Corporate blogging software

Though we're in the middle of an economic crisis where some of our mortgage industry might deserve it, flogging has a different connotation as discussed by Dr. Vaine.  Dr. Vaine discusses forced blogging and speaks (tongue in cheek) about how to drive your corporate blogging productivity into the ground.

The humor is a bit dry in the video but the message is clear.  Strapping on rules, regulations and a ton of overhead to your corporate blogging strategy is a surefire way of killing it.  I had a boss who once told me, provide your employees with every opportunity to succeed - and they will.

Provide your employees with the freedom to blog - and they will.

Of course, Compendium has the added safety net of an administrative approval process in the application.  That's not to stop a bad employee, but provides an opportunity to coach a great one.

• Link Farms: A group of Web sites is created for the primary purpose of delivering a high number of links to a given Web site.
• Automated Content Generation/Duplication: To get search engine spiders to index more pages from them, some sites auto-generate content or scrape Web content from other sites.
• Keyword Stuffing: This involves over-populating certain portions of a Web page with repeated occurrences of a given keyword.

A week or so ago, I had a chance to meet up with some personal bloggers, and one of the questions that arose from that gathering was whether blogging as we know it would be around in five years. The basis for the question was the rise of simplified rich media creation and the development of semantic technology that makes locating the media more feasible.

I thought about this for a while. I've been reading blogs for around eight years. I've contributed content both as an author and as a commenter for about six of them. I've read a lot of blogs... personal, professional, and corporate. Rich media has a seductive lure, but I don't think it's for everyone.

Creation of video and audio content is certainly easier and cheaper to do than it was four or five years ago. Free or inexpensive video editing software, Adobe Flash's support for streaming video, and the ease of uploading content on sites like YouTube have created a boom in this area. Indeed, just about anyone with enough desire to be seen has put a clip or two on that site.

The downside to rich media is that if you want to stand out, the quality bar gets raised several notches higher. In the business world, minimally edited output from a camcorder or a webcam won't do it. You're going to have to look good, or at least have good presentation graphics, for people to not only push the Play button, but also stick with the clip all the way through. You're probably going to have to have an expert at the helm.

Contrast this with how corporate blogging works with Compendium's hosted service. Employees across your organization contribute, so you can harness the creative energies of many, not just a few. You get to retain content control through an approval process. And you can always add rich media, when it makes sense, by embedding an object in the post's HTML.

Blogs are also search engine friendly. Even with semantic aids that are becoming increasingly available for rich media, the added overhead of tagging and annotating media imposes an added burden that may not always be met consistently by your organization. Compendium's blog pages use a structure that is rich in semantic detail, aiding search engines in focusing upon the most relevant parts of your content.

Finally, blogs are reader friendly. Information overload is an undisputed problem we all have to deal with. To deal with it effectively, people have to train themselves to filter through the deluge for relevant bits and pieces. You can do this easily with a blog post. It is less possible with podcasts and video. When someone is in a hurry to find something, which do you think will help the prospective customer not only find you, but also learn whether you are going to meet their needs?

Compendium is helping to shape the future of corporate blogging, both on the consumption side, with people and search engine friendly content presentation, and on the creation side, with tools that make the blogging experience more enjoyable to the author and accountable toward ROI.

When you take all of this into account, corporate blogging is definitely in it for the long haul.  We'll be glad to help you along the way.

Old emails make great blog content - we say this often, but how have we proven it?  I was going to turn one newsletter into one blog post, but after looking at it, it looks like there is room to turn a lot of these articles into quick blog posts for your business blog

Here is a link to the original newsletter for your reference.  Let's start with one of the small blurbs here (note that this blurb actually comes and links to Chris's blog, talk about a program that feeds itself!).


















Now let's make a quick blog post off of this.

Title: "Harsh Reality Of Building A Community"

Post:  Recently Chris was talking about the misconception in the marketing world that an organization or business being able to truly create a community with their corporate blog and with some support from eMarketer, he makes a great case that the bottom line is that even with the most 'interactive' and 'community based' blogs --- most traffic comes from search, not repeat visitors. 

These new eMarketer studies make it cleared than ever that the real opportunity for business blogging is to use it as a great SEO tool that is more engaging than a typical landing page or website because of the real, human content within.  So stop measuring your blogging success on comments and RSS subscriptions and start measuring traffic and conversions!

Wow!  That was easy, quick and I didn't spend more than 5 minutes writing it!  I bet everyone within a company could have a different take on the same topic --- so it's not limited to just one person posting up the newsletter, it's taking a snippet and putting your own view and spin on it!  Let's see how many posts I can get out of this newsletter (without being too annoying!).

