Corporate Blog Policy

May the Force Be With Your Organization

Thursday, March 4, 2010 by Brittan Bright

I committed one of the deadliest sins of discount-retail shopping this weekend: I threw away a receipt after trying to purchase my 7-year old stepson a Star Wars poster that turned out to be poster of the Beatles. I also accidentally mistook the Rebel Trooper Army Pack for the Assassin Droid something or other which is apparently vastly different. The look on his little face trumped the dreaded task of making a trip to the customer service department sans-receipt.

As a sales professional, I'm always looking for new customer acquisition strategies and competing for business. It struck me that, despite it's proximity to my home, this particular discount retailer was one I had not frequented often due to many bad customer experiences. This store in particular had destroyed my trust in the entire chain's ability to use common-sense over policy and act like human beings. However this was prior to the advent of Social Media. The article I had just read on Mashables about consumer trust in the age of Social Media came to mind. I decided that this was their chance to win me back! After all, those bad experiences happened before access to so many competitors at the click of a mouse was widely practiced. This chain has had a complete image overhaul, including a social media strategy. According to their marketing efforts, this shifted focus is geared toward customer satisfaction.

Still I prepared myself for battle, determined to use the Force to get the simple and equitable exchange I felt I deserved. As I suspected, I was stopped, bag in hand, by the greeter at the door and asked for my receipt. As I explained the facts of the situation, he just shook his head and told me it wasn't going to happen.

I was not swayed, surely I could find some sensible individual with a gaggle of Facebook friends who would recognize my power and the potential disaster of disappointing a socially and digitally connected consumer. I clutched my Blackberry, prepared to document my experience in real-time if necessary as I charged on toward the Customer Service counter.

When it was my turn, I positioned my smart-phone suggestively on the counter and plead my case. She asked "all you want is an exchange?" I nodded. She told me to just go and get what I needed, and said would work it out.

The moral of this story is (other than my flair for drama) that if you do not create and embrace an open exchange of information like blogging as the center of your social media platform than you not only risk the destruction of an enraged client with no where to go but Twitter or Facebook, you also lose the momentum of an engaged client and an opportunity to redeem yourself. That redemption may just lead to new clients and have the very viral effect that most companies with a Social Media strategy are struggling blindly for.

May the Force of the people be with you and your organization.

Corporate Blogging Policy - Get Some!

Friday, February 19, 2010 by Jason Harvoth

Does your company have a corporate blogging policy? Do your employees spend time building your brand, enhancing your messaging, or contributing to your lead pool? If you haven't thought about blogging for lead generation, then you need to start thinking about it.

I spoke to a gentleman the other day that was very satisfied with his company's acquisition rate of new clients. I asked him for a key phrase or two that I could search to find him on the web, w/o using his company name. And, his company didn't come on the first 5 pages of the Google results. So let me ask you this, Mr. Customer, "If you are satisfied with your client adoption rate now, how much more satisfied would you be if your company could be found on Page 2 of Google results? Or...even Page 1?" In sales professional terms, the prior scenario is what is referred to as a "No Brain-er."

Compendium's search marketing platform can help drive more relevant traffic to your site, thus improving the ROI on your marketing spend.

Get Results - Get Found - Get Leads

Take a look at our recent 3rd Generation Whitepaper & get informed.

Entering into the blogosphere

Tuesday, September 8, 2009 by Sarah Sedberry

The blogosphere is always growing, and has certainly gotten a boost lately with the surge in social media. At Compendium we offer an affordable blogging platform that allows companies the ability to increase their organic search marketing efforts, while providing a view into their company, and generating sales leads.

Due to its affordability, we are constantly hearing the "gong" ringing in our sales department. What does that mean to your company and marketing efforts - the competition is rising, and its important that you don't get left behind!

Here is a quick "welcome aboard" to some of our more recent clients who have signed on:

Architura
Auto Accessories
Flow Meter Controls
Grand View Outdoors
Loon Mountain
Sharper
Sprinkler Warehouse
Wagner Signs

...and to those already up and blogging!

