My Response to ZDNet's Mitch Ratcliffe.
Posted Tuesday, July 1, 2008 by Daren Tomey
I read a great post this morning from Mitch Radcliffe at ZDNet titled, "What is a company blogger good for?.  Mitch does a great job of outlining 5 goals or objectives that companies may consider prior to launching a corporate blog.  As a result of his post, I posted the following comment.

"Seems obvious but often overlooked
Mitch,

Thanks for the post on developing a clearly defined set of goals and objectives prior to launching a company blog. As a provider of corporate blogging software (www.compendiumblogware.com), we all to often encounter this challenge and attempt to take a more consultative approach with our prospects and clients. Sometimes this backfires as some of them simply want to subscribe and blog, however those that are either already focused on their goals or are willing to allow us to help them define what their goals and objectives are going to be related to blogging for a purpose, experience the greatest benefits and quantifiable results."
So, how did I find Mitch's post?  It is a simple process of setting up Google Alerts, something that we recommend to all of our clients.  These alerts, set up with keywords that are important to your business, industry, or interests, are great sources of inspiration and topics for which an author can write about on a daily basis. 

This and other blogging best practices can be found on our website at www.compendiumblogware.com.
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Web 3.0, Semantic Web...?
Posted Monday, June 30, 2008 by Daren Tomey
I just finished reading a great article on The Semantic Web by John-Scott Dixon in the May 2008 issue of Website Magazine.  In this article John does a great job of outlining the current short falls of search engines and what the future may in fact look like.  I really liked the analogy of doing a search on Randy Johnson's ERA...Great Stuff! I am a major fan of baseball, so that one really caught my attention. 

Anyways, the long and short of it is that search engines are delivering far too many results today and will continue to do so for many more years, but as a marketer we are constantly challenged to increase our lead generation efforts through an audience which is passionate and engaged into what products or services we have to offer. 

How do you do that?  Our client success team will tell you that in order to maximize the benefits of blogging for seo, a blogging best practice is to focus on the mid and long tail approach in their keyword/Compendium blogs as the audience that is using three words or higher when conducting a search are more educated and engaged in what they are searching for and closer to making a purchasing decision. 

If you really want to target the audience to drive conversions and ROI, add a local qualifier to your keyword blogs!  For more information from Compendium on blogging trends, blogging tips, and blogging best practices, please visit our website frequently!
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Short and Sweet
Posted Thursday, June 5, 2008 by Daren Tomey
I reviewed a new "perspective" from MidMarketer today titled Joining the Blogosphere, you can download a free copy of their perspective at www.midmarketer.com. 

One key point that MidMarketer presented in their prescriptive is that, in general, blog posts need to be kept short and sweet!  Wow, I could not agree more to this statement.  We are commonly asked what the average length of a blog should be and the best answer is that your posts need to be relevant to your audience, be short and easily digestible, and most importantly, frequent and consistent. 

Read Chris Baggott's recent post on this very topic.

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Making the most of a Corporate Blog
Posted Friday, March 14, 2008 by Daren Tomey
I see dozens, if not hundreds of articles and posts, per month on the topic of getting the most for a corporate blog.  This article written by Sarah Campbell out of London's Times Online has some very straight forward and valuable points that I felt needed to be shared with a wider audience. 

Sarah includes 10 points to making the most of your corporate blog, all of which are supported by real world corporate bloggers.  They include;
  1. Get into the ether. Start out by monitoring what people are saying about your company and products.
  2. You don't have to do it. A blog needs to be a logical step in the conversations you have with your customers.
  3. Test the water.
  4. A blog is only part of the mix. Forums and blogs go hand-in-hand. Allowing people to comment on your blog is fine, but giving them the chance to continue the conversation in a forum is more constructive. ( I would add that giving your audience the proper points of conversion and/or calls to action are equally important here.  Make sure that you have provided them the ability to subscribe to your email newsletters, or perhaps include an option for them to Click2Call and speak with someone immediately.)
  5. Use your company knowledge wisely. Pull in contributors from all over your company. Your job title is not relevant.
  6. Don't over regulate. Bloggers need to be free to say whatever they like – consumers will not value what they read if they think it is corporate propaganda. (It is wise to monitor what is being blogged about from within your company, however over regulating could kill the passion your employees have.)
  7. Be structured. Hold weekly editorial meetings to discuss what is being blogged about.
  8. Have regular content. If you are not updating regularly, readers will stop checking back.
  9. Monitor it. “It’s the behaviours that count, not necessarily the comments,”
  10. Enjoy. Do not force people into it, invite those that are passionate to blog. 
Again, I have read dozens or hundreds of these articles, but this one is put together well and offers easily attainable goals for anyone exploring the option of implementing a corporate blog.
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The Recession and PPC
Posted Thursday, February 7, 2008 by Daren Tomey
I read an article this morning which touched on the topic of Google's posted earnings and how the recession may begin impacting more and more search engines due to a decrease in PPC spending, specifically in smaller, longer tail advertisers.  If this theory holds true, then how will these companies forge forward in their online acquisition strategies?  Could corporate blogging be the answer to their search engine optimization and customer acquisition goals?

