Text Blog Software

Google Voice is Awesome

Monday, March 23, 2009 by Blake Matheny

I was lucky enough to get a grand central number early on. Grand Central, which touted itself as, "one number for life", was a simple service which allowed you to give out your grand central number to people and based on their call group (coworkers, friends, family, etc) could be routed to one or multiple phone numbers, screened, get alternate voice greetings, etc. Purchased by Google back in 2007, the service seemed to stagnate and at one point Google even stopped allowing new people to join the service.

Yesterday I was finally migrated to Google Voice, and I can say that I am absolutely a convert. The number of new features that are available as well as the easier to use interface simply make this a must have service. Some service highlights for me:

Can receive text messages to your Google Voice number
Can reply to text messages and they show up from your Google number
Can initiate calls from your Google number, both from the web as well as from any phone
Voice transcription of voicemails can be emailed to you

All of this is in addition to what was already available from Grand Central and all of this is of course free. One thing that I find particularly interesting is what I assume is a basic phone number multiplexing scheme that Google must be using.

When someone sends your Google Voice number a text message, their phone number is included in the message body but the sender number is not the same, it is some Google number. If you reply to that phone number via a text message, or call that number, it connects you to the original number but shows as being from your Google number. When playing with this feature, I noticed that each person who texts my Google number is assigned their own unique Google number (with a 406 area code).

What I assume Google is doing here is creating a basic mapping between your phone number and people you interact with. So when you reply to a text message at one of these 406 numbers, Google says, "Okay, which contact have we assigned this to for this Google Voice user?" and knows not only which Google Voice user you are (based on your ANI) but which destination number you are trying to reach (based on what contact was assigned that number).

This also means that Google Voice can map an unlimited number of users to each number, each one having a distinct destination contact. Hopefully this service doesn't go the way of Google Notepad and some of the other services that Google has decided to ditch in the past few months. Obviously, if you're giving out your Google Voice number to people, you are like me and hoping Google doesn't discontinue the service.

Tips for First Time Bloggers

Friday, March 20, 2009 by Sarah Sedberry

Sometimes the toughest part about a business blog is just getting started. Like many things is all about taking that first step, and developing routines. I liken it to going to the gym. You know you need go, you want to go, but you have to develop the routine before you actually do go. Once the routine is there, you're happy and you actually feel out of sorts when you don't make it to they gym.

Same thing with blogging - you know you need to write a blog post today, you want to write a blog post today to drive more traffic and convert those searchers, but you keep finding excuses to make you feel better about why you didn't get that post out today.

Well, think of the Client Success Team here at Compendium as your Trainer. We're here to help encourage you to keep up post content, write keyword rich blog posts, and to help target your blog to drive conversions. So whats the first step? Keep it simple and just write!

Here are some quick tips to keep in mind when starting out:

KISS: Keep It Simple Silly - a blog post should be quick and easy, don't worry about writing some long, thought provoking post. That's what whitepapers are for.
Be Pithy: Think of writing a blog post as writing an email to a friend. You want to be casual and relaxed.
Be Engaging: No one wants to read a computer screen full of text. Break up your posts with lists (bullet or number), pictures, and links
Be Consistent: Searchers want to find relevant and recent information about what they are looking for. If they land on your page and its been 2 weeks since any content has been posted, they will not find you credible. Be sure to stay on top of your post frequency.

Hopefully with these first few tips you'll be able to get started. If you have further questions, always feel free to reach out to our Client Success Team at clientsuccess@compendiumblogware.com.

Happy Blogging!

To Tweet or Not To Tweet

Thursday, March 19, 2009 by Jess Wehner

I was watching the Today show this morning and they had a special on Twitter. Of course, it peaked my interest, given the industry I work in and I took down a couple notes on what they were saying.

So what is twitter you may be asking? In the words of the Today show Twitter is “a cross between texting and blogging” and it’s based on “what you are doing”. They also said to think of it as a “mass text” updating all the people who follow you. So now that you know what it is, the real question is:

To Tweet or not to tweet?

