I couldn't be happier about this article from the New York Times about M.I.T. embracing student blogging as a major marketing tool.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/education/02blogs.html?emc=eta1Before joining the Compendium Blogware team, I spent a year as an Admission Officer at DePauw University (my alma mater!). While I traveled states like Ohio, Minnesota, Texas, Florida, and Indiana marketing the value of liberal arts and DePauw University, I realized something very valuable that this NYT article now validates.
Prospective college students don't want another glossy brochure with cliche tag lines about diversity, the low student to faculty ratio, and incredible facilities. In fact, most 16 and 17 year olds rarely even look at the snail mail that reaches their home. This is the Facebook generation, the MySpace kids, the Tweeting youth of America. They're certainly not at home waiting on the mail to bring the next post card. They are all online. They connect to millions of other prospective students just like themselves in a matter of seconds. They do hundreds of searches a week as they research their college decision. And that is why student blogging is such a vital tool that all colleges should be embracing. Those teenagers I met while recruiting for DePauw wanted to know about the campus atmosphere, and they wanted to hear it from the the most qualified source; the students.
So this does not surprise me at all that top universities like M.I.T. are taking student blogs to the next level. But does this mean that the fears and risks are not on the minds of the admission office, every dean across the country, and every board of trustees? Nope. They are all still worried that student blogging will put them at risk and tarnish the school image.
That is why our enterprise level blogging software is so important to consider. We have easy to use administrative features that allow a school to unleash their student blogging army while still maintaining control of the message. We can customize the blogs to match the university branding without losing that blog feel that makes it more human than a web site. But most importantly, Compendium's platform is the only solution that can maximize the SEO value of all this amazing student blog content. With us, colleges can guide their students with important topics, good ideas for better blog posts, and the highest level of security. For an example, just search this: Top 50 Liberal Arts Colleges and look for DePauw's blog at the top of the search ranking.
Hey Admission Office, would you like to use safe student blog content to win on your most important search phrases that support your mission statement and encourage the best and brightest to apply to your institution? If so, email me at
bmillis@compendiumblogware.com or call my direct line
(317) 777-6254 and I'd love to share more about my experience as an Admission Officer and how it relates to the world of blogging.
There are many benefits of blogging... particularly, there are many benefits to using
Compendium's blogging platform.
There are several key features that I think are worth noting in Compendium's software:
- Enterprise level editorial control - Which means no one can post without approval.
- Easy to use interface - I learned how to navigate it in 10 minutes and you can too!
- Scalability - You can start with a few bloggers and add more as times goes on. As your number of bloggers grows, so will your SEO scale.
- It is web-based - Compendium's software is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. You just have to contact our Client Success department with any questions you many have.
- Search Engine Optimization - Compendium's platform automatically structures your blog content to be maximized in SEO.
And that's the beauty of it.
Compendium offers all of these features with its blogging platform - all you have to do is generate good blog content! For more information on Compendium's blog software,
click here to receive our free
Whitepaper: Consider Blogging and see if a corporate blog is right for your company.
Probably not, but don't get discouraged just yet...
I was just reading a story about Julie Powell, a writer who started a blog about her cooking experiences with Julia Child's recipes. This blog turned into a book, which just became a movie starring Meryl Streep, and the entire thing is one of those Cinderalla stories where a nobody becomes a big somebody overnight all because of her blog!
Out of 133 million blogs out there on the Internet, Julie Powell's became one of the magical ones, all because according to her she was "at the right place at the right time."
Bingo. Blogging to become famous,whether you're an individiual or someone responsible for overseeing a corporate blogging stragetgy, is not all that likely. Put the idea out of your mind. You're not going to become a star and Meryl Streep is not going to call you.
But blogging can absolutely help you be in the right place at the right time -- again, whether you're a consulting company of one or a billion dollar enterprise -- and it can help you intercept people who are online and already searching for the very things that you know something about. As we all know, being in the right place at the right time is critical. So while it won't make you or your company famous, it does come with all sorts of perks -- more interest, more leads, more customers, more money.
If you're unsure how blogging as a part of your online marketing strategy can help you be in the right place at the right time, then let us help you.
Sign up here for a free consultation.
I would wager these days that most of us have played around with starting a blog of some sorts, whether it's a place to post photos and update your friends and family, document your travels, say whats on your mind, or rant and rave about your passions from music to wine and fine dining. For all of the aforementioned blogs, there are many great free blog software options out there, easily customizable and easy to start within literally minutes.
