disgruntled customers and indiscreet employees aside for a moment and look at the big picture. You know that economic downturn that started in back in 2007? Chances are that everything between then and now that has happened in the business world has done more damage to your company's reputation than anything that these perceived threats could have possibly done.

About a month and a half ago, the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion conducted a poll for the Knights of Columbus, seeking to get a snapshot of the public's view of businesses, and the picture was not pretty. Quoting from the K of C's press release:

Among the American public, 76 percent believe that corporate America’s moral compass is pointed in the wrong direction, 58 percent of corporate executives agree; and a majority of Americans, and two-thirds of executives, gave a grade of D or F in ethical matters to the financial and investment industry.

The poll of 2071 adults and 110 high-level business leaders also showed that Americans believe personal financial gain and career advancement drive the business decisions of executives while concern for employees and public good seldom factors into corporate decisions.

Yep, all of those meltdowns, bankruptcies, compensation scandals, and bailouts have skewed public opinion against you, even if you didn't blow a cool million to redecorate your office or get a bailout check from the treasury. With 5.1 million people collecting unemployment checks do you think your business stands to gain any goodwill by canning an employee because you didn't give your 100 % approval to everything they might have written?

This is one of those times where a company has to look beyond its legal rights and think about whether its actions fit within a larger goal of survival. Be clear with your employees about expectations of conduct. Be fair and consistent with holding them accountable, but don't use that concern as license to rule with an iron fist. You can't afford it.

What do to on Monday... END HUNGER!

Monday, March 9, 2009 by Brian McKay

Why business blogging you ask? Why humanize your marketing at your company? One reason, is that you can make a difference. Individuals can have a significant impact on your company, and the world.

A great example is being set by Tyson Foods with their Pledge to End Hunger. By going to this site and taking the online pledge, Tyson Foods will donate 35 pounds of food product to food banks:

http://www.pledgetoendhunger.com/

This took me less than 30 seconds to do this morning, and now 35 pounds of food are going to be delivered to people in need. Please link to this post, directly to the site, or email to as many people as you can today. 30 seconds to deliver 35 pounds of food to the needy. This is why I love America!

Thank you in advance for taking the pledge, and sharing.

Oh so sweet support!

Friday, February 6, 2009 by Abby Brosmer

Dunkin Donuts is currently running a radio commercial that cracks me up! Unfortunately, I have searched and searched for the audio of it, but have not been able to find it. So, you are just going to smile and bear with my rendition.

I apologize in advance, but basically a gentleman is calling in for support on his computer and Support Team says, "let's start with some basic trouble shooting" and asks, "is the computer plugged in?" The gentleman requesting support says, "plugged in, to what?" The support team member says, so calmly, "to the wall, sir." And the gentleman says, "this computer didn't come with a wall." That's when the narrator comes on and says its going to be a long!

You are probably thinking, "great story", maybe chuckling a little, but really what does this have to do with business blogging? Well, as you all well know, I am a member of the support team here at Compendium. Every day, I get the pleasure of working with our clients to help them solve questions and concerns they may run into while using the best blog software around.

I can't stress it enough to our clients, any product related, questions, contact Support!! We are here and ready to help you! Also, We love feedback, so if you ever have any recommendations, please send them in. If you are nervous about asking a question, we have a public knowledge base or FAQ, surf through there. If you are unable to find a solution to your question, let us know that you looked, but couldn't find one, so we can be sure to add one in.

We are here 8am - 5pm EST, and always ready to help!

Awesome blog design: Komodo Media

Thursday, February 5, 2009 by mikey mioduski

This blog design is really one to check out. It was one of the "Best CSS Design of 2008" post from CSSbuilt with good reason.

Not only does it look great, from the navigation to the CTA's and styling in general, but it's also got some great interactive elements. Check out this "foliage-o-meter" which you changes the design of the page as you take it from left to right.

So as you drag the knog to the right...

wait... wait... keep going...

Heres the site: http://www.komodomedia.com/

Go, play.

Not really sure how it's done. I know Doug knows. Might be jquery I guess. What is really exciting to me about the sweet Komodo site, is that although it's not done on our software... it very well could be.

I've been working on the redesign of our own corporate blog for Compendium. At first I wasn't too sure just how customizable our blog software is, after all, ours is built specifically for professional, or businesses to start blogging. We are a software-as-a-service meaning that the client doesn't need to know ANYTHING about design or websites, we have people do it for you...