With all of the things to read on the internet: blogs, facebook, news, etc. do you really have time for Twitter? I think if you have the time and enjoy it, sure, Twitter can be a great way to connect with people and share your opinion with others. But, if your resources are limited and you need to choose one tool that will increase your search engine visibility, Compendium blogs are a great way to go.

If your number one goal is marketing your business and reaching out to potential customers, you need a tool that does this the best. Compendium blogs aren’t just a social media tool, they help organize your content in a way that is search engine and user friendly. We focus your content on the words people are searching on. So in the end, Twitter is not a bad thing at all, and from what they showed on the Today show it looks like a lot of fun. They showed how it can be a great tool for celebrities and thought leaders to get their opinions across. But for everyone else out there, with only 20 minutes a day to focus on marketing, there is a need to be a little choosier with where to spend resources. Maybe there just isn’t enough time in the day for twitter.

What is RSS?

Wednesday, March 18, 2009 by Compendium Client Marketing

According to Wikipedia:

“RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed" or "web feed" or "channel") contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text.”

Check out the video below for more great info on RSS and what it means to you!

Struggling with High Bounce Rates on Your Blog?

Tuesday, March 17, 2009 by Douglas Karr

Today I received an email from a client who was concerned about their bounce rates which ranged between 80% to 90%. No one wants to put in the effort on a blog and find that it's not sticky... so what's a blogger to do?

Before I even start to take action, one of the first things I compare is how the bounce rate is tracking from week to week - is it increasing, decreasing?

How is your bounce rate comparing to your search engine traffic? Typicallly, if you're reaching a larger percentage of search engine users, your bounce rate percentage will also increase. It's natural when you're casting a wider net, that many of the fish won't make the cut.

If bounce rates remain consistently high, I review the following:

Am I targeting keywords that are truly relevant to my business? At Compendium, for instance, we target a lot of blogging terms. Since we're a business blogging platform, it's natural that some of the audience isn't going to be relevant.
Am I writing relevant content? Bad content sucks and makes people jump fast. There's nothing worse than leaving a first impression with a bad blog post. Are you writing about your business? Your customers? That's why people are visiting you! Stay on target.
Do I write Post Titles that are truly relevant to the content within the post?
Am I writing content that gives back to my readers or wastes their time? If you want readers to engage and read more, you need to put some bait on the hook to get them to nibble. (Not that you guys are fish... I'm just using a simple metaphor).
Do I link to my other related posts within my content with informative anchor text?
Do I have previous posts from my blog listed in my sidebar?
Do I have engaging Calls To Action that make someone want to click through because the CTA is relevant to the content and leads the person to want additional information.

Lastly, of course... is the question no one likes to answer:

Do I suck at writing?

Some people really do suck. In that case, hand off the baton to someone else in the organization who keeps the readers engaged. You may be surprised by who the talented folks are within an organization when it comes to writing compelling content.

Don't give up if you're a young blogger, though. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of time to get into a rhythm and hit a few home runs.

I would not hesitate to contact ghost bloggers, as well. Great ghost bloggers can learn your business and write compelling content on behalf of your organization, or even better, interviewing and sharing stories about your customers.

Finding what you are seaching for

Tuesday, March 3, 2009 by Brett Fritz

There is a great service where you can call or text a random question to this number and the service provider will give you the answer you are looking for!

If everyone had compendium, the answers your potential customers are looking for would be at their fingertips! Using Compendium's simple blogging software will not only humanize your marketing strategies but it will also provide you with results!

Compendium is a SaaS that is build specifically for businesses to win organic search.

We at Compendium make search easy again!

HTML Attributes in Unexpected Places

Sunday, February 22, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Introductory discussions on good web user interface development drive home the importance of separating content (HTML), presentation (CSS), and behavior (JavaScript). The most powerful, and usually the slowest, way to interact programmatically with an HTML document on a web browser is to use the Document Object Model (DOM) API.