If you are a business, whether a small business or a nationally-known enterprise, then you probably have different blogging goals in mind. Most small to medium sized businesses today are asking,
"how do we grow our online search presence?" This is the real advantage of blogging for business. Search engines look for new content, densely focused content, frequently updated content, as well as how popular the content is (how many backlinks and how much traffic is coming to this post/page.) So when a company engages in blogging, they have the ability to begin controlling their own online search destiny, by posting great and relevant information as often as they deem appropriate, and then integrating their blog with all of their social media outlets to create more linkage, and more visibility. The sooner they start, the better.
So when you're considering which blog software to pick, first decide if you are blogging for business or recreation. If you want to blog to establish a search presence, there is no platform out there like Compenidum. We offer all of the perks and features of traditional blogging platforms, but our proprietary
Compending feature organizes content in a way that gets the most bang from any single blog post, leveraging any one post any
"N" number of times based on the relevant keywords targeted in the post. Because we are a software-as-a-service, you also dont need to invest the time and resources of designing, downloading or learning a new software. We help you target the keywords and work with you to make sure you are getting the most out of your blogging efforts.
Recommended reading:-- Chris Baggott,
"Why is there so much bad blogging advice?"-- Ali Sales Roach,
"The Easiest Way to Calculate Blogging ROI"-- Doug Karr,
"What's the Value of a Blog Post?"
Here is a quote that should grab your attention:
"In 2009: $65 billion will be spent on enterprises’ own sites, dollars NOT spent on TV, magazines, newspapers, billboards, etc. To scale that, compare 2009 total U.S. TV ad revenue (cable + broadcast) at $66 billion, and total 2009 U.S. Newspaper ad revenue at $42 billion. So corporations spending marketing dollars on their own sites is equivalent to (a) wiping out all TV ad revenue or (b) wiping out one and one-half newspaper industries!"Hello! Thanks to
Outsell for this great new report, but what does it mean to advertising? Why is this happening?
Simple answer is that Advertising relies on middlemen to deliver a corporate message. With Online Marketing (
Search Marketing), business can now leverage their own site, Corporate Blogging software and email marketing to control and develop a direct relationship with their prospects and customers.
Emarketer already told us that the three biggest growth areas in marketing are Search, Email and Social Media (
Business Blogging covers both SEO and Social Media). What is transforming the marketing world it the capacity for organizations to have direct relationships with the people who drive their business. Marketing departments from organizations large and small are rethinking their investments and strategies and going direct...to the detrement of the old model that required a middleman to deliver your message.
Newsgator recently published a free download called
A Roadmap for Successful Adoption of Social Computing in the Enterprise. I'd recommend the download. The root of the whitepaper is that companies must adopt a cultural transformation - and when they do - they benefit enormously.
Here are
5 obstacles the study speaks to. We hit these obstacles in our sales process as well. Specific to blog software and search marketing, here are my reactions:
- Employees already use other systems and don't want to be bothered with another alternative.
What is the strategy and measures of success for using your other system? What are the costs (maintenance, uptime, administration). When confronted with this, our prospects don't typically have a strategy in place that proves results. If you can't measure it, how do you know it's working? If you think it's working, how do you know how well it's working?
- Employees are concerned about having their contributions public and uncensored.
This is why we've built approval and feedback loops into our application. It's important that employees be allowed the freedom to blog but with moderate oversight that provides them feedback if a post isn't approved for publishing.
- Management is entrenched in the "old school" way of thinking - institution over community, hierarchy over collaboration.
This is a difficult obstacle to overcome. In short, I like to talk to companies about where their clients and prospects are rather than talk about how the company needs to change. Consumer and B2B behavior has changed and they are researching solutions and products via the web and search engines before ever calling you. You need to be where they are looking, reading and discussing.
- Management desires more control over the actions of contributors, e.g. tagging, discussions, group creation, etc. The open nature of social computing is concerning.
This is why a Software as a Service is a fantastic solution. We continue to modify and enhance our system based on industry trends, search trends, online marketing trends and the needs of our clients. Investing in a SaaS blog software comes with a year of feature upgrades - all providing the right balance of control over openness.
- Management is worried about decreased productivity as they still perceive social computing as fun.
I often ask people how much time they spend on email each day and there is always a groan. Some answer 20 emails, others over 100 emails daily - just to keep up. What's the ROI on email? What if you could prevent calls to customer service by having the content out there and the questions already answered in a means that prospects and clients can find it? What if you could write a blog post that 2,000 people read instead of the 1 person you're writing an email to? Blogging is an incredibly effective and efficient means of communicating.