So this made me wonder how customizable our blog software is, and as I spent all day working on our own CSS, I came to realize it is as customizable as you want it to be. Fully customizable in that if you can get in there and figure out what you're doing with the template, you can take it as far as you want to... something like Komodo has done with this beautiful CSS and jquery. Or if you'd rather have something much more simple, you can just have us match your existing website. Or anywhere in between.

So the answer is this, our blog software is as customizable as you want it to be. Plus, with our advanced API, the possibilities are wide open.

Be Sure to Check that JavaScript before Dropping It on Your Page

Sunday, February 1, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

It's a lively time for those who work in web marketing. With no end to the number of social media widgetry and sophisticated analytics you can throw on a web page, the temptation to pimp your page with anything and everything can be strong. This post is about the downside that can haunt you when you fall prey to siren call of scripts, scripts, and more scripts.

The sad news is that not all scripts are created equally. Although JavaScript is a powerful language, it is also misunderstood as a consequence of its name (the Java part throws people off) and it's syntax (the similarity to C++ and Java lures developers into thinking it's just another procedural language). Moreover, the community of JavaScript code authors contains far too many whose skills are lackluster.

What does this mean for you as a web marketer? It means that when you add third-party JavaScript to your page, you run the risk of degrading the performance of your page either through code bloat or just plain awful programming.

Let me give you a case in point, we were recently reviewing some JavaScript code supplied by a marketing analytics company. Subscribers to the analytics service had to place the snippet of code into a web page's source so that data could be collected by the service.

I noticed that under certain circumstances, the JavaScript produced errors in the browser's interpreter. Depending on your browser configuration, such an error might register itself with warning icon on the browser's status area at the base of a window, or it might in some circumstances pop up a warning dialog. In either case, it can be an embarrassment because it makes your website look like it was poorly constructed.

We investigated the code and found that the error was caused by a buggy algorithm for deducing whether a the visitor had landed on a page as the result of a search query. The script scanned the page's referring URL for the presence of a search engine domain name and then tried to pull out what the query was.

The script wrongly assumed that a referral from such a domain had to be the result of a search engine query. Consider the case of Google, which does a lot more than just search. They also provide e-mail and RSS feed reading applications, both of which are wildly popular. The script didn't protect against this edge case and wound up failing to execute.

What were the ramifications of such a fatal error? In this case, it was more than just an embarrassing error message. It also meant that all of the data that the analytics script was trying to collect for that page view was going to be lost. The analytics code was failing in its most fundamental purpose.

We also looked deeper into the code and found that the developer had chosen to implement some of the analytics operations with pauses that used a homegrown "sleep" function. Rather than implementing an asynchronous wait that let the browser do its thing during this pause, they chose instead to use a "busy wait" loop that would keep checking the browser's time to see if the interval had passed. Things like this are bad for a user interface because during that wait period, your browser would appear as if it were locked up.

It suffices to say that our team issued a strong recommendation that the script not be used.

Some websites aren't as lucky. JavaScript flaws can sometimes make a page unviewable to visitors. As an extreme case-in-point, consider the embarrassing error that SiteMeter users encountered this past August. A script exercised a DOM readiness bug in Internet Explorer that made it impossible for a visitor to see the page's contents.

How can you guard against something like this happening? If your business has a team of developers which includes someone well-versed in JavaScript, ask them to do a code review. Be sure to clear it with the team management and give them plenty of advance notice. A last minute request probably won't be greeted with open arms and a smile.

Another thing to keep in mind is that some services supply JavaScript in "minified" form. Minification is the process of reducing the size of a JavaScript file by eliminating white space and possibly shortening names of variables and functions.

Minified form reduces the size of the download, which helps reduce page load times, but it is darned near impossible for humans to make sense of it. If your third-party service supplies its JavaScript in minified form, ask them to supply a non-minified version for code review.

If you don't have a ready resource, do some background research on the company to find out how reputable it is. If the code is buggy, chances are you will find posts from people on blogs, bulletin boards, or mailing list archives detailing such flaws.

Just as you would do with any other business-to-business relationship, it's in your best interest to do due diligence before committing.

SEO got Pete and Louie a place to crash.

Thursday, January 29, 2009 by Lindsey Bailey

As many of you may know, I'll use any shameless excuse to post a picture of my beloved pets on my blog page. This time....it just happens to be very relevant! My fiance Tony and I are getting married May 1st, then leaving for our honeymoon directly afterwards. What does this mean for our dogs...homeless, parentless, and alone for 2 weeks. (We'll miss them dearly, but I'm welcoming that week in Grand Cayman!)