The principal references for DOM are the W3C standards, but the road to cross browser compatibility is fraught with pitfalls. Consider a document element. Elements can have attributes, which are expressed syntactically in the tags like this like so

    <element_name attribute_name="attribute_value">

In the DOM, elements are represented using DOMNode objects, and they are distinguished from other varieties of nodes by the nodeType property, which is set to the constant ELEMENT_NODE (defined to be 1). One can access, modify, and remove node attributes by calling setAttribute(), getAttribute(), and removeAttribute() respectively.

The collection of all attributes associated with an element is available via the node's attributes property. It is exposed as a NamedNodeMap object, which allows the manipulation of attributes by name (the *NamedItem() methods) or by index (item()).

Given this information, the API sounds fairly straightforward. You can deal with attributes individually by name or as a set that you can iterate over. However, this isn't the only way that attributes can be modified under Internet Explorer.

In IE, an element's attributes are also exposed as properties on the object corresponding to the element node. Save for a few exceptions, like className for class, the property names line up with the attribute names.

What may be surprising is that the converse is true. If you add a property to an HTML element object, Internet Explorer will count that property among the list of attributes, regardless of whether the property corresponds to a valid HTML attribute. To verify this is the case, try this out... In an HTML element, create an element with an ID attribute for reference via the DOM.

<div id="target_element">
    This text is contained by the DIV with id = "target_element".
</div>

Now, within a JavaScript function, use the DOM to get the node corresponding to this element and set a property on the element that does not correspond to a real HTML attribute:

    var target_element = 
      document.getElementById("target_element");
    target_element.fake_attribute = "foo";

Then iterate over the attributes NamedNodeMap for the element, checking to see whether such an attribute exists. In the code below, we check for an attribute name match and then generates an alert dialog informing the user whether that attribute's specified property is set to true or false.

   var attributes_node_map = target_element.attributes;
   for (var i = 0; i < attributes_node_map.length; ++i) {
        if (attributes_node_map.item(i).name == "fake_attribute") {
            alert("Is attribute fake_attribute specified? " + 
                attributes_node_map.item(i).specified
            )
        };
    }

On Firefox, no dialog will be produced because the bogus property does not count as an attribute on the element. With Internet Explorer, the dialog will show up.

This difference came into play for us recently as we were debugging a piece of third-party JavaScript code. The source poked properties in HTML element objects for internal tracing purposes. The properties did not correspond to valid attributes, but IE would report them as such via the attributes property. Another portion of the code, which based its decision on whether there were no attributes set, would malfunction on IE because the attribute counts would be non zero.

Some additional notes on the dysfunctionality of attribute manipulation can be found at the QuirksMode website.

The Trials and Tribulations of WYSIWYG Editors

Thursday, February 19, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

UPDATE: Based on Doug's comments below, I revised this post on 2/20/2008 to clarify what functionality is provided by the editing features supported by the major browsers.

If you write content for the web, chances are you use a rich text editor for writing your material.

The rich in the name refers to the ability to apply styling to the content via mouse click operations. For example, to make the text bold, you click on a toolbar button, usually with the letter "B". To anchor a hyperlink to some text, you click on another toolbar button that interactively asks where the link should point to. You get the general idea.

HTML 4.01, as spelled out in the W3C specs, doesn't give you this functionality for free. All it supplies are INPUT and TEXTAREA form elements, and these are just vessels for containing plain text. So how do web based rich text editors work their magic?

The two major browser architectures, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox, provide an infrastructure for interactively editing elements.

Through the use of JavaScript or HTML attributes, web page content can be made to be editable. This includes structural elements like divs, not just the standard form elements. Moreover, the technologies gives web developers a handle for executing edit commands against HTML, so you can do things like insert hyperlinks and images.

Editability allows developers of rich text editors, like the YUI Editor and FCKEditor, a way to layer JavaScript on top of this foundation to create a customizable toolkit. Web application developers, like Compendium, can then customize these editors to support additional features, like draft submission and keyword strength calculation.

As powerful as these toolkits and the browser APIs might be, there are times where you can run into glitches. I uncovered one such case recently while troubleshooting some problems that users were encountering with Internet Explorer.

