Search Marketing, and the Catalog Industry
Posted Monday, July 21, 2008 by Chris Baggott
So let's talk Business Blogging for B2C organizations.   As many of you know I came originally from the Catalog business.  Catalog frustration is what drove me to  Email Marketing in the first place.   As far as Compendium Blogware goes, B2C is half our business.

I just spent $2500 with  a company called Frongate for some stuff in a new garage I just built.   I didn't go to Frontgate as a destination  or through direct navigation, but found them after a long painstaking series of searches looking for some specific floor mats my neighbor has.

It probably took me 15 minutes of searching to find the right product.   I was happy with the transaction (so far) and the good news for Frontgate is that I not only bought the mats, but wound up being upsold with some grade-A shelving as well.  Frontgate's mats were by far the most expensive as well.

But I couldn't find them.   My search was painful.  I went to a lot of sites that either didn't have the right product I was looking for or that the quality was suspect.    Remember...the searcher isn't going to call the thing the same thing you call it.  Frontgate isn't found searching 'garage mats', 'garage floor mats', or even using one of the names that Frontgate calls, them 'industrial grade garage flooring'.  If you seach 'PVC floor covering'  Frontgate is found on the bottom of the first page. 

Uhhhh.....I didn't know I was looking for PVC....thought that was for plumbing....

So how could advanced business blogging help in this environment?  

Compendium Blogware post about Frontgate catalog marketing and my garageSuppose they send me an email asking me why I need this product? ...ask me to tell them about my new garage and mention you are looking for stories for their blog.   I'm so excited about this stupid garage I would probably send pictures and tell them all about why I built it,  what I put in it,  how I'm outfitting it and how I'll use this Frontgate stuff.

That's all there is to it. 

And it's totally a blogging best practice.   Frontgate gets a great post and the searcher now gets terrific relevant content to more easily help the next searcher more easily find all the stuff I struggled to find.   The searcher is thrilled,  Frontgate is thrilled and as far as I'm concerned I'll never visit a Frontgate blog again...until I have another search that they can serve...

I promise I'm not likely to subscribe to a garage blog or make any comments...I've got a life....and I did subscribe to their email & I'm sure I'll be getting a catalog every month :-)

A blog strategy like this could generate literally hundreds of relevant blogging posts a week.   Combined this with widespread employee blogging on the products and you have not only a winning search engine marketing strategy...but a lot more happy prospects clicking through to buy.



We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (1)

Forrester: B2B Blogging Takes Nose Dive
Posted Tuesday, July 15, 2008 by Chris Baggott
I'm generally a fan of Forrester and their research, and they have done some terrific work on blogging in general.   But in the newest paper which is mis-named:  Derive Value From B2B Blogging comes off as really negative generally with regard to the state of B2B Blogging Solutions & implementations.

There are some terrific points in this paper for B2B marketers as it relates to Corporate Blogging and Blogging Best Practices. For example:

...many B2B marketers are failing to realize that good blogging style should resemble a coffee shop conversation, not a whitepaper.

But the sentence below really describes the overall tone of the paper:

Corporate bloggers are apparently struggling to sustain a conversation...


What is broken in the Forrester study is the overall "goal".   They keep talking about  conversation, community, comments, and repeat visitors as the main objective of corporate blogging.   These are metrics that are doomed to fail.

Successful business blogs have two characteristics.

First, rather than top down from the "C" level,  they open up by having widespread employee participation.    Prospects and Customers are not the ones to write frequently about your business....but you hire smart, passionate people who like their jobs, like the customer, are proud of your products....let them blog about it.

Secondly, ROI need to be measured based on search & conversion.   Blogging is a content and engagement strategy.    Widespread employee blogging generates lots of great topic specific, keyword, frequently updated and authentic content.    The more content you generate like this, the more traffic you generate.  Most successful Corporate Blogging programs in our system drive three times or more traffic than their traditional sites.

When the searcher lands on a page with a post that specifically matches their search intent...written by a real human being and addressing a similar situation...they convert.  They take the next step in the relationship.

The business blog is basically a one shot encounter.  They search, they find the blog, they convert to either email, phone or a sales relationship (if we are talking about B2B)

Blogging for search is legitmate, valued by the searcher and highly effective if executed properly.



We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (3)

If you don't blog, how do you tell stories?
Posted Monday, July 14, 2008 by Chris Baggott
Seth Godin has a quote at the beginning of "All Marketers are Liars".  

