People Want to Hear from People
Posted Wednesday, May 28, 2008 by jennifer buscher

While planning my next vacation I started to wonder why my research starts and ends at www.tripadvisor.com.  I am in love with this website because real people who have been to the destinations, stayed at the hotels, and dined on the local fare write about their personal experiences with no agenda other than to inform other travelers.  I personally don’t care about gold lists and stars, I care about what real people have to say. 

The same idea applies to business according to The Edelman Trust Barometer for 2008.  People want to hear from people like you and me.  They don’t necessarily always want to hear from the CEO or the webmasters and marketers who create a company site.  By empowering everyone from the secretary to the sales team to blog you are giving your employees an outlet to share industry knowledge thoughts and expertise all while boosting your search engine rankings if done correctly and on the right platform.  Compendium software is an affordable, blog management software that leverages blog content created by individuals to help with online customer acquisition and lead generation.  Just as I look for feedback from travelers like me, potential customers in any industry are looking for insight from "other people like them".  High levels of trust equals high levels of conversion.


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Blogging Right from the Start
Posted Tuesday, November 27, 2007 by Ali Sales

There are two ways that you can read this title, and guess what? That's intentional!

The first way is with respect to choosing the “right” blogging solution. That's the first step in your start to corporate blogging -- and it can cause a lot of headaches if you go with the wrong platform. What kind of headaches?

Well, a lot of the time, the tendency is to go with the cheapest software. The problem with this is that even though the software is cheap, the costs associated with maintenance and growth get pretty ugly -- and can be extremely hard to predict. What you don’t pay on the software side, you’ll definitely have to pay on the services side (and probably a lot more).

Another temptation is to build your own blogging platform (again, because you think it's going to be cost effective). The trouble with this lies in the execution. It's easy to keep putting the development on the back-burner, and generally, a homegrown solution is just not going to scale. That also goes for the cheap blogging solutions I mentioned above.  Many of the automated elements included in Compendium Blogware will have to be done manually...and this will only work in the short-term.

Oh, and did I mention switching costs? The time needed to create content is one of the biggest investments you'll make in your blogging program, and moving content is usually unpleasant.

The last item I’ll mention is that the wrong blogging solution will make it hard for you to follow best practices. The wrong blogging tools will make it hard for you to get content out the door, will lack control and compliance features, and will leave you wishing for a platform that makes your life as easy as possible.

All worth considering as you contemplate which blog platform is right for your organization.

Tomorrow I’ll be back with more on the second way the title can be read: as in, actually creating content as soon as possible. 

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