Suppose you have an editable HTML document, that contains an image (something with an img tag). With IE, you can click on the image and get some resize handles, like this:

As you can see, there are little squares on the perimeter of the image's edges. Grabbing and dragging these edges allow you to adjust the size of the image interactively. The resizing is handled entirely within the guts of the browser. It's outside the scope of the JavaScript world.

Now consider what happens when you are working with a large post where you can start to scroll the image outside the region of the editor. A well behaved user interface would ensure that the resize handles are not drawn outside of the the editing area.

I wound up noticing that with Internet Explorer 7, the image resize squares continue to exist outside the editor area. Moreover, the area belonging to the image's rectangle will prevent user interface elements from getting click events.

demonstration of resize handles outside viewport

As you can see with the image on the right, the resize handles are drawn on the top row of toolbar elements.

In this state, I coldn't click any of the buttons that fell within the image's rectangle. Want to click on the insert hyperlink button? Sorry, you'll have to scroll the content so that the rectangle is out of the way.

We were able to reproduce this problem also using the demo of FCKEditor, the editor toolkit upon which our editor is based.

It turns out that this is a problem with Internet explorer. In the fall of last year, someone reported this anomalous behavior exists in IE version 6 through 8 beta 2. If that is the case, then it looks like might plague users for some time to come.

Since the issue is in the native code that provides in-place editing for HTML elements, there is little, if anything that web developers can do to work around the issue.

Good SEO Advice and an Application Therereof

Friday, February 13, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

When it comes to claims of effective SEO techniques, I'm a skeptics skeptic. In my line of work, I read and hear a lot of claims about what works.

Most of the reliable advice is just plain common sense. There's also a pool of good advice that probably makes sense only to those who work extensively with HTML and algorithms.

On the other side of the quality spectrum you'll find advice that falls into two bins:

shady advice that attempts to game the system. It might work for a while, but once the search engines adjust, rankings will plummet. Black hat SEO professionals make their living dishing out this dreck.
harmless, ineffective advice that buys you little or no benefits. This class of advice is usually rooted in empirical evidence that has been poorly analyzed and then passed around by word of mouth.

Last week Chris Boggs wrote a great post over at SearchEngineWatch.com that reminds the user that SEO advice requires critical thinking skills.

Would you make a life or death decision about caring for a sick infant based solely on blog advice, or even WebMD? Would you decide on a retirement strategy by reading a few blog posts or a forum discussion? Probably not. Yet, some marketers choose to base their SEO or paid search strategies on blog posts.

A person without any SEM experience shouldn't trust any single online authority as guidance. Misinformation and outdated tactical guidance seems to be floating up, along with the reliability of many so-called "SEO tools."

He goes on to write:

Design and development teams are usually great at sniffing out immediate problems with tactics, but also sometimes need to be reasoned with in order to test a theory or new SEO-friendly workaround. I've received plenty of blog post links from developers and designers in the past, claiming something can't be done or doesn't work. It's crucial to reach an agreement by either finding evidence or testing that the tactic can work.

He's right. If you're going to come at our team with a request to change something about a page for SEO benefits, you better have some hard data with good analysis to go with it. The whole post is worth a read and your time.

I thought of this post as I read a listing of tips on image SEO written by Patricio Robles. I found myself disagreeing with some of Robles' arguments.

Take the "descriptive name for an image" advice. Providing descriptive label helps, but I would speculate that search engines don't give images nearly the level of weighting that Robles claims. Unlike text, which can be processed and characterized by an algorithm, images can't be dumped into a machine and then identified. The means that a someone seeking to game the system could give irrelevant images names of keywords they are trying to target.

I don't buy the "larger images" advantage, either, which the author admits there is no hard data to back up the claim. If anything, larger images will slow down the rate at which pages load, making your visitors bounce very quickly. When we shipped a new editor interface a month or so ago, we even added new functionality that resizes images automatically if they exceed a threshold size that would exceed the typical width of a column. This was to counteract something that Randy, our UI Engineer, refers to as dumbnails -- large size graphics that are displayed at sized much smaller via inline styling on the image tag.

The advice to those who are trying to optimize their website? Beware and be wise!