AppAssure Software
Design Toscano
Indiana University - Kelley School MBA
Indium
Market Direct Solutions
NursesPro
Policy Settlement
The Plan-it! Group

As you can see our clients are from a variety of industries and company sizes. Reiterating the fact that blogging is for everyone, and with dedicated support from the Client Success Team, you'll have a partner to help provide advice and guidance along the way.

For more information on incorporating blogging into your marketing plan, check out one of our many case studies, whitepapers, or schedule a demo.

The Benefits of Corporate Blogging

Tuesday, September 8, 2009 by Randy Cox

One vital component in any company is communication. Now that connectivity through the World Wide Web is enhanced and is made available to a large group of population, it is a good decision for big and even small corporations to make use of Corporate Blogging.

Corporate blogging is mainly focused in the online marketing side of a company. It is a way to connect to the employees and the most importantly to the clients. By creating a buzz online, potential customers will be able to get hold of the information and will gain trust and confidence in the product. A certain business blog is utilized to have a better outcome and also uniformity in the marketing process.

Like many great ideas also lies a downside to blogging. The opposite of gaining fame may strike caused by malicious attack or improper presentation of products and ideas.

It is important that corporate blogging will go along with the marketing policies of the company. Since corporate blogging is now widely used as a vehicle for communication and product launches, it is better to make use of it now so as not to be left behind by others.

Now is the beginning of the future.

What Came out of that Consumer Advocate Meeting?

Wednesday, September 2, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Yesterday, I wrote a post about the perils of being too zealous with the collection and use of customer data. I made passing mention about the efforts of several consumer and civil rights groups to spell out what sort of protections should be put in place.

A recently published followup story on CNet News.com gives a wrap-up of the group's findings. More importantly, the article provides a link to the policy document that articulates the basis for their stance. In the next few days, I'll be digging further into the policy document and commenting about some of key recommendations and what they could mean for marketers.

Where I'm Speaking This Week (hint: Boston on Tuesday May 5th)

Monday, May 4, 2009 by Chris Baggott

Tomorrow (Tuesday May 5th) I'll be presenting at the Online Marketing Summit in Boston. This should be a great event with lot's peer to peer learning going on. Hear how OMS describes the event:

The Online Marketing Summit is the only education based event of its kind focused on best practices in online marketing including Social Media, Search Engine Marketing (SEO & PPC), Web Analytics, Usability, Email Marketing, Integrated Marketing Strategy.

Built on the premise that learning best practices from real “in the field” experts and sharing knowledge amongst marketing peers is essential to your success, OMS has a running policy of no tradeshow booths, no vendor pitches and no sales-folk allowed! At OMS, you not only will receive knowledge that can be immediately applied to your workplace but will also forge invaluable new relationships with your marketing peers.

I'm presenting "Blogging As A Search Marketing Tool" at 3:30pm. The OMS Complete Agenda can be found by hitting the link. If you are going to be there, please be sure to introduce yourself.

Open Source Code from Compendium

Tuesday, March 24, 2009 by Blake Matheny

Here at Compendium we use a lot of open source software and other open platforms. The list is innumerable (at least in a blog post) but a few pieces of software that we rely on include:

Linux (CentOS)
PHP
MySQL
Agavi
Phing
AWS (SimpleDB, EC2, S3, SQS, CloudFront)
YUI

While some of the software we write isn't an appropriate candidate for releasing to the world, on occasion we do develop stuff that doesn't offer anyone a competitive advantage and should really be open sourced. I hadn't put a lot of thought into how to actually go about releasing that software until this past week.

One of the issues that we run into is how we end up pushing static assets to our CDN (CloudFront) during releases. We have a number of static assets that change somewhat frequently (Javascript & CSS mostly) and because of the nature of CloudFront, we needed to introduce a naming scheme to deal with this. Essentially each static asset gets a different file path every time we publish it. This scheme has a few problems, including having to publish all of our static assets every time one of them changes.