"Either you are going to tell stories that spread, or you will become irrelevant."

Websites are for facts and figures.....blogs are for stories.  Every company has stories that come up every day.  Customer interactions, product innovations, problems solved.  An employee based blogging strategy empowers your people to tell these stories!  it's a business blogging best practice.  

Compendium Blogware is a perfect example.  As a blogging software company in Indianapolis we empower all of our employees to participate in our blog strategy....they blog, the software organizes the content around keywords and topics.

Not only do we drive a ton of organic traffic, we get to tell a lot of compelling stories.




We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (0)

Universal Search & Blended Search....threat or opportunity for business?
Posted Wednesday, July 9, 2008 by Chris Baggott
There has been a lot of talk about the changes in search results brought on by Universal Search & Blended Search.  

Basically, what this means is that Google and the other search engines are considering a lot more than just your website SEO when deciding what results to deliver.

Specifically, It's becoming really important to have frequently updated Corporate blogs, pictures and even video to greatly increase your chances of ranking on a wide range of keywords.

Blended Search is actually great for the marketers that are really trying to build trust and engagement with prospects and customers (although in this case we are mostly talking about prospects since your customers typically shouldn't be searching for you).   This is where people really need to rethink everything they have been taught about the Goals for Corporate or Business Blogging.  Business blog strategy has to take into account and focus on the goals of Search Engine Optimization and  Conversion.   

When I read about Blended Search I tend to hear a lot of panic that these new strategies are both hard and expensive.   BALONEY.

Let me introduce you to my friends & client of Compendium Blogware, Greenfield Liquors.  This is a tiny small town liquor store in Greenfield Indiana and they totally take advantage of  Web 2.0 marketing strategies and business blogging with very little effort and lots of great results.    Take a look at this Video that appeared in their blog.     The winery featured is Paige 23.

Paige 23 Wine from Compendium Blogware Post on Blended Search


Now, Type Paige 23 wines, Greenfield into your google search box and see what happens.  



 Home run!   Another great example of a Blogging Best Practice.   Blog management software for business is affordable and easy.   Try it! 

www.compendiumblogware.com



We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (1)

Icann Domain Name Confusion: Why you have to start corporate blogging now.
Posted Tuesday, July 1, 2008 by Chris Baggott
Many of you may have noticed the announcement last week regarding ICANN dramitically increasing the suffixes available for domain names.   Here is a blurb from the New York Times:

According to new rules unanimously passed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, at its meeting here, any company, organization or country will soon be able to apply for a new Web address extension, called a top-level domain.

That could smooth the way for Web addresses that end in city names, brands and generic words. It could also sow confusion in the minds of Web users, create a host of new ways to exploit the Web addressing system and start a wave of legal skirmishes over applications to register trademarks — .coke, for example.

Uggh!  What a mess this makes for normal businesses & organizations.  People are already having a tough time keeping track of your web address.  By adding basically an unlimited number of  .anything  branding by domain becomes just about impossible. 

If anything is going to drive people even more into the arms of the search engines, it's going to be this.

What are you going to do? 

Incorporate blog management software company wide.  The biggest benefit of enterprise or business blogging is Search engine optimization.   The more people you have blogging, the more relevant content gets created, and the more likely you are to be found accross a lots of keywords.  

Forget people remembering your domain...focus on getting found by using corporate blog tools.



We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (0)

Find your 'ness' through Corporate Blogging
Posted Tuesday, July 1, 2008 by Chris Baggott
Dupree in Compendium Blogware Corporate Blogging SoftwareI recognize that not many people have seen "You, Me & Dupree", but I believe it's a movie destined for cult-like status in the future.

What does this have to do with Business Blogging Software or Corporate Blogging Strategy....well, there is an important lesson that Dupree is trying to teach us.



We all need to find our inner "ness"  -ness is a suffix that goes after your name, as in what is my "Chris-ness"   the unique thing that makes me...me...?  (ok, you really need to see the movie to get this)

The point I'm making poorly here is that organizations need to find and articulate their 'ness' too and blog creation software is the way to do it.

Use blogging and communicate your 'ness'.



We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (0)

Compendium Blogware Closes $1.6mm
Posted Friday, June 27, 2008 by Chris Baggott
chris baggott of Compendium Blogware Corporate Blogging Software Solution with Seth Godin I am pleased to announce that we were quickly oversubscribed on our most recent funding round.