Keys To A Great Call To Action

Friday, February 13, 2009 by Compendium Client Marketing

What are the four keys to a great Call To Action (CTA)?

Purpose: Give a reason to follow through with the action that your requesting them to take

Benefit: Remember that a reader is always asking "what's in it for me" - so make it clear

Command: Tell me what to do - click, download, register, etc

Click: Give a visual or text something that shouts CLICK HERE

Remember these 4 keys when creating CTA's for your corporate blog.

Writing Post Content

Tuesday, February 10, 2009 by Sarah Sedberry

Compendium Blogware is a Software as a Service (SaaS) company, meaning that you can login into our platform from anywhere as long as you have a connection to the internet. However, there are times where logging into the internet are not an option, but you have a great post idea and want to write it down. Such as right now, where I am waiting for a meeting with a client in Panera and my computer is revolting against me, not allowing me access to their supposed free Wi-Fi....

So what is a blogger to do? Here are a few tips for writing a post when logging into our text editor is not an option.

1) Find a suitable program to write your post in, we always recomend Notepad or a similar program that does not apply extra formatting.

2) If you do choose another program, such as Microsoft Word, we highly recommend that you throw your text into Notepad before pasting it into our platform. There is a very specific reason why we recommend this, Microsoft Word (or most any program) will copy extra formating into the posting area, that is unnessecary and can "break" your template due to all of the extra code. There are a few easy ways to notice if this is whats happening - the font of your post is different from all the others, or you will notice your sidebar is now missing, and showing up at the bottom of the screen.

3) Once you have pasted your content in from Notepad, simply click "Sumbit" and you are all set!

P.S. A very big thank you to the representative at Panera's WiFi Support line that finally helped me get connected. I'm lost without my internet....

How Your Readers Are Consuming Your Blog Post...

Friday, February 6, 2009 by Sarah Sedberry

Recently our VP of Sales, Brian McKay wrote a post that contained the below comic strip and it is the PERFECT way to explain how searchers and readers on the web consume information.

Most clients I talk to explain that they will spend a lot of their time trying to write a blog post that they pour themselves into, that is "perfect", "world changing", etc, when the reality is you will lose your readers writing this way. It is much better to write 5 short blog posts than to write one long post.

I'm sure you can relate that when you come across a page on the web that is mostly text, you typically do not stay and read it all. You might speed read it, skip through and pick out the good parts, or just move on in general.

I have shared this comic with several of my clients to help explain why we always encourage the following when writing a blog post:

Keep it simple
Be pithy
Write like you are sending an email to a friend
Make it engaging for your readers by adding pictures and links

Most of all - have fun with it, and don't be scared to let your personality show in your company blog. Customers engage with those that are like them, or can share an experience like theirs. So let them see that you are able to do that!

Photo Blogging

Thursday, February 5, 2009 by Jason Gergely

Remember the old saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words?"

Well its true!

They say that you retain things better when you get a visual media rather than just reading it. The reason is that people can relate the picture to the

text that they are reading and by recalling the photo, they can better remember what they just read. The same is true about blogging.

By including pictures in your post, you are not only helping people solve their problem and potentially increasing your business... you are helping those people remember your website the next time they run into a similar problem your company can solve... all by putting a simple picture in your post!

So after you do your company a favor and type up your post... go out and find a picture, any picture that can remotely relate to your topic you are cover. It will help out your company blog and your company tremendously.

If you are still curious as to how to intrigrate them in your post, you can look at some examples from the people at Compendium Blogware!

Simple Content Quality Tip: Image Usage

Thursday, February 5, 2009 by Compendium Client Marketing

Increas the quality of a blog post by including an image that complements the content and context of the blog post. Here are a few examples of Compendium Employee blog posts that do just that:

Example use of image in a quality blog post

Not only should you be including a image but you should properly format it. Formatting an image includes:

Where the image is placed in a post (beginning, middle, or end)
The alignment of the image (to the right left or center)
Spacing between the image and the text (padding)
Most importantly from an SEO perspective image descriptions

For details on how to set the formatting up properly in your blog post check out Krystal's step-by-step blog post on Understanding Image Properties.