After a particularly change intensive testing period required a number of publications to the CDN, we decided that enough was enough and came up with a more reasonable scheme for publishing static assets. In this new scheme, assets will be named based on their MD5 hash. This means that an asset is only added to the CDN if it has actually changed. It also meant that we needed a new way of handling renaming, compression, etc.

This required a number of phing enhancements including:

YuiCompression Filter to compress CSS and Javascript
Md5Mapper to handle renaming of a file based on the hash of the source file
Rollup scheme for defining Javascript and CSS rollups
S3 Publisher Task

We intend on releasing this as an open source project so that others can benefit from the work. Some other pieces of work that we will over time look at open sourcing:

Asynchronous Logging for PHP
Enhanced Agavi logging subsystem
Yahoo BOSS Access
Memcache Session Storage for Agavi
Flexible, policy based, cache subsystem
- Memcache
  - Includes chunking for segments greater than 1MB
- Files
- S3
Selenium Integration for Phing/Agavi/PHPUnit

A while back Google released their Google Code product. Google Code is basically a place to host open source projects. We will be hosting our Open Source code at the Compendium Code project. It is still barren but look for changes over the next few weeks as we start to publish some of the above projects to the repository.

Businss Blog webinar questions continued: #2

Friday, March 20, 2009 by Chris Baggott

Dan asked: As a medical manufacturer, our greatest obstacle is pushing blog entries and comments through a review process. Any advice on that?

Well this may sound a little commercial, but work flow and approvals are a big part of the Compendium Blogware offering. Beyond Simple Blogging Software, our focus is squarely on the business or organizational users vs. platforms that are better suited for individual journal type bloggers.

What folks in business understand is that they have both an opportunity and a liability when it comes to widespread employee and constituent blogging. The opportunity of course comes from the collective nature of all that great passion and content that leads to better search engine traffic and the ability to humanize your marketing in a whole new way.

Business also needs to understand, as Dans organization does, that they are responsible for every item of content that comes from their organization from either official or unofficial channels. Most companies rely on policies vs. real work flow and an approval process. That's just not good enough.

The trouble with a policy is that you can only react to it when something goes wrong.....the horse is out of the barn. The damage is done.

Having a work flow and approval process like with Compendium is a business requirement because it's the only way to proactively manage your exposure.

The Limits of Limiting Blogger Free Speech (or: You're Worrying about the Wrong Thing)

Tuesday, March 17, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Here's a nice way to make use of that "schedule for future release" feature that we added to our blogging application a couple weeks ago... Every once in a while, I'll see an article that I want to blog about. I'll create a draft and drop in the link so I can work on it later. Most of the time I wind up finishing the post, but other times I don't get around to it, so the post winds up languishing in drafts, never to be finished.

Prior to the future release scheduling, I had little incentive to finish the post because once the content was submitted and approved, the post would appear based on the date that the post was first saved as a draft. The older the post, the less likely the post would be seen at the top of blog listings. By changing the publish date, I am able to revive old posts that still have relevance and put the finishing touches on them. The following post is a good example of this technique.

Back in December of last year, the regional business website NJBiz ran an article about corporate conduct policies and blogging. The article has renewed relevance because it dovetails with the post I published yesterday regarding online reputation monitoring and defense.

In the prior post we took a look at marketers worrying about how adverse comments by third parties could damage the reputation of a company. In the NJBiz story, the focus is employment law attorneys who sound the alarm bell about the threat from within -- online indiscretions by employees that could harm the company's reputation.

While I understand the importance of discretion and decorum, the tone of the article rubbed me the wrong way. Before I lay into the parts the bugged me, I will summarize where I do agree with the article.

For any business, there exists a pool of information that provides the company a competitive advantage. It could be a trade secret, a strategic plan, or a list of customers. It is in the best interest of that company to ensure that this information remains non-public, and it is reasonable for a company to proactively have their employees sign agreements to protect that secrecy.
Employees oftentimes find themselves representing the company to the public in some form or another. It is in the best interest of the company to communicate to their employees the expectations of conduct that the company believes will help develop and maintain a good reputation.
If an employee is participating in a forum as a private individual, there needs to be clear disclosure that he or she is not representing the company.
Under no circumstances should an employee write content that would affect the company's interests under a pseudonym, as was the case with Rick Frenkel at Cisco.