Seeking $1.5mm we quickly had commitments from angel investors for $1.6 at which point we closed the round.

Whats significant about Compendium Blogware's Corporate Blogging software is we are able to get by on much smaller investments than a traditional software startup.   This may not always be the case, but at this point because our client base is growing so quickly we are able to fund a great deal of the company out of operations......kind of old fashioned I know :-)

But obviously, we are really excited and proud to have the support of our investors and proud of the fact that that so many Organizations (from large enterprises to small businesses) are finding tremendous value in our blog management software.

Blogging for business is just beginning a rapid adpotion and organizations are recognizing the need for an easy to deploy SaaS solution with a solid ROI.

Follow this link to a nice article today on the announcement....Compendium Blogware Funding Announcement



We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (1)

Comment I made on Debbie Weil's Blog
Posted Thursday, June 26, 2008 by Chris Baggott
I made this comment today on Debbie Weil's blog:

Uggh! Every time I hear the term "Brand" I cringe...

If social media is telling us anything, it's telling us that people are tired of 'brands', we are tired of institutions, we are tired of being treated like a mass of consumers instead of individuals, We are DONE with reach & frequency advertising.

What we want is to deal with people...real human beings that like what they are doing, like the customer, believe in their products & services and think that they have something of value to offer.

The way we find these real humans is through search.

The job of the marketer is no longer to shout and interrupt...fighting to create a brand message. The job of the marketer is now to listen. The prospect will tell us when they have a need (by typing that need into a search engine) Marketers need to listen...stand up respectfully, raise their hand and say...."hey, we can help you".

This is the real power of corporate blogging. Empower the humans involved in your business..your employees to create content, offer that content and get found when people search. The searcher lands on content that reflects their search intent, written by a real person who honestly deserves consideration....

This is how social media like blogging successfully fits into the modern marketing mix.

Sorry for the rant... :-)

Best,

Chris Baggott
CEO
Compendium Blogware
www.compendiumblogware.com



We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (2)

Corporate Blogging from Africa
Posted Monday, June 23, 2008 by Chris Baggott
Young Girl from a School Visit in Kenya, for Compendium BlogwareOk....I didn't do any business blogging from Africa.   But I could have....

Perhaps the thing that surprised me the most from my recent two week trip to Kenya was how wireless they were....   My IPhone worked better in the bush 300 miles from Nairobi than it works in my hometown here in Indiana.

So that raises the question...why didn't I blog?   The honest answer was that I promised my family to do no work (including blog writing) while we were on this trip.  For the most part I kept to that.  But I did think about it a lot.    And of course posed the question:  "I there room in a Corporate Blog for reflections from a personal vacation?"

The answer of course is ABSOLUTELY.  The whole idea behind Blogs for Companies is to humanize an organization.   You blog for your business because you want to not only showcase your expertise in specific products or services but also let searchers learn a little more about you and your company as individuals. Blog Information should contain personal insights...human interest and other content that let's the reader get to know and trust you.

I went to Kenya with my kids...I didn't know what to expect and had the experience of a lifetime from an educational, business and fun standpoint.    Like it or not, blog writing is what I do...and what I'm going to be talking about over the next few days is what I learned about Corporate Blogging in Kenya.



We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (0)

Duplicate Content and Compendium Blogware
Posted Thursday, June 5, 2008 by Chris Baggott
As most know by now, the idea behind Compendium Blogware is to help Corporate Bloggers as well as Searchers, by organizing blog content around topics or keywords.

Where all other blog platforms basically organize blog posts by author, Corporate Blogging gets muddled as more Corporate Journalism.   The reality is that if someone is searching on a topic...they probably care a lot more about finding everything on that topic vs. the journalistic thoughts of any single author.   Both Searchers and Business benefit when corporate content is arranged by relevance.

At the end of the day, Google and the other search engines want the searcher to be happy with the result based on the keyword phrase they entered....in other words, Relevance is the final deciding factor.

Search Engine Expert Vanessa Fox explains it this way:

"Relevance means keeping to a topic, helping the search engine understand what your site is about and, ideally, about one thing in particular."
The idea behind a Compendium is to collect all the writing (blog posts) within a company and 'Compend' or assign that content to specific keywords or topics... The net result is many more blog pages that are just what Vanessa is calling for...focused blogs talking about only one thing.