According to the Whitepaper:
By 2012, more than 30% of large organizations will have deployments of social software suites available to all their employees (The Gartner Collaboration and Social Software Vendor Guide, 2009, Carol Rozwell, Nikos Drakos, David Mario Smith, Jeffrey Mann, Matthew W. Cain, James Lundy, and Tom Eid, February 19, 2009, Gartner.).
We've got a long way to go! Begin breaking down these objections within your company today to reap the benefits.
A friend of mine,
Erik Deckers, once told me that the average reader of the Internet reads and comprehends at a
6th grade level.
Erik is a professional writer and marketer worth listening to. Ever since Erik told me that, I've toned down my 8th grade writing.
All joking aside, it's an important thing to keep in mind when you're explaining products or services on your corporate blog. Don't overestimate the knowledge-level of your visitors.
It's not that you want to
dumb down the content of your blog, it's that you want to make sure that you thoroughly explain your post as if you were explaining it to a 6th grader.
All businesses solve a problem - whether you're an
Infrastructure as a Service company dealing with virtualization, a
gourmet cookie company that sells cookies, baskets and more, or a
real estate company serving Southern Indiana and Kentucky.
If any of the products or services those companies provided were easy, they wouldn't be in business. Businesses help make difficult tasks simpler. Compendium is a great example - we make
enterprise corporate blogging easier for companies seeking greater organic search results.
Our business blogs and yours should reflect this! When you're speaking to the audience that's visiting your site, your blog posts should be simple to read, drawing in the person that's got a difficult problem that you solve. If the visitor needs a dictionary by their side to read your posts - you're going to lose them.
It's not difficult to take a complex topic and write it in simpler terms. Writing at a 6th grade level also doesn't make you sound less intelligent. I would argue that a blogger's ability to write about a technical topic and explain it as a sixth grader is an very talented and intelligent writer.
To promote your ability to
answer a difficult problem easily, you should be writing at a level that represents that. Don't overestimate your audience.
The word competitor bugs me. I've never actually met nor been challenged by a competitor. Some prospects think we have competition, but every prospect's needs are different and your solution may not match the needs that another solution would.
Anyways, I had a great conversation with a
blogging consultant from a firm today that implements open source blogging software for very large companies. I'm quite familiar with the platform that he works with - I host a personal blog on it and have released quite a few plugins for it.
We talked through the challenges we both had with our clients. We spoke through how many of them are concerned with the nuances of search engine optimization... links, rank, tagging, categorization, etc., but they're not actually paying any attention to
writing relevant content.
On the plus side, after I walked him through the enterprise solution that we've built, he's signing up for a demonstration. He said he would love to be able to commit his time to executing on
great blogging strategies for his clients instead of tinkering with the technology.
Turns out, he may not be a competitor at all... he may be our next
agency client!
If you're an
enterprise corporation and have people throughout the world, we released an incredibly sophisticated feature today -
user-centric time zones.
In typical blogging applications, the time zone is set for the blog itself, regardless of where your bloggers are located. In other words, if my blog is set for EST and I'm in California, and I post at 6AM, the blog post is displayed and shown as posted at 9AM. Boo!
Our developers released a fantastic enterprise blogging feature today -
user-centric time zones. Within your user settings, you can select your personal time zone. Once your time-zone is set, voila!
Even nicer, the team put a message reminder on login to remind our users to set their timezone with a link to the setting. That was great thinking on their part, pre-empting any confusion from the bloggers.
Also released was a smart
auto-save feature and an option to
schedule your post to publish at a future time. Nice job
Compendium developers! These are fantastic enterprise blogging software features.
Tripp Babbitt wrote a great post,
A Little Respect for the Front-line that speaks to the fact that customers (and prospects)
don't deal with the leaders of an organization - they deal with the front-line employees.
Often, companies are hesitant at allowing their front-line employees to blog. The leaders wish to
control the message or marketing wishes to
control the brand. Both are ridiculous statements when you have front-line employees. They should all
be blogging.
Whether you like it or not, your front-line employees ARE a reflection of
your company and its leadership. Your front-line employees should also be key to a corporate blogging strategy. If you don't trust your employees to blog about your products, services and clients... what are they doing speaking to your customers?
When I search for a company, product or service online I would love to read customer stories from the customer service representative that I will be dealing with.
How great would it be to look up Enterprise Rent-a-Car in Chicago and read a blog post from one of their actual cashiers on 3 tips for speeding up your visit. If I were picking up a car from Enterprise in Chicago, I'd be looking for that customer service representative!