Now that we've established the points of agreement, let's talk about why I didn't like this article. The article stirs up a cloud of mistrust about employees and paints this picture of where the employer's interests reign supreme. I could imagine a heavy handed manager using this advice to assert the need to invasively police the personal lives of its employees.

It's bad enough when the high school mentality pervades a business' perception of external parties. When the mentality drives management to treat all employees as potential threats from within, it really poisons the well of the workplace. Cracking down too hard on employees will worsen morale, stifle authenticity on blogs, and possibly backfire in the public eye.

These are tough economic times. Your business is probably being challenged on many fronts. The last thing you need is an adversarial relationship with your employees because their energy and vitality is part of what helps set your organization apart from the competition. Motivated employees put their heart into their work and have a shared interest in the continued success of the company. Treating them like they are the enemy is not going to foster the loyalty that attorney Helen Tuttle is quoted as being owed to the employer.

On the blogging front, as has been mentioned so many times before in this space, authenticity is essential. Press release posts are a recipe for corporate blogging failure. If you take John Sarno's advice too much to heart:

Companies may create their own blogs for employees to address the public in an official capacity, though Sarno said if an employer encourages blogging for marketing purposes, the content will likely be strictly controlled. Blogging under such terms “is a tool for business. It’s not a tool for free speech,” he said.

you will wind up with posts that sound like substance-free marketing messages. Content control has its place, but it should be wielded with grace, not brute force.

Finally, let's take on the question of business reputation management. Let's put the disgruntled customers and indiscreet employees aside for a moment and look at the big picture. You know that economic downturn that started in back in 2007? Chances are that everything between then and now that has happened in the business world has done more damage to your company's reputation than anything that these perceived threats could have possibly done.

About a month and a half ago, the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion conducted a poll for the Knights of Columbus, seeking to get a snapshot of the public's view of businesses, and the picture was not pretty. Quoting from the K of C's press release:

Among the American public, 76 percent believe that corporate America’s moral compass is pointed in the wrong direction, 58 percent of corporate executives agree; and a majority of Americans, and two-thirds of executives, gave a grade of D or F in ethical matters to the financial and investment industry.

The poll of 2071 adults and 110 high-level business leaders also showed that Americans believe personal financial gain and career advancement drive the business decisions of executives while concern for employees and public good seldom factors into corporate decisions.

Yep, all of those meltdowns, bankruptcies, compensation scandals, and bailouts have skewed public opinion against you, even if you didn't blow a cool million to redecorate your office or get a bailout check from the treasury. With 5.1 million people collecting unemployment checks do you think your business stands to gain any goodwill by canning an employee because you didn't give your 100 % approval to everything they might have written?

This is one of those times where a company has to look beyond its legal rights and think about whether its actions fit within a larger goal of survival. Be clear with your employees about expectations of conduct. Be fair and consistent with holding them accountable, but don't use that concern as license to rule with an iron fist. You can't afford it.

Of the Big Agencies, I think Edelman might get employee blogging the most

Monday, March 9, 2009 by Chris Baggott

Edelman just keeps coming up with the right ideas for organizations to legimatly leverage blogging and social media. Steve Rubel is credited with the following quote this week:

".......corporations have the opportunity, through their own employees' social media efforts, to put a face on their facades.

"As the economy tightens up, people are recognizing that reputation matters. We are seeing more workers flock to social media who say they have to be there to build their own brand as an insurance policy or escape clause." He said corporations should figure out who those people are, and rather than fire them, give them a soapbox. "People should figure out who, in their companies, could be personal brands," he said. "Give your 'all stars' independence--let them know what the ropes are."

This covers two important things we talk about a lot when it comes to Corporate Blogging Software.