There has been some concern that the Compending Process can create an issue because of duplicate content.   It's not a concern.   Basically, Compendium Blogware is a form of internal content syndication.   Every post is clearly linked back to the original source (author) and Compending improves the user experience by arranging all the relevant blog posts in one place based on keyword phrase vs. various individual author blogs.  

At the end of the day, Google and the other search engines are going to give preference to pages based on whether they are useful to the user....

Adam Lasnik is Google's person responsible for communicating this.....Let's hear what he has to say about Duplicate Content:



We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (0)

quote of the day
Posted Tuesday, June 3, 2008 by Chris Baggott
So I see this today:

"Social networking sites represent a new mass medium for brand advertising"

This quote is attributed to Seth Goldstein at a talk during the IAB conference.  

With all apologies to Seth, who I don't know...it's this kind of thing that really reminds me of how much people don't understand what the Social Phenomenon is telling us.

Advertising as we know it is over.   There is no benefit to Mass Marketing;  in fact it's kind of embarrassing.   People want to deal with people...they trust human beings more than brands or institutions.   They don't want to be 'marketed to'  simply because they happen to be catching up with a friend on a network any more than they want a TV commercial interrupting "The Office".  

This is why search is so important.   The other Seth (Godin) taught us this lesson back at the turn of the century with Permission Marketing.   Don't try and interrupt me or intercept me....just because I happen to be standing there.

The customer is in control and will tell us when they have a need for what we do.   How?  They search.   It's so simple....."you vendor.....stand over there."  "When or If I have a need I'll tell you."

They do this through the search engines.

Our jobs as marketers now become being really good at listening.   What we can't control is how that person is going to describe their problem.  They could use any of thousands of different keyword phrases to indicate a need for our solution.   All we have to do is be ready to jump up when summoned.   "Hey, yeah...I can help here!"

That is blog tools are so important...and why you need to engage everyone on your team in the corporate blogging effort.   Creating lots of relevant content, organizing that content around your strategic keywords, and then having an engagement process that makes the searcher happy all lead to a win-win relationship.

Getting people to play your game isn't the same as doing business. 

Mass marketing has been dead for years....but like the Subservient Chicken, it just doesn't know it yet.



We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (0)

Fight Piggybacking by winning your own searches!
Posted Tuesday, June 3, 2008 by Chris Baggott
There was an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal today called: 
Google Search Ads Rile Its Big Customers.

Wall Street journal story Google Search Ads Rile Its Big CustomersThe issue is that big brands are angry because of a practice called 'Piggybacking" where smaller competitors or resellers use the brands trademarked names, slogans or catch phrases to compete for display ad or pay per click traffic.   The example on the right show's the ads the display when someone does a search for Holiday Inn Orlando.

What's interesting is that Holiday Inn wins the entire front page organically on this search.  If I'm typing in Holiday Inn I would think I'm looking for Holiday Inn and 99% of the time I'm going to click on the organic results anyway. 

What the Brands are missing while they focus on this, is all the other terms that are associated with travel that they should be targeting.

This is where a widespread corporate blogging strategy will help them a lot.   Blog posting software that organizes content around topics and perhaps more importantly in travel blogs; location.  All this will expand the reach of any given brand and  drive much higher engagement. 

What's interesting about this is that the Big Brands are ceding local search to the smaller local companies.   Blogging has proven to be a great tool for local search (watch for a new whitepaper shortly) and because of the low cost and easy adoption of SaaS tool like Compendium Blogware, it's the local SMB's who are the early adopters. 

But this is also an amazing opportunity for the big brands.  They have more people, and they have people who are in the local community..this combination gives them the unique resources to generate more content more frequently and will lead the big brands to ultimate search success.




We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (0)

Misconceptions about Blog Content
Posted Monday, June 2, 2008 by Chris Baggott
I'm totally lifting this paragraph from a comment I saw posted by Scott Henderson of Mediasauce about Corporate Blog Content and who should write....I promise I will send him a link:

"..Another big challenge is the misperception of how to blog. It’s not lengthy white papers, stilted memorandums, and corporate speak, but needs to be more akin to engaging coffee house/cocktail party conversation The savvy corporations tap people who are great minglers and conversationalists, who can host a great conversation as well as partake in the other conversations out there (i.e. visiting and posting on other blogs)."