As I'm trying desperately to get things squared away and finalized months in

advance, being the meticulous planner that I am, I wanted to go ahead and arrange their boarding. One less thing to worry about. My first step: SEARCH! I went to Google, typed in "Dog Boarding Noblesville Indiana". The first result was Beverly's Precious Pets. Just so happens this place was less than a mile from my house, and I didn't even know they existed! They have used SEO and search marketing to grow their business. They just got my reservation.

Everyday people are doing two major things online. Email and search. 90% of internet users do these two activites on a daily basis. Your small business needs to be in that pool. You need to be fishing those waters. I'm going to quote the wondeful Jennifer Buscher, "Google is an ocean, with a Typepad or Wordpress platform, or even a website, you have 1 hook. Compendium Blogware gives you 25 or more hooks to catch those 'fish'". This is an amazing analogy. Small business marketing needs to realize that print, direct mail, yellow pages, all of those methods are dead. Cast those wide nets and fish hooks - and capture the most leads (fish)!

Top 3 Tips for Professional Speakers to Build an Online Persona

Sunday, January 18, 2009 by Douglas Karr

Yesterday I had an incredible opportunity to speak to date. Jean Palmer-Heck of Real Impact and President of the Indiana chapter of the National Speakers Association asked me to speak to regional speaking professionals on Social Media. I wound up spending the afternoon at Karl Ahlrich's home with the group! Good friend John Ketzenberger of The Indianapolis Star was there as well.

Jean and I had decided on the specific subject, How to Manage an Online Persona for Greater Visibility and More Bookings. Basically, tailoring a social media presentation to provide the folks with an overview of the technologies and how they can put it to work to build authority and presence on the Internet that will lead to more bookings.

Brooke Billingsley of Perception Strategies challenged me to narrow the 3 hours of presention and conversation down to 3 tips for their group to walk away with. Since many of these folks were new to any of the technologies involved, my response was:

Research what searchers are looking for on the Internet that will lead them to your business. What you're known for or wish to be known for are often in conflict with what people are searching for!
Create a business blog that targets those keywords and write frequently, utilizing the keywords that have been identified to capture that search engine traffic.
Build authority with those in your field of expertise by finding other professional speakers who are blogging on the Internet and joining their conversation through commenting on their blogs. Bloggers enjoy user-generated content because it adds value to their blog without any effort - and they often reciprocate by mentioning your blog. This provides your blog with backlinks, a gold standard for search engine ranking, as well as exposure to their audience.

An Example of a Misguided Site

You don't bite the hand that feeds you, but its always great to provide a relevant example. In this case, I'll use the NSA, a fantastic organization. According to their website, the mission of the NSA is:

The National Speakers Association (NSA) is the leading organization for professional speakers. Since 1973, NSA has provided resources and education designed to advance the skills, integrity and value of its members and speaking profession.

If I do some keyword research on the NSA, though, the keywords they're recognized for are much different than what folks may be looking for, like How to Become a Professional Speaker. Unfortunately, they are being indexed for different keywords that folks are not searching for.

Later in the afternoon, I demonstrated Compendium for the NSA members and showed them how our company provides both the products and services that would enable them to build the online persona they need to get those bookings!

It was a pleasant surprise... we even had clients in the audience that praised the work we were doing for them! One of the members who spoke up was a professional ghost blogger! It's always nice to get a nod of approval from those who depend on your company for their bread and butter!

Image Best Practices in Blogging

Friday, December 19, 2008 by Douglas Karr

I did a post a week or so ago to distinguish your blog posts with images.

Chantelle, (Successful Blogging), and I followed up with an in-depth webinar with our clients on how to "Spice up your Blogs" this week and images were a key part of the presentation.

Images can be used a number of ways with your corporate blogging strategy, including:

To distinguish the blog or post (helps a lot with RSS).
To explain data through a chart.
To provide a call to action for folks to click-through to another site.
To provide photos of the people from your business.
To provide a photo that's representative of the content. This is very important, since studies have been done where cognitive recognition is actually done through images, and very rarely through remembering text.

I try hard to incorporate some kind of photos or images into every single one of my posts. If you're using easy blog software such as compendium, designing a blog post and including an image is quite simple.

If you don't have any advanced photo manipulation experience and are locked up behind an IT force that won't install any image desktop applications, there are a few great online tools out there:

Aviary - a powerful photo imaging and design application. There is a free and a professional version.
Picnik - a simple online photo editing tool with all the basics plus some cool enhancements.
Pixenate - a basic image manipulation tool, great for blogging.