The both converge on the idea that you need to empower your employees to blog on your behalf. The smart ones are going to do it anyway, and it's a whole lot better to embrace them "within the ropes" than ignore them. Millenials especially are looking for a voice, they want to be empowered....so empower them.

One thing I think Steve misses is the idea that you don't need to be that selecitve. Sure there may be "all stars", but for most companies there are also many people who simply make the product or service better, make the customer happy, solve problems.....empower them all.

Blogging Software as a Service

Wednesday, February 18, 2009 by Douglas Karr

Not enough people talk about the benefits of Software as a Service when it comes to business blogging. We want our clients to spend time blogging and observing the business results of it. We don't want our clients worried about patches, upgrades, security, search engine optimization themes, etc. That's our job.

In addition, the Software as a Service model allows us to make major investments in infrastructure, development and consulting that the typical client could not afford. It's not uncommon for a large business to spend a six-digit budget on search marketing. We can make that investment and all of our clients will benefit from it. That means our smallest clients are given a level playing field with the largest of competitors.

Software as a Service is also a great insurance policy for the client. If we don't deliver the results that a client needs to justify the expense, they can leave. That's incredible pressure for us as an organization to deliver. Every day we meet and review our clients to ensure they are productive, getting the search traffic they need, and ultimately the conversions that tie directly to the return on investment.

This diagram is from Shijaz Abdulla's Technology blog and I believe it touches on the advantages of SaaS. Compendium Blogware applies this model to business blogging.

The second look at backups

Monday, February 2, 2009 by james litton

I have spent the past couple of weeks doing a review of the state of our production environment. Out of that review, it was determined that one of the more pressing issues was a revamp of our backup procedures. I wanted to implement a solution that could be centrally managed and could maintain flexible policies.

Bacula seems to fit the bill. It is an open source backup solution that uses a pull mechanism to grab the data off of servers. I have used this solution for backups before due to encryption requirements for another project, but I have not previously set up bacula to manage a significant number of machines.

I will create another post once I have gotten a solid configuration together along with some testing I will create another post regarding managability and resource utilization.

Hidden sales pitches just don't work

Friday, January 30, 2009 by Brian McKay

"Hi, I'm Brian McKay and I am most definately here to ask for your business, but only after I have delivered enough value to merit the opportunity."

Was that so hard? As I browse the web and am marketed to, it is suprising how many bait and switches still exist. When it comes to Blogging to earn customers, please remember that honesty is the best policy.

If you are enthusiastic about small business marketing and that you can provide real points of difference and value to a prospect/reader of your Blog, do so. The right to ask for the business is earned. It is born on the back of a great product or service that has real world ROI for a customer.

I work at Compendium Blogware because I am enthusiastic about what we are doing for our clients, and how energized our team is. I'm the VP of Sales, and when you are ready to have a conversation with someone who is enthusiastic about Blogging for SEO, and Blogging to earn customers, please give us a call.

We will immerse the conversation in value, and the focus will be on you, your business, and your lead generation, SEO, and customer acquisition goals.

Decaffeinated Afternoons at Starbucks

Friday, January 30, 2009 by Clayton Stobbs

The day before last I walked down to Starbucks to get a half-caf coffee (trying to cut back on caffeine, at least a little). To my surprise, I was told they were no longer brewing decaf after 12p.m. Given that it was a new policy they offered to make a half-caf Americano for the same price which was a great overall experience for me anyways. (Side note: they will still brew decaf if there is normal demand or per the manager's discretion)

In line with that, Starbucks posted that day on their corporate blog about the change and solicited feedback from consumers. They promoted a very open discussion and used their actual business blog to facilitate the interaction between their brand and their customers. I think they have been great at trying to meet needs wherever they can (e.g. customer suggestion box) and despite their financial issues and store closings, will continue their consumer-centric brand marketing.