Right on!   Advanced Business Blogging whether it's Enterprise or Small Business Blogging depends on frequent content creation and very narrow focus.  Find the people in your company who are the most passionate, and have access to the most stories about your company and most importantly, your products or services.

I'll give you a hint...they probably are not C-level.





We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (0)

George knows what makes Corporate Blogging Work
Posted Friday, May 30, 2008 by Chris Baggott
Advanced Business Blogging is easy.   Usually where it slows down is in the process of content creation.   Too many people worry about content for business blogs instead of focusing on the real human stories that happen every day.    Business bloggers often have a tendency to overthink every word to a point of infrequency.

Frequency is the most important component in Corporate Blogging. Blogs aren't the place for articles or whitepapers.

Short, sweet authentic anecdotes about things that are happening in your business, with your customers, success, missteps...all this is what makes great corporate blog content.

Thanks to Scott for the clips!




We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (0)

WordPress is easy???
Posted Thursday, May 29, 2008 by Chris Baggott
There are a lot of parallels to compare Corporate Blogging today to where Email Marketing was 5 or 6 years ago.   Back then, Email Marketing was free.  All you had to do was download a ListServ application, configure a server or two, find and manipulate some plug-in applications for registration or bounces or unsubscribes or de-duplication or throttling or opens & clickthrough tracking or analytics.....and the list goes on.

In the end, some geeks might have loved all this tinkering, but from a business or marketing standpoint it was a nightmare.   The solution was all encompassing SaaS tools from companies like ExactTarget, Constant Contact or Responsys...

Superior tools designed for marketers, not IT folks.   In the end, both parties were happier.

The same discussion happens in Corporate Blogging Software.   "WordPress is free...why pay you?"    For the most part we hear this when IT folks are involved.   Natuarally as they understand the Compendium Blogware offering they start to see the feature differences, but the don't really understand that Free isn't Free. 

That is why I was so happy to see this post today from a big Technology focused Blog talking about how overly hard WordPress is:

"Recently I have started chatting to an engineer at Automattic, the mob which employs most of the lead programmers on Wordpress. They also run the Wordpress.com service, which is a big job — millions of blogs, tens of millions of monthly visits."
"I complained to him that one of my annoyances in life is how complex Wordpress actually is. Why? Because you don’t just have to configure Wordpress to get anywhere. To get it to perform acceptably you can either throw powerful hardware at the problem (which is how Club Troppo has done it since our donation drive last year) or you can implement a whole rogue’s gallery of tweaks and adaptations."

When you think about what your goals are with advanced business blogging the focus should be on engagement and traffic through SEO....not constantly tweaking software, messing with plug-ins or installing more powerful servers.   Let the Vendor manage that stuff....





We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (3)

Blogging ROI?
Posted Wednesday, May 28, 2008 by Chris Baggott
I am going to spend some more cycles understanding this aversion to leveraging Corporate Blogging or any other social media to drive business.

People often ask me what size businesses use Compendium as their Corporate Blogging platform.   Well...we are growing quickly and like all SaaS applications our software is used as a blogging platform in large enterprise organization as well as the smallest of small business.   They all have the same objective....drive engagement....I should say, drive measureable engagement.

Our smallest client is Lizann Brand of tiny Greenfield Liquors.   Here is a story told to me by one of our Account Managers yesterday:

"Lizan from Greenfield Liquors called this morning and she shared a great story with me.  This past weekend she had a customer from out of town stop by the store. He was from Toledo OH and was in town for the 500. He specifically wanted Absinthe – he found out that Lizan had the product at Greenfield Liquors because of her last blog post. Her blog post: http://greenfieldliquors.compendiumblog.com/blog/owners-corner/0/0/lucid-absinthe-is-at-greenfield-liquors I believe she said that it is $60 a bottle and he wanted 3 of them. Unfortunately she only had one in stock. I think next time she will stock up on a product before she writes a post about it!"


This is a three employee shop.  They use their blogs to win searches on various products with a local qualifier (she's in a suburb of Indianapolis...hence the 500)

She reads the Wine Speculator and posts on the products featured there...knowing that locally others are reading the same thing and then searching to find that specific product.    They also use the blogs for building up their email list and to solicit drink recipes & other content from their visitors.  They put very little time or effort into this.   From a pure ROI standpoint, Compendium Blogware is the most productive tool in her marketing arsenal.



