Blog Software Comparison

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.

A search engine marketing firm, Slingshot SEO, got me thinking about bounce rates a few weeks ago. Sure, we've all heard that traffic, clicks, and conversion are all good ways to measure our marketing and corporate blogging efforts, but how many of us are paying attention to bounce rate? What sort of research are we doing in comparing bounce rates of our blogs vs. our landing pages vs. our website?

Slingshot believes that Google will one day (if they are not already doing so) take bounce rates into consideration when determining how to rank landing pages. It makes a lot of sense -- if 99% of the people who hit your page leave as quickly as they're able to, something isn't clicking. Getting those kinds of stats aren't difficult - it's making sense of them. "What" leads to bounce rate? The same things that apply to a website definitely apply to business blogs. The problem may be general design flaws, outdated content, irrelevant content, "boring" content, etc., etc. etc.

Now that I'm paying attention to the bounce rate on Compendium's own blogs, it's also interesting to see how various search terms impact bounce rate and read time. For example, "business blogging software" is one of our best terms, with people spending an average of 3 minutes on our blogs, and very few of them are bouncing off right away. The bounce rate for "business blogging software" on our website is higher, and the read time isn't as long.

What this tells me is that it would do Compendium a lot of good to be the #1 result in Google for this term. Clearly, it's attracting the right kind of attention, and higher search engine placement would likely mean more visibility. When it comes to your blogging program, as a first step, I recommend taking a look at your website stats, because then you'll have something to benchmark against. Thanks to Slingshot for getting me in the "bounce" frame of mind.

I was recently in the market for a racing scanner. I think owning one brings me into  compliance with an obscure zoning law within Indianapolis (where I live) requiring possession of such a gadget.  While usually one to succumb to impulse purchases, I decided to be responsible and diligent in the form of conducting research and checking several websites during the course of reviewing price, different brands and quality factors. 

Having never purchased such an item previously, I wasn't immediately aware of the differences between individual units in terms of channel capabilities, headsets, sound dampening, reception, etc. Reading product description sheets was cumbersome, but websites that allowed for side-by-side feature comparisons certainly proved beneficial.  Operating under the assumption that more is better -- more channels of reception and more decibel dampening -- I was able to narrow choices down to three units. 

One site in particular employed a feature that directly influenced my buying decision -- the ability to read product reviews from actual customers who have purchased the same item.  What a novel idea.  Rather than read specification documents, I was able to enjoy, and relate to, field testing and feedback from people just like me within a similar situation. 

While the source I ultimately purchased from is certainly on the right path of facilitating similar situation by posting actual customer reviews, room for improvement exists.  Imagine if their testimonials were in the form of blogs that position for search optimization.  Imagine the power of combining testimonial blogs with blogs drawing upon knowledge within the organization regarding new models, sales, service and support.

Might have cut my research time in half by leveraging those blogs for SEO.

Interested in learning about easy to use organizational blogging software?
Reach Daniel Wale and Compendium directly at (317) 777-6110

At Compendium, we get a lot of questions about the kinds of metrics and goals that organizations should think about when it comes to blogging.

And despite the fact that a lot of people don’t know what an RSS feed IS let alone how to use one, several companies seem to be of the mindset that the number of subscribers is the best way to gauge the success of the blog.

Well, unless you’re a publisher, that’s a bunch of baloney, and I’m here to tell you why.

Even if you are the funniest, most perceptive human being alive, it’s unlikely you’re your prospects are going to read your blog over and over again, day in day out. And the important question is: why would you want them to?

If you think about it, using RSS subscribers as your basis for success is comparable to using returning web visitors as your all-telling metric for your website. It’s a bit laughable, when you think about it. The way you measure success on your website is (or hopefully is) conversion, and guess what? You should be in the same mentality when it comes to your organization’s blogs.

I am not saying that returning visits or RSS subscribers should be ignored – quite simply, they are not the most important or telling metrics. Maybe I will return to your blog or your website three times – heck, even thirteen—before I’m ready to take the next step, but the key here is that you have to tell me what the next step is, and make it easy for me to do it. Thus, a conversion. And if you could get me to convert after three visits versus thirteen, that would be a good thing, right? So if you think about it in this way, people who are returning day after day to read your blog—and not doing anything else—may not be as desirable as people who read, get a bit of info, and move on.

An important part of this is the kind of blogging platform that you use—does it make it easy to include conversion points—but the most important aspect is knowing up front that no matter what anyone has told you in the past, RSS subscribers is not necessarily what you should be blogging for…

My good friend Doug Karr has a terrific post on his blog comparing Corporate Blogging Solutions to Forums.   The simple difference he calls out is the difference between support and marketing.  A Blogging Best Practice is using your Corporate blogging software to tell your story….explain your business and expose the human beings in your organization. 

Trust me, he says it way better than I could (and has some great pictures to go along with it)

Please take a minute to read Doug Karr’s post.

Today we met with Kristian Andersen + Associates, a phenomenal design company here in Indianapolis whom we think the world of. During the meeting, we got to talking about success, and how sometimes companies will ask if a certain solution is "guaranteed" to work.

Well, as Kristian put it so perfectly, the answer is usually a "yes," but it comes with a big IF. If you do everything on side A of the solution, as well as erything on side B of the solution, and take into consideration past experience and evidence, yes, it should work. But there a lot of places where things can fall apart, even when using excellent solutions and tools.

How does this translate into the world of corporate blogging? Well, yes, a huge portion of success is reliant upon the tools and people used to drive the success, but another huge part of it comes down to goals, strategy, and ultimately, blogging best practices. Let’s compare it to this: just because you have the fastest race car doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll win the Indy 500. For example, if it’s me behind the wheel instead of Danica Patrick, you’re guaranteed to lose. I don’t know the strategy. And if it’s my mom changing your tires instead of your regular pit crew, let’s just say that things are going to get ugly really fast.

It’s the same thing with blogging and nearly any other kind of corporate initiative. The blogging platform that you chose is your vehicle, and if you follow general best practices and do a good job creating valuable, relevant content, the rest should come together quite nicely.

Another example I like is comparing it to email, since a lot of marketers are already running successful email campaigns. The outcome of a well-done campaign is conversions, sales, and even clicks. A bad email campaign that’s irrelevant gets flagged as spam, or just as bad, it gets to the inbox and irritates a lot of people. It’s the same thing with blogging. The outcome of a well-done blogging program—one that follows blogging best practices—is that you’re delivering content that makes people want to do something (convert, learn more, etc.), and on the flip side of that, the search engines are likely to value that content and will give it a good ranking when people search for the terms that your content is about (this is where blogging for SEO comes in).

So the point of this post is to keep in mind that there is no silver bullet when it comes to anything in life, including blogging. Of course there are easy to use blogging tools that will make “getting there” as pain-free and easy as possible, but it still takes thought and a lot of elbow grease to make it successful.