Microsoft On The Issues

Wednesday, January 21, 2009 by Clayton Stobbs

I was just about to write a new post about some fairly interesting financial blog findings but I got sidetracked and found that Microsoft recently launched their corporate blog on legal and policy issues. It is gradually going to be opened up to a variety of employees in the legal affairs and regulatory departments but I think it's a great stride forward in showing their involvement in policy-making and leglislation.

Technology has become a huge factor in almost everything that is done, especially on large legislative intiatives, and by having a blog service specifically targetted towards this information Microsoft should become more transparent.

They have also been active in other blog avenues but this one struck me as more interesting than most because I often do not think of Microsoft as a key player in say, health solutions, even though they are quite active in the space. Rather, I pay attention to their more consumer driven announcements and often get caught up in the battle between PC and Mac when in fact there is a great deal more going on that will help their brand.

Is There a Problem with Logging?

Thursday, December 4, 2008 by P.J. Hinton

Coding Horror blogger Jeff Atwood wrote a good sized post last week offering up a criticism of abusive application logging. He gives several reasons for resisting the temptation to log everything that is happening, including code bloat, performance hits, developer inconsistency, and information overload.

Something tells me he'd look at our logging infrastructure and then take on a facial expression not much unlike the image on his blog's header. Our logging policy isn't as hard core as the one Atwood cited at the beginning of his post, but it does generate a mountain of data if you turn it on full strength.

I think Atwood errs by focusing too much on the use of the logging interface and not enough on the configuration of the logging system's implementation. There are several ways you can deal with the issues he brings up:

At the lowest level, support a wide variety of destinations for logging data, for example a flat file, the system log, or even an asynchronous log the cloud. Moreover, it should be able to write to different destinations depending on the message type.
From the application configuration level, make sure that you can customize the logging for different environments. In a development environment, for example, have everything go to a file. In production, log only messages meeting a certain severity threshold or higher.
Design the logger API so that you can write a log entry with a single line of code. If you have to instantiate one or two objects, e.g. a logger and a logging message, not only will the code bloat, but developers won't be inclined to use it.
Set up a simple policy for logging that will be followed by developers in new code and be easy to retrofit onto existing code.
Create an easy-to-use interface for browsing production logs so that developers can take a look at what's being recorded for both diagnostic and proactive situations. There should be a way to filter by severity, date, and even the class where the logging message was triggered.
Introduce specialized log message types for tracking key performance indicators, like page rendering time and set up monitoring for these things to see how your application is responding to demand.

We've managed to make good use of the logging, and while we did have to do some tuning after we rolled it out, we didn't seen any of the catastropic deadlock situations that Atwood says happened within his own application.

It's Okay to Protect and Preserve Your Livelihood

Wednesday, October 29, 2008 by Douglas Karr

Curious, if you owned a retail establishment what you would do if a customer stood up and started screaming, cussing and demeaning your company in front of your other patrons. You'd most likely ask him to keep his voice down and usher him some place where you can find out why they carried on and what you could do for it.

Chris Brogan has a great post today on Corporate Blogs and Commenting Policies. I wholeheartedly agree with his post - a blog isn't a place to set up a stage for rude visitors to begin yelling. You must protect and preserve your company when blogging. Chris goes into the following details:

It's not wrong to protect your living room
Allow for dissent and discourse
If you're going to moderate...
There are off-topic and rude comments

Just as you would treat a customer in your establishment, so should you on your blog. Protect your business but deal with the issue quickly and quietly. Don't allow a terrible comment to be published (always moderate) and contact the visitor personally to resolve it offline.

It's okay to protect and preserve your business!

Outbound Linking - Benefit or Risk?

Wednesday, October 15, 2008 by Douglas Karr

Bloggers are an interesting group. One of the reasons why folks call it a blogosphere is that we're often interconnected through our outbound links and our mentions of one another. We had an interesting conversation regarding linking in the office this week - enough to discuss it here. Ultimately, the question was:

Should outbound links be encouraged in your blog post? Looks like a great topic for some blog research. Some of the conversation was interesting. From the naysayers:

Only if you utilize a nofollow in your anchor tag. At one time, the nofollow link was only relatively utilized for comment spam, but some think you should use it everywhere to avoid any risk of hurting your ranking to bad links.
Never link to an external site. Outbound links drive traffic away from your page where you are trying to engage people. You're driving them away.
No, because the risk of an outbound link outweighs the benefits of providing external resources to support your blog post.