Instead, I read (and largely ignore or don't trust) content written by their marketing or leadership team. It's insincere and it's not applicable to me - because I don't work with the leadership. I work with that CSR!
Let your frontline employees blog!
Wow, hat's off to McKinsey and authors, Michael Chui a consultant in McKinsey’s San Francisco office; Andy Miller an associate principal in the Silicon Valley office, and Roger Roberts a principal, on their great new report: Six ways to make Web 2.0 work.
Sincerely, these guys get it. They are preaching the Compendium Blogware gospel. Below I've pulled some key quotes from the report, but the main message is that Corporate Blogging must be a bottom up effort not top down. Top level executives can set a good example, but the key to real business blogging success lies in widespread participation.
In discussing the difference between Web 2.0 success vs. CRM/ERP (web 1.0) they say:
"What distinguishes them from previous technologies is the high degree of participation they require to be effective." "Unlike ERP and CRM, where most users either simply process information in the form of reports or use the technology to execute transactions (such as issuing payments or entering customer orders), Web 2.0 technologies are interactive and require users to generate new information and content or to edit the work of other participants."
As you know, I'm constantly preaching that your employess, at all levels, make your best bloggers:
"Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University, calls the underused human potential at companies an immense “cognitive surplus” and one that could be tapped by participatory tools."
Many companies ask us how to get more participation and more content from their employees. This quote talks to recognition. Bloggers work for applause. You hire smart people, they want to participate and feel valued...let them blog and recognize them for it. This quote compares the stick of mandates "you will give me two blog posts a week" vs the carrot of fame:
"A more effective approach plays to the Web’s ethos and the participants’ desire for recognition: bolstering the reputation of participants in relevant communities, rewarding enthusiasm, or acknowledging the quality and usefulness of contributions. ArcelorMittal, for instance, found that when prizes for contributions were handed out at prominent company meetings, employees submitted many more ideas for business improvements than they did when the awards were given in less-public forums."
And finally, the conclusion....let everyone blog. Good bloggers are not appointed, they are freed!
"With participatory technologies, it’s far from obvious which individuals will be the best participants."
Sincere thanks to Brandon Powell for passing this report my way.
Brandon Powell
My colleagues Brian Millis and BJ McKay recently returned from a great conference in Chicago,
Blogwell. This conference hosted quite a few well known enterprise level companies and disucssed all things blog and social media related. Brian and BJ observed that these companies are realizing they need a strategic social media presence. Their customers are using facebook, twitter,
etc... to communicate about them both positively and negatively. These companies need a professional blogging tool, a tool like Compendiums easy blog software perhaps, to particpate in these conversations and monitor what is being said online about their products and services. I found an interesting article from online marketing source
Practical Ecommerce, that shared some interesting points about this very topic title Social Media:
Listening Is The New Marketing.
The shrinking world we live in. While listening to NPR this morning the reporter delivered news on the global economy. The theme was "shrinking." As I jumped on the elevator this morning to head to the office, I shared a quick convo with a woman who moved her offices, to "shrink" her practice. This shrinking in a lot of cases is leaving customers without a provider. This is when smart hard working marketers can make a mint.
The need for most products and services has not diminished, it's the collective psyche of businesses around the world that has been altered. The question I'm posing to you is, instead of tying your stomach in a knot over customer attrition at your business, how are you acting on the same problem your competitor is having?
Decision makers in the household and at the office are online using search everyday to find new options for suppliers and better deals on a giant package of toilet paper. The data around the volume of search for keywords and phrases is public and available to all comers. If there is a more economical way to leverage SEO to win customers from competitors, I haven't found it yet.
Blogging for SEO is a turnkey way to show ROI from your first play in optimizing search to earn customers. There is affordable blogging software with all of the built in consultation necessary to realize ROI for small businesses and enterprises alike.
Customer attrition is a real issue right now, are you addressing your problem by capitalizing on the same problem your competitor is having?
When you Blog to earn customers, it's comes down to promises and consistency. Blogging is about telling human, relevant, stories that tie into your company's value proposition. Why am I different? Why should you choose me? This is vital for small business marketers and enterprise level marketers alike.
Here's a real life illustration of what I mean. I was coming home late last night, hustling to hit the deadline that the babysitter set for me to relieve her of her duties. At 7:45 PM I remembered that I hadn't eaten since 11:30 AM.
I saw a McDonalds on my left, turned in
and hit the drivethrough, and there I sat for 8 minutes to 7:53 PM behind a car sitting at the kiosk where you yell your order. 8 minutes! This is McDonalds, the mecca of greatest fast food system that the world has ever known! I turned out of the queue, and headed home without my McNuggets.