We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (1)

How I spent my Memorial Day Weekend
Posted Tuesday, May 27, 2008 by Chris Baggott
So don’t tell my family, but a big part of my limited brain capacity was spent this steven baker of Business Week talking about Blogging and Scocial mediaweekend thinking about Stephen Baker (pictured) & Heather Green of Business Week regarding his latest cover story: Beyond Blogs (sub context…social media will change your business), a follow up to his fantastic 2005 article; Blogging Will Change Your Business.


Let me start by saying this 2005 article had a huge influence on me.   Additionally, Steve’s cover story of Janury 2006: Why Math Will Rock Your World is the reason I subscribe to the paper version of Business Week…the only paper subscription I have. 

Let me be clear from the start that I'm a fan of Steve's, love his work and he is one of the few Print Journalists I feed to my homepage....I just think this story misses the mark.

The Last Lecture Image in compendium post on Corporate BloggingThis weekend I also read  “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch.   I’m sure most of you have heard by now about this book highlighting a final CMU lecture by a dying college professor. Here is the video….

Randy has some great lessons here, but one that kept coming back to me was to “focus on the fundamentals.”

This is what kept nagging me about Stephen & Heather’s updated Business Blogging article…they really seemed to ignore the fundamentals.

There are basically two big problems with reporting on Social Media that it seems all journalists fall into...(wait!  I just thought of a third…)

1.    Chasing the newest thing.   There is a lot changing in social media.  But the big story for business isn’t Twitter or Facebook, it’s new and more effective ways to use the basics:  Email and Corporate Blogging.  Randy talks about his early youth football days.   How a coach made them practice with no balls because, like Vince Lombardi says, this game is about fundamentals.    In Randy’s talk  a kid asks why they have no footballs.   Coach answers: “how many people on the field don’t have the ball?”    Answer: “21”.    Right says the coach:  “We are going to focus on what those 21 people are doing.”  
What happens with getting  hung up on the newest widget or Twitter is it distracts from what the vast majority of people are doing online…..email and Search.   There are amazing strides being made in data driven email dialog and blogging is revolutionizing Search Engine Optimization and engagement.  Pew Study showing the focus on Email and Web with regard to Internet Activity According to the Pew Interent and American Life research, (see graph)  this is where the people are.  This is where business needs to be focused.   Yes, keep an eye on new things, but focus energy on perfecting what is working today.  Search and Email are the biggest parts of the Social Media mix and present the largest opportunities for business.
2.    Celebrity.    So many journalist covering  Social Media focus on Celebrities and celebrity bloggers.   There are 20,000,000 businesses in the United States…and this doesn’t count non-profits.   Hearing stories about Jimmy Wales, Michael Arrington, Kerry Miller or Jonathan Schwartz is great if you’re People Magazine, but this is Business Week.   Tell me about real businesses using these tools.   The story at Sun Microsystems isn’t the story of a CEO/Celebrity blogger (Jonathan's Blog), the story is the thousands of normal everyday Sun employees that blog.  Who are they?  What are the benefits to the organization?  (hint…it’s not touchy-feely....the ROI is found in winning searches and converting those visitors to prospects….)
There was a great quote from Richard Edelman in the Dallas Morning News the other day:
“It’s clear that when it comes to traditional authority figures – whether they’re chief executives or heads of state – people trust them less,” says Mr. Edelman. “Employees are the new credible source of information. We have data that shows an employee blog is five times more credible than a CEO blog – and I say this as a CEO blogger.”

This is the big story in Social Media as it relates to Business.
Fundamentals are about focusing most of your effort on the things that are most important…with Social Media as it relates to business, that is the amazing strides being made with Email driving engagement through data and  Search made through widespread employee blogging.
3.    Journalism.   Journalists can be forgiven for sticking close to home when considering Blogging and Social Media.   A quote like this is typical: 

“According to a recent study by Forrester Research, only a quarter of the U.S. adult population even bothers to read a blog once a month."
Journalists think in terms of circulation…. of a fan base that is going to be loyal to a given author.    This doesn’t work in business.  More importantly it’s shouldn’t even remotely be a measure of success for business.   Again, this makes people like Kerry Miller or Arianna Huffington interesting to Journalists but not really relevant to the other 19.9M organizations that are not involved in publishing.  
Businesses measure success based on metrics like traffic, engagement, conversion, leads, sales…that sort of thing.   How is social media being successfully executed against those metrics…..now that’s a story.