Understanding Image Properties - Description, Padding, & Alignment

Friday, January 30, 2009 by Krystal Featherston

As a support manager our job is to help our client with Compendium's blogging software. Once question that we've gotten a lot this week is about the properties when you upload a image - so below are some brief descriptions.

Image Description:
A text field that will assign the alt tag, image title and hover text for the image. These descriptions are searched by search engine crawlers and while they will not affect the compending of the blog post, it will aid your SEO efforts when keywords are used. Also, adding an Image Description improves the webpage’s accessibility for the visually impaired.

Width & Height:
Assign the size of the image in pixels. Ratio proportions are locked, to ensure the image is shrunk or stretch proportionately. By clicking on the padlock icon ratio proportions can unlocked, to allow custom sizing. When the padlock icon is closed, ration proportions are locked and when padlock icon is open, ratio proportions are unlocked. Also, note that images are resized to a lower resolution to thereby speed load times

Padding–Horizontal:
Is the spacing on the left and right of the image

Padding–Vertical:
Is the spacing on the top and bottom of the image

Border:
Assigns a black border. Select a number to modify the border width

Align:
Assigns the alignment of the image in relationship to the text or how to do text wrapping– options include Left, Bottom, Middle, Right, Top.

ALSO .... if you have a question you can search Compendium's Knowledgebase RIGHT NOW - or shoot us an email or fill out the online submission form.

How to Make Your Corporate Blog Standout!

Thursday, January 22, 2009 by Sarah Sedberry

Marketing is all about how to get your Company or Product noticed so that you drive more business. The best marketers out there find ways to make their Company/Product stand out amongst everyone else in their industry. The difficult piece is that it is becoming harder and harder to stand out from the crowd.

For example, look at Superbowl ads. They used to be mild and mundane, but every year have become more and more elaborate, as they are all competing against each other to see who had the best 30 seconds of air time (there was a football game played??).

The same thing happens with a Corporate Blog. The blogs that are most successful are those that stand out amongst their competitors. So how do you accomplish that when there are companies out there who selfishly use the blog to sell their product and reinforce the idea that Corporate Blog's can't be trusted??

Here are a few tips:

A blog that is HONEST and TRANSPARENT will get noticed: All of the research out there shows that customers want to buy from someone they can relate to - someone with a similar experience. Customers will trust a blog that revel tidbits about whats going on inside the company, those that talk about customer problems and competitor products, those that talk like real people! Those that choose to write in a corporate voice will be ineffective.

Creating CONSTANT CONTENT that your readers can follow: Best blogging practices state that an individual bloggers should post no less than twice per week. This ensures that searchers and followers of your blog will find new content and feel up-to-date with what is going on. Nothing drives traffic to your site better than frequent content.

Blogs raise STAFF'S VISIBILITY: Giving your employees (of any rank or position) allows customers to see what type of people work at your company. It allows them to relate to these individuals.

SPREAD YOUR PRESENCE on the web: A company that has several social media sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, etc) is more credible than a blog that simply posts text on a weekly basis. It shows your customers that you want to be out there, want to be found and are marketing wisely to those generations that are up and coming.

Compendium's Enhancements ....

Thursday, January 22, 2009 by Krystal Featherston

As you may know there have been a few changes the past few weeks with Compendium's software ....

A few weeks ago we launched an updated and enhanced text editor. It was one of our most exciting releases yet. Being apart of the product support team ... it is our job to listen to our clients and to communicate their difficulties and enhancements to our engineering team. Well our clients wanted a new text editor and that's exactly what we did. Thanks to our engineering team for all their hard work and dedication to the product!

In additon, to the new text editor we have introduced a knowledge base portion of the help page. Now clients have the ablity to search for the answer without having to call or email. I know that I always like to try to find a solution on my own before I send an email!

Just becausee we now have a knowledge base for our clients to search, they still can submit a request or question via email - help@compendiumblogware.com, phone - (317)777-6255, or by completing the webform. We will respond to your requests as quickly as possible!!