1. Edit your analytics settings and you'll find a Filter section:
   
2. Add a filter for your company's IP address or addresses.  The syntax is a little funky because Google allows for regular expressions (which are cool).  If you have a single IP address, simply enter it with a slash before each dot:
   

• Where would you want your company's site to show?
• If you were ranking in the first 5 spots, would you erase your PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign and save your marketing budget hundreds or even thousands of dollars?
• How about in the top 10 spots?
• Now what if you were ranking in the top 10 on mulitple keywords?

These are all questions we at Compendium Blogware answer on a daily basis, because it's what we do.  We provide a solution to companies marketing strategy via a Corporate Blog.  Our platform utilizies the way search engines work in order to maximize your efforts and provide huge return on both ROI and conversions.

The secret sauce behind it all?  Actually, it's no secret at all - Content Development.  Remember that frequent and relevant content on a regular basis is what drives traffic and therefore results to your site. 

1. People search.
2. Search engines provide the relevant answer.
3. People read the answer.
4. Some people engage further.

• Show the relevant content that people were looking for.
• Provide a compelling call to action for the person to engage your business future.

John's page has no less than 50 calls to action (text and image ads) on it.  Why?  John's page is not a corporate blog, it's a blog to make money off of corporate sponsorships and advertising revenue.  Other than to buy ad space, the purpose of the site is to make money from folks hitting ads. 

The way to ensure this happens is to place ads everywhere you can find real estate.  It's a great blog and it works at driving advertising revenue to John.  John also does NOT rely on search engine traffic for acquisition.  In fact, I believe Google dropped him from the index a while ago.

Here's an example from Compendium Blogware's Business Blog:

Our focus is not that of a content management system nor of the off the shelf blogging software.  We designed our system + our standard template + our call to action strategy to drive business results from search back to your company.  It’s a proven force already in the industry.  Extraneous features are a diversion and will significantly reduce the conversion rates of those people who land on your blog.

We absolutely want to cross-promote your site – where you can have all of the gadgets and widgets you'd like (and hopefully information in a neatly organized, easy to find, and attractive interface).  However, on your blog, it’s going to hurt your investment. 

A minimalist approach is the best approach – with distinctive call to action(s) that leave nothing to the imagination for organic searchers who land there.  I would add that we’ve proven this methodology by drinking our own Kool Aid!

Additional Resources on Optimized Landing Pages and Maximizing Conversions:

• SEOmoz - Simple Strategies for better conversion rates
• BtoB - Landing Page Optimization
• Jonathan Mendez - How Simplicity, Recognition&The "Perception of Ease" Impact Landing Page Optimization
• Search Marketing Standard - Five Factors for Landing Page Optimization
• Conversation Marketing - 14 Landing Page Upgrades
• Marketing Experiments Journal - Landing Page Optimization Tested

Books on the Topic:

• Landing Page Optimization
• Don't Make Me Think
• Call To Action

The economy is bad, we are ALL aware of this; but this article just had me almost laughing today from CNN.com; my favorite quote is "It's scary how many Americans admit they are scared..."

Some guy is scared because Americans are scared?  Hmm...nothing like perpetuating the fear factor.

So recently --- it seems as if we have had more prospects saying that they are going to wait and see what happens with the economy before moving forward with a blogging solution.  It is definitely a legitimate concern, we all wish we had a little more liquidity and more savings at this time in the economy. 

However, one of the best thoughts around this came out in a meeting that Chris and I were in late last week --- you can't grow a business by cutting costs (or something along those lines..).  So while we are always about using your budgets as effectively as possible -- it's time to market smarter, not time to stop marketing and stop growing.  Someone always gets rich on the downturns; why not let it be you?  Now is the time to gain market sure, increase customer bases and grow your business!  A corporate blogging strategy focused on winning organic search is one cost effective way for you to do just that.

• Utilizing the ShareThis application on his blog network.  This allows his readers to "digg", "tweet", post, email, etc his blog posts.  Thus the readers are able to virally spread the word about his blog.  In essence doing his marketing for him!
• Chuck has an account on Facebook, that he reguarly posts his post to for his social network on this site to be aware.  As well as, he frequently comments in his status about his latest blog post. 
• Chuck has also put a link on to his blog in his LinkedIn profile.

• Four Words: 1 Blogger, 14 Posts-  MediaTile only has one blogger and yet has managed to get 14 posts up in the past 30 days.  And no, blogging is not his full time job.  It is possible to get two posts up per week and still have time for all of your other obligations.  Just ask Chuck!
• Lots of Links- Every post has lots of links in it- and not just links back to the MediaTile Website, they also include links out to other websites.  This helps provide their readers with resources and helps with their search engine ranking.
• Videos and Pictures-  MediaTile has done a great job of incorporating pictures and videos all throughout their blog.  What’s great is not only are most of their pictures relevant to the blog they are also funny.  This is a great way to engage readers and draw them deeper into their content!