By no means do I want to minimize the power or potential of these new tools.   Internal Wiki’s are perhaps the greatest thing to happen to internal organization communications and collaboration since the telephone…or at least the Outlook Calendar.    Both BT and Best Buy have great cases to make.   But the reality is that every CEO on the planet wakes up with one thought first and foremost….sales.

What’s missing from the conversation about Social Media is how any of this affects the actual numbers.    It’s almost like it would be ‘dirty’ for anyone to talk about how a business should use social media to drive sales.   

Sales happen when there is a need and a solution that comes together for mutually agreed value.  (I value that flat screen more than I value my $1,000 in cash)   

What’s been lost from traditional marketing since the advent of TV has been a fundamental premise we all learned from Zig Ziglar.   People buy from People.   Marketers have been corrupted by “Brand” and “Consumer” for so long that they forgot about the people on both sides.    

The greatest gift of Social Media is the ability to reintroduce people to the mix.    Email, Search & Employee Blogging all are social media….and all drive better relationships, higher engagement and more business.  That’s what the entire Social Media phenomenon is telling us.     We trust people more than we trust institutions.



We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (1)

The URL is dead...LONG LIVE SEARCH!
Posted Thursday, May 22, 2008 by Chris Baggott
In a great post today from ReadWriteWeb called "The URL Is Dead...Long Live Search."   My favorite quote:

".....it would seem that long, unwieldy URLs will become even more cumbersome on devices with limited screen size. That makes search even more important, and driving consumers to your product via search seems like a safe bet."

Basically it talks about a big brand (SpecialK) that ran a TV commercial and asked the viewers to search rather than remember a URL.  It's a great point, but I still think misguided execution.

The strategy was a big high production TV commercial that I'm sure drove a huge spike in sight visits to download a diet plan.    I don't know the exact number of visitors, or how many people actually downloaded the plan.

What I do know, is there are Thousand of keywords associated with diet and weight loss and millions of searches....and those searches happen every day.   It's frustrating to me that an old media 'campaign' like this gets so lauded when if SpecialK or any big brand would simply invest a fraction of the resources that goes into one commercial into a corporate blogging strategy designed for SEO they would be able to accomplish a couple of significant goals:

  1. A blog program designed for Search Optimization will throw a very wide net out and attract lots of qualified traffic over a wide range of keywords.  Enterprise blogging is one of the best ways to drive SEO.
  2. Real Engagement.   The Edelman Trust Barometer for 2008 tells us that the most trusted sources for information are "people like me".  What corporate blogging does is allow organizations to create a lot of content written by real human beings....when a searcher finds you, they find 'someone like them' and the result is significantly higher conversion.
Compendium makes easy to use blogging software for small businesses to retailers and serving the worlds largest enterprise applications...all delivered SaaS.

If you would like more Blog Information From Compendium, visit our site.




We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (1)

Compenidum Blogware Press
Posted Monday, May 12, 2008 by Chris Baggott
Compendium Blogware, small business to enterprise blogging softwareI wanted to share some good Corporate Blogging press with you.  I know it probably seems self-serving...but hey...it's my business :-)

This first one is from a city business journal here in Indianapolis and talks about our growth.  The article may not have the complete business concept down, but the bottom line is we are growing quickly because there is a tremendous need for easy to use blogging software designed specifically for business, corporations, enterpirses or any other type organization.

From a small business blog standpoint, Direct Magazine had a great feature about a dental practice that is using Compendium Blogware to help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).   Blogging for Search is a great use of Compendium and as the Dr. in this article says, it's very measurable and converts into paying customers at a very high rate.  I'll leave it to you to read the article to see just how high a rate he is talking about :-)




We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (0)

Follow up to Small Business Blogging Webinar
Posted Wednesday, May 7, 2008 by Chris Baggott


I just finished a webinar on small business blogging with Logoworks.  In that I referenced an Edelman Trust Study.   I'll put that up in a couple of days, but if you are just coming from the webinar, please just email me:  Chris@compendiumblogware.com and I'll get it to you directly.



We Know Business Blogging.
Take our 60 Second Blogging Challenge, and you will too. Start here

Comments (0)
Previous     Next