Our goal is to make your corporate blogging experience at easy and seamless as possible. So you can focus on what's really important - writing content and increasing your SEO!!!!

Twitter-ing

Wednesday, January 21, 2009 by Sarah Sedberry

I have a confession to make:

I have worked for Compendium Blogware for some time now, which is a technology firm, providing software as a service. I should be someone that is up-to-date on the "going's on" of the internet and social media world.

** Here is my confession - I have never created a Twitter account.**

There are several reasons for my lack of motivation to add yet another social bookmarking tool to my belt.

I already have several social media accounts to track
I update my Facebook status on a regular basis - does this not annoy my "friends" enough?
I honestly just didn't take the time to look into it...

So why now? What happened that I finally caved in and created a Twitter account? Two words: Doug Karr.

Many of you know him as our VP of Blogging Evangelism, but he is so much more. Doug has been an invaluable asset to those of us here at Compendium, with his never ending knowledge of Search Engines, and his ability to always keep us in good spirits.

So for all of those out there curious about Twitter here is a brief synopsis:

Twitter: is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

I find it similar to the "Status Updates" on Facebook, and nothing more. A great way to stay in touch with those you "follow" and always be in constant contact.

So what does this all have to do with blogging? Well its all social media of course and you can create twitter accounts for your Company, to go along wiht your Corporate blog. Just how Compendium has done, it allows us as a company to spread our presence on the web, and keep clients and employees up to date on tips for blogging, special events, etc!

Now what are you waiting for?

Compendium on Twitter: Click Here!

Compendium on Facebook: Click Here!

Compendium on YouTube: Click Here!

Sarah's Twitter Account: Click Here!

Do You Blog Mr. President?

Wednesday, January 21, 2009 by Ellie Cummins

I really wanted to blog about the inaguration. Even though I was just sitting in a conference room here at Compendium there was an incredible energy in

the air yesterday, it made me feel proud to be a part of this country and I can't wait to see what Obama and his administration do for America. Now, how exactly does that relate to blogging and social media? It has been amazing to watch his campaign and popularity grow and much of has been done via social media and marketing. Using facebook, email, and text messaging Obama reached out to millions of young voters and found them where they were already at, then nurtured that relationship and turned that into votes which obviously worked out very well for him. :) I am someone still fairly new to sicla media and all its capabilities it is really is a pretty straitghtforward approach, reach people where they are and in ways they want to be talked to. By doing that you have a much more likely chance of them giving you the reaction you want. For a business this can easily be

done via search, give that searcher a blog page discussing exactly the topic they want then ask them to react, take the next step, buy from you. Pretty powerful but still pretty basic, I think Obama's efforts along these lines indicate how powerful social media is today, we will see where it takes us moving forward.

Testing out our new text editor

Wednesday, January 7, 2009 by mikey mioduski

Our team of engineers deserve a lot of credit for their hard work making this new text editor interface more awesome than ever. They are always busy making our business blogging platform more powerful and easier to use.

I am using this post as a test to see if they actually did anything or if they're just saying they did, because nobody really knows what goes on back in that room. They sometimes grow beards and some of them don't wear shoes, so I don't know if I fully trust what they say. But here I go.

I will now attempt to upload a picture.

Hey, that was pretty easy. I really enjoyed doing that.

As I type my thoughts onto this editor, I am noticing how fast it is. I mean, it's a lot faster than I remember.

What about linkage? I will now place a link to a client blog, Christy Sports, because I just noticed they're a client, and I have rented skis and boots and boards from them since I was a tyke.

Wow, that was also really easy.

The work of our Dev team reminds me of a song by postitive rock legend Stan Bush. In his words, "Never surrender, never say die. You got the will to survive."

I will now attempt to embed a Youtube video into our newly enhanced text editor, and if it works, I shall dedicate the video to our Dev Team.

Gosh dang that was easy!

Well after some serious testing, I would like to give props, whatever those are, to the dev team on this one. The new features look really slick, plus they make adding content to our corporate blog much much easier. It's also noticably faster. The awesomeness is beyond words.

I think I just fell back in love with blogging. Thank you dev team for helping me rekindle this flame.