Corporate Blogging

I can remember my first college economics class, taught by Professor Lemon...In between scaring us off with words like "recession" and "marginal consumption" he mentioned something that has stuck with me to this day:

"There's no such thing as a free lunch."

Yeah, and he's right when it comes to blogging, too. At the MarketingProfs conference earlier this week, I answered a lot of questions concerning this particular topic. You might be wondering the same thing: With access to free tools out there, why would I ever pay for a blogging platform?

Well, for several reasons, but here are the three main ones:

1. If it can't help you accomplish your goals, then who cares if it's free? The time you'll spend trying to bend it into what you need it to be are time that you can spend doing something else (time is money of course)

2. Many of these "free" blogging tools are great for techies, but aren't very easy to use when it comes to someone who doesn't have a significant amount of technical knowledge. To get things like RSS feeds and analytics, oftentimes, you have to worry about plugins or even (cringe) paste code.

3. Along those lines, these free blogging solutions are geared toward individuals rather than organizations. An organization's blogging needs are quite different from an individuals, as an organization needs to think about control and compliance and how the organization as a whole is represented.

The point is that all blogging tools are not created equal, and there is a reason why corporate blogging software exists. Sure, it may be "free" to get started, but the resources, time, and effort needed to make a free platform work within an organization really starts to add up. Before you pull the trigger on a free platform, my advice is to start looking into the costs needed to not only support it -- but to be successful with it. The great news is that corporate blogging tools like Compendium make the organization's life a lot easier with features that let them focus on blogging goals rather than the execution side of things.

Remember, there really is no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to anything in life, including blogging software!