Blogs As A Marketing Solution

So, this is my first week with Compendium, and I've learned an amazing amount in just a few days. It's an interesting perspective to have when, as of a few weeks ago, my knowledge of blogs was very basic. This is a great advantage in my eyes, however, because I can relate to organizations who are completely new to the world of blogging for business.

It's a fairly safe bet that your average person has a false perception of how a blog can be used as a marketing strategy. In July 2006 the Pew & American Life Project conducted a national phone survey and found that "most [bloggers] are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology." They went on to report that there are 12 million people in the US that keep an active blog, and 57 million adults read them. That being said, I would guess that those 12 million active blog users think of blogs like I used to - a successful blog has multiple reader comments for each post. WRONG.

This topic came up in a meeting I attended Wednesday with my co-worker Jenni. The potential client used a personal example of how he recently posted a comment on a political blog post, and his perception was that it was a successful blog based on the number of comments. Jenni did a great job of defining what "success" is. For organizational and corporate blogging, the goal is to generate new leads and convert blog readers into customers. At the end of the day, there needs to be a clear call-to-action. If you look to the right of this blog, our own call-to-action is to engage readers enough that they will click for more info and sign up for a software consultation.

My success on this blog will not be measured by the number of comments I receive, but rather engaging someone enough to take action and request more information about Compendium software.