At 8:15 PM I called Jimmie Johns, ordered a sub for delivery and in 15 minutes I was enjoying dinner. Seamless, inexpensive, and right on their brand promise. The winner is.... Jimmie Johns.
By employing affordable blogging software you can begin to win organic search traffic by generating keyword rich content that hammers home your brand promise, not your brand. Your company solves problems, makes life easier, saves money, and helps my business accomplish our goals.
Now, if you make a promise, be a Jimmie Johns and follow-through, not a McDonalds and leave me waiting to do business with you.
Advertise during the Super Bowl, it's economical! 
If you knew your company would be in front of billions of people at the same time, and you had the money to invest, would you? YES. I just had to answer that one for you. The marketing minds behind the companies listed above are bright. They based decisions on metrics and pure ROI. Per dollar invested, a Super Bowl ad is an effective vehicle to get noticed. Engagement however, is all about timing. That's where Blogging for SEO comes in.
Blogs will change your business much like the Super Bowl ads listed above. It's about reach, volume, and targeting. In search, content alone is not king. keyword dense content that is stacked vertically is king. At Compendium, we build a Blog network that is aimed at acquisition through organic search. A powerful platform, and a team of experts, is charged with fueling this strategy for your business.
When you are watching the Super Bowl this weekend, think about your business, and your acquisition goals for 2009. Then call us and we'll discuss an enterprise search Blog platform customized for your business.
Go Cardinals!
Links for 2009-01-29
- New memcached extension » Andrei Zmievski - The API is more extensive and provides for such features as server-specific hashing, read-through cache and value callbacks, asynchronous multi-gets, and other stuff. It’ll be apparent in the docs.
- Open Source Systems Monitoring & Management Software | Hyperic - Hyperic HQ manages web applications wherever they are: in your data center, a virtual environment, or the cloud. Hyperic HQ automatically discovers, monitors, and manages software and network resources, regardless of type or location. HQ provides a single pane view of performance and availability for companies running apps on any or all popular platforms, including Unix, Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, VMware, and Amazon Web Services. With fast deployment, enterprise security, and extensibility, organizations will save time and meet SLAs.
- http://haproxy.1wt.eu/download/1.3/doc/architecture.txt - This document provides real world examples with working configurations. Please note that except stated otherwise, global configuration parameters such as logging, chrooting, limits and time-outs are not described here.
100 cool things you can do with HAProxy
- Jonathan Ellis's Programming Blog - Spyced: All you ever wanted to know about writing bloom filters - Bloom filters are surprisingly simple: divide a memory area into buckets (one bit per bucket for a standard bloom filter; more -- typically four -- for a counting bloom filter). To insert a key, generate several hashes per key, and mark the buckets for each hash. To check if a key is present, check each bucket; if any bucket is empty, the key was never inserted in the filter. If all buckets are non-empty, though, the key is only probably inserted -- other keys' hashes could have covered the same buckets. Determining exactly how big to make the filter and how many hashes to use to achieve a given false positive rate is a solved problem; the math is out there.
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-01-29
Links for 2009-01-26
- Suse Studio: Linux customization for the masses | The Open Road - CNET News - Suse Studio is a new, innovative Web-based service to enable (independent software vendors), developers, and the community to quickly and easily "mass customize" Linux. Suse Studio is the first tool to enable users to create fully supported, customized variants of Suse Linux Enterprise and OpenSuse, add additional software, and test the resulting image--all in one simple and easy-to-use interface.
- Taxes: Everyone Can Now File Their Taxes Online Free - You used to have to make less than $56,000 per year to use the IRS' Free File program to submit your income tax forms online (with help). Now everyone can e-file for free this year.
- Doom - This is just a fantastically hilarious tool. Use Doom as a user interface for managing your system processes.
- patterns & practices: Application Architecture Guide 2.0 (The Book) - Release: Application Architecture Guide 2.0 - Application Architecture Guide 2.0 project guide provides design-level guidance for the architecture and design of applications built on the .NET Framework. It focuses on the most common types of applications, partitioning application functionality into layers, components, and services, and walks through their key design characteristics.This guide is a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, product teams, and industry experts. This guide is related to the project http://www.codeplex.com/AppArchGuide/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=20586
- Neural Networks - A Systematic Introduction - Free PDF ebook on Neural Networks.
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-01-26
The other day I posted this graph showing the latest of the Gartner Hype Cycle's and the 