While this theory poses a strong challenge for search engines, we see this as another opportunity to serve our clients and prospects moving forward!  Due to the nature of our corporate blogging platform, more and more of our clients are decreasing their PPC spend and allocating a larger portion to our solution based on the results that they are receiving. 

Here is a case in point, which is a story that was published today by BtoB Magazine on one of our clients, Vontoo. 
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Give them what they want...Content
Posted Monday, February 4, 2008 by Daren Tomey
I was going through my email inbox this morning and read a great brief from eMarketer on Grabbing Those Valuable Search Minutes.  The brief details how advertisers spend money on paid search relative to the audience on a per ad basis.  Interesting enough, the majority of advertising dollars are still being spend on paid search keywords, while the audience is only spending 5% of their online time in search engines.  The overwhelming majority of the time (50%), the audience is spending, is on content. 

How does this relate to blogging?  Well, consider that blogging is all about content! It is posted in a reverse chronological order and written with a human voice.  Now if the audience is spending the majority of their time on content, how can you leverage a successful corporate blogging strategy to drive conversions and revenues accordingly?  We have spoken with and are working with dozens of publishing companies, newspapers, etc which are all trying to capture and retain internet users via our philosophy of blogging for SEO, while at the same time monetizing those efforts into recognizable revenues.  Several of them are seeing success in either allowing an advertiser the ability to sponsor a particular blog, a network of blogs, or implementing their ad server into the blog template. 

Whatever course of action you may take, now is the time to begin converting those Paid Search advertising dollars to where your audience is spending their time, with the content you have available.  Blogging can produce the audience, when structured correctly and executed properly.

How will you monetize this audience?
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Blogging for Business and ROI
Posted Tuesday, January 8, 2008 by Daren Tomey

I read an article today that quoted Piper Jaffray as stating the following, “Whereas Internet advertising budgets were the first to be cut during the market crash of 2000, we believe the proven high ROI of online advertising today will make online advertising resilient even with a recession in the United States.”  I find this extremely interesting and I completely agree with their statement.  As stated, the resilience of online advertising is based on its proven high ROI.  That being said, every method of marketing must be measured for ROI no matter if it is email marketing, PPC, even blogging.

Generating and measuring ROI from blogging represents a shift in mentality for many marketers and bloggers alike.  The days of blogging to blog are eroding and more and more marketers are shifting their online marketing dollars to corporate blogging solutions due to the SEO benefits corporate blogs provide.  Where we see many marketers fall short in their blogging strategy is the development of a clear call to action.  This is a very simple and fundamental step in every marketing campaign, yet we routinely experience prospects, inquiring about our corporate blogging software, that have become frustrated with the perceived lack of success of their blogging strategies only to uncover through our business analysis process that a key contributor to this frustration is a lack of measurability.  A blogging strategy must include a clear call to action, whether it is to convert readers to email newsletter subscribers, webinar registrants, or sales leads.  Just remember, as Piper Jaffray stated above, the resilience of online advertising is based on its proven high ROI.

Are your blogs search engine optimized?

Do your blogs include a call to action? 

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Is 2008 the year of alternatives
Posted Monday, January 7, 2008 by Daren Tomey
I read a blog post from Mark Simon today titled, Insider Data Trading and quickly came to the conclusion that I am happy to be in sales and not directly responsible for marketing or the spending and allocation of marketing funds at Compendium!  The conversion, or soon to be conversion, of the big three (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) as it relates to their acquisitions of online campaign management software companies continues to convolute the ultimate purpose.  Mark's post raises some serious concerns over the capabilities of these acquired solutions to provide insights (PPC rates for one) previously not readily available, to their new owners and how these insights could be used to manipulate PPC rates moving forward.  I hope that his concerns do not come to fruition, but only time will tell. 

We speak to hundreds of prospects on a monthly basis and the majority of them are actively looking for alternatives to customer acquisition via PPC, many of them are turning to Compendium and our Corporate Blogging software.  The uncertainty that Mark lays out in his blog post, in my opinion, further strengthens the need for alternatives in 2008.
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