Blogging impact by design

HI I'M MIKEY.
I'm a 25 year old intern.

I came on with Compendium this summer to complete one of my final requirements for my MFA program in Advertising Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Why would an aspiring Art Director take on an in-house internship designing for a startup B2B blogware company in Indiana?

The creative industry is looking for young minds with a strong knowledge of the interactive realm and buzzwords like Web 2.0 to lead them into the future. We as consumers are sick of advertising, being crushed with literally thousands of messages each day. Remarkably, it is the resourceful companies-- the ones with finite marketing budgets-- that develop some of the most innovative thinking with their marketing dollars. Blogging and achieving great search engine results is one fantastic way to get discovered online. Affordably. All the while reaching a more personal level with an audience.

In my mind, working with the hottest company in the field of corporate blogging will not only keep me busy, but it will aid me in immersing myself into this exciting and evolving interactive world. Not to mention I get to deliver crushing creative backhands for the team all summer long. Pretty good gig, eh?

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Oh Come On! Compendium

In last week's Adweek article entitled, (Author)ity: The Importance of Storytelling. Advertisers need to be able to spin a yarn, Simon Kelly writes

Brands no longer need to rent time and space on someone else's channel (whether print, online or broadcast), but can and must create their own.

Kelly explains

...In today's post-advertising world, where interruption is dead, the only way brands can connect with consumers is through useful, relevant and entertaining content -- in other words, storytelling.

Gosh, where oh where could we tell our story...

CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT.
A marketer doesn't need to spend insane amounts of budget on placement in order to reach their audience. In fact, pushing information on an unreceptive audience may be one expensive backfire. It's time to start pulling your audience in, and there is no better medium today than a corporate blog to deliver tons of rich content to tell a story of your own.

FREE PLACEMENT? COME ON!
With a corporate blog, your communication opportunity is cheap, self-defined and seemingly endless. Blog's don't constrain your communication opportunity to 30 seconds, or 8.5"x11." And instead of pushing an unwanted message on an unreceptive audience, the blog becomes the perfect venue to fully engage, entertain and inform an audience.

Let's say you have an idea for a great new message...

You want it to be seen...

But you don't want to pay for placement...

Throw it up there! If the content is interesting, they will come.

It's no illusion! It's corporate blogging.

develop your marketing with a corporate blog

develop your marketing with a corporate blog

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Page titles are so money. By money, of course, I mean search-awesome.

Posted Monday, August 11, 2008 by mikey mioduski

If any of you are just getting the hang of this SEO thing, like me, you, like me, may have recently discovered the grande importance of page titles in SEO. This is relevant to blog titles as well.

In his whitepaper, What is Blogging’s Role in Search Engine Optimization & the Social Networking Phenomenon?, Compendium Blogware Co-Founder and CEO Chris Baggott quotes SEO expert Steven Bradley:

By far the most important piece of writing you’ll do on any given page is your page title. Search engines consider your page title to be very indicative of what can be found on the page.

Chris goes on to make the following recommendations.

Think about your keyword strategy for PPC and use that as a guide for your blog titles. For example, if ExactTarget wants to rank well on the search term “blogging best practices,” they should name a blog this. And by “name,” I mean that they should title it “blogging best practices.” Titling by the appropriate keyword phrase is a highly scaleable strategy, meaning that ultimately, you would have a blog titled with every one of your PPC keywords.

Along those lines, here are some tips:
• When writing page titles, place your keywords as close to the front of the title as you can.
• Don’t “stuff” with keywords. Titles still need to be readable and need to convince someone to click on them, even in the organic results. (Remember, it’s the actual page title that will show as your result and link in the search results. Obviously results that include the search terms that the searcher has used will be the most compelling ones!).
• Be wary of using titles such as “Rob’s Ramblings.” Every blog should have a meaningful title that includes specific keyword phrases for which you want to rank.

Page titles are money. They're like this huge bear, with these massive claws. Search engines are like this cute little bunny, and if you don't have a relevant and powerful blog title, that little bunny's going to slip away off to some other big bear's cave. Search engines love blog titles, and we should too.

So I changed my blog title to something that may be more search-awesome, in hopes of catching that beautiful baby bunny. We'll see what happens. Who's the big winner here tonight in Indianapolis? Anyone blogging for business that's who.

Author's note: I refrained form embedding one of my all-time favorite scenes from Swingers here, as there is no made for tv version that I could find on YouTube. If you know of the whereabouts of the bear-claws-rabbit scene online, sans colorful language, please comment on this post! Gracias.

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BBC GOES APE...

Posted Tuesday, August 5, 2008 by mikey mioduski

BBC teams up with the Gorillaz creators Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett for a pretty sweet rendition of an Ancient Chinese folk tale, "Journey to the West." If you weren't stoked about the upcoming games, and if you can get down on some tasty beats and stunning visuals, this might just get you in the mood.

To me this shows that creativity doesn't need to be confined to a 30 second tv spot. This particular video has only been up on YouTube for a little over one week and has 355,000 something views. Like Chris Baggott commented on Greenfield Liquor's approach to blogging for business, video can be a powerful and fun approach to communicating your message.

Compelling content (like a monkey flying on a cloud and kicking ass all the way to Beijing) will get mad views. This voracious viewage will stir up some crazy conversions once the traffic floods into the target homesite from the place where the killer content is held (ie YouTube or your better yet, your very own Compended blog). These crazy conversions turn into radical return on investment. Shizzam.

BBC can track the real return on their ill investment just by tracking the number of views on YouTube and the traffic flooding in to their site thanks to their mind-blowing content.

CONTENT DRIVES TRAFFIC. Know this.

Get your games on!

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doctor's orders: go to Bonnaroo

Posted Friday, June 27, 2008 by mikey mioduski

You know how you ease into a really hot tub or even a really cold body of water? That's how I had to take my first week at Compendium for my newest summer internship as the in-house design guy. Not that I wasn't excited or ready to take on the world of corporate blogging and web 2.0 with the tenacity that these five dollar terms deserve. I just didn't want to hurt myself coming out of grad school into the pro's. I didn't seek medical advice, but I imagine any doctor would have told me this is a good idea. You know, keep a limber mind.

Bonnaroo 2008 was incredible. One of the best times of my life. Some of the best live music I've heard in some time. My advice to anyone who cares, go see My Morning Jacket this summer if at all possible.

Now finishing up my third week I am blown away at the quality of people at Compendium. Great environment. And busy. My plate has been FULL since day one. I have a canker soar in my mouth. I've been informed by a very sweet, very attractive dental hygienist that this is a sign of stress. I haven't felt stressed out. But I sure as hell have been busy. This is good.

This place is busy. That's the bottom line. The more I am learning about our software, services, and corporate blogging in general, the more I am starting to understand why the weeks have flown by.

Time to go!

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