From the pro-linkers:

Yes, outbound links - especially ones to your corporate site, products or services, can enhance the optimization of the destination site.
Yes, outbound links provide external resources to support your post.
Yes, outbound links often result in the destination site taking the time out to read your post or even linking back to you in the future.

I've read a few different posts on the subject and here's my conclusion: If the destination is a quality link, I believe your company blog policy should allow them. As an example, I've included a few links in this post - not to drive people away from the post but to provide them with alternative perspectives.

I believe this approach is one that will result in me seen as more authoritative on the subject. I've got a ton of blog posts that are #1 in Google's search engine results and some of them point to some destinations that don't have great ranking. They do; however, provide the reader with additional information - making me a trustworthy source.

The balance is up to you, do more search results lead to more conversions? Or does better content lead to more conversions? I think it's a balance of the two. My bottom line: do not link to spammy sites. If you're wondering how to determine that, it's pretty simple - do they show up in a search result? Google doesn't like providing spammy sites in their results.

Blogs Can Evolve (Notes from TechPoint Summit)

Friday, October 3, 2008 by Ali Sales Roach

Yesterday Compendium exhibited at the

TechPoint Summit here in Indianapolis, and I had the pleasure of taking part in an "early stage marketing" panel since Chris is out of town.

The panel was one of the best I've been on, and I think it's because all of the participants (ExactTarget, Canteloupe, and Compendium) were equally unprepared. We didn't have slides, we didn't have agendas, and we let the audience gear us toward topics they cared about rather than us spouting off a bunch of gibberish that no one pays attention to.

In other words, we let the session evolve. We didn't plan. We jumped in and adjusted as needed.

And guess what? That same approach can be taken with any kind of online marketing initiative, including business blogging.

You can do all of the research in the world and spend thousands of dollars on a new website, but as most of us have learned the hard way, the message that we think is going to strike a chord when we start a business ends up being drastically different a few months later.

Sure, corporate blogs are a way to help get found in organic search and humanize your marketing, but story telling is still a fundamental part. Good stories engage us and make us want to learn more. And good stories get better over time. They become funnier and more interesting...ever played the game telephone? Try to think of a time that you haven't laughed at the end of it, or at least been mildy entertained.

So before you spend too much time writing and rewriting a company blog policy, or investigating every blog software review available, consider the fact that a corporate blogging program can grow and evolve with you over time, as the most interesting things in life tend to do.

Who Cares?

Saturday, September 13, 2008 by Brian McKay

Who cares about your products or services? Who cares about your company in general? No one should care more than your employees and your current customers. This is why Blogging for business makes so much sense. It is a practical and logical evolution in business communications for companies of all sizes.

You are responsible for being enthusiastic about your company mission, products and services. If your people are not expressing that enthusiasm, there is an obvious disconnect between your brand and what is being communicated to the customer. This is a big problem.

By using Blog authoring software and applying Blogging best practices you will be empowering your employees and creating brand evangelists in the process. When your employees Blog about delivering solutions to customers, problem solving, or resonating why they love their job, that is incredibly valuable to your business.

With an assertive company Blog policy you will be allowing your valued employees to share their experience, prove their understanding of the product/service, and leverage all of the points of difference that make your company competitive in your given industry.

If you choose the right business Blogging partner you will experience tangible rewards both internally with employees that are being heard, and externally with your message being received by potential customers that would have otherwise been doing business with your competitors.

If Blogging in this context makes sense for your company, join us at our September Webinar: Bussiness Blogging: The Key to Local Search September 17^th 1-2 EST

Bu Who cares? Answer: You and your employees do! Take control of your message and get your message working for you in organic search.