Compendium Blogware

Social Media Content Strategy

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:07:37 +0100

One of the benefits working at Compendium is that I am working with the top content marketing specialists out there. Every day I receive emails full of content discussing hot topics around SEO, Social Media, on online marketing. Thanks to a colleague of mine, I just read a phenomeal article about a well known energy drink company that heavily relies on Facbook as their primary customer engagement tool. You can find the Information Week article here.

As a salesman in the online marketing space, I am often selling to marketers who are building their entire social content strategy around Facebook. But this is an example of a major brand that lost ground on that strategy. This article points to two changes that FB made, 1. To iframes and 2. To SSL pages.

With constant changes in Facebook, it’s much smarter to engage within Facebook (i.e. use it as one channel of content curation), but take ownership of the content and where it lives. Businesses cannot rely on Facebook as their dataBase of customer/social engagement, because the game can change so quickly and often. Compendium provides an easy solution called Web to Post that will allow you to engage with your customers in Facebook, but capture, control, and publish the content to your brands standards.

If you are looking to easily control your content, click here for a product demonstration of Compendium's solution.

Compendium Innovation Day is an Amazing Success

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:24:29 +0100

Indianapolis, IN—Compendium, a software company that makes it easy for marketers to publish content to blogs, landing pages, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, organized its first Innovation Day on Friday, April 15, 2011. The purpose of the day was to demonstrate to employees the agility and innovation that is inherent in a start-up organization.

Beginning at 8:00 a.m., participants pitched ideas for new product features. After the top three ideas were chosen, individuals selected their groups and got to work. A developer was assigned to each team to aid in the actual building of the feature. Comprised of members from every department, each team had 8 hours to turn their ideas into functioning prototypes. A panel of expert judges was assembled to select the winning team.

“What these teams were able to accomplish in a matter of hours far exceeded any expectations I had,” said Frank Dale, President of Compendium. “We were hoping the teams would walk away with a better understanding of start-up culture, but to achieve that as well as three viable features to our product is simply amazing and a testament to the talent we have on staff.”

The three features revealed at the end of the day were as follows: 1.) a click-to-post widget that allows Compendium clients to highlight text from any page and feed it into their Compendium account, 2.) an A/B Call-to-Action feature, and 3.) a content dashboard—which took home the prize—that sits inside the Compendium platform and helps users and administrators evaluate content based on search analytics and volume. All of these features will be refined and incorporated in Compendium's content marketing platform.

“It was exciting to watch the teams narrow their focus to specific customer segments, test their ideas with those customers, and adapt their ideas to better meet customers' needs,” said M. Kim Saxton, Clinical Assistant Professor of Marketing at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.

“I've been involved in judging a lot of business plan competitions. This teams' ability to put together a compelling value proposition was phenomenal in comparison. Perhaps most compelling was the focus on customers' points of pain and not the technology per se,” said Todd Saxton, Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.

Compendium is planning on implementing an Innovation Day each quarter to continue to foster momentum. For more information about the day, click here.

Content Marketing 101: Understand Your Audience

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:00:00 +0100

Your content is most valuable when you understand whom you’re talking to (ask yourself: who is my customer?) and what they want (ask yourself: what problems does my customer have?). If your business is having any success, you probably already know most of the answers to these questions, but you might not know how to translate your answers to the online world.
Start with keyword research. Get a Google Adwords account and begin learning how people search for the products and services that you sell. As an automotive shop, you might sell PVC floor coverings, but searchers might call them rubber garage mats, meaning you should be calling them rubber garage mats, too! Keyword research is vital because it helps you understand how your customers talk about their problems online and how you should address them.

Our advice: Start your content marketing strategy where your competitors aren’t—in the long tail. Remember: searchers will care about your content if it’s easy to find and solves their problems.

Want to take this Content advice to the next level? Download this!

Content Marketing 101: The Middleman is Dead

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 19:40:40 +0100

The middleman is dead, and we should all be glad for that (our condolences, of course, if you are the middleman). With the infusion of Web 2.0 tools, every organization can now afford to be their own publisher. Want to publish a video? Do it with YouTube and Vimeo. Want to publish an article? Get yourself a blog. Want to share your recent presentation with the world? Get your slides on Slideshare, your podcast on iTunes, and your speaking notes of Scribd—then, Tweet and Facebook the links.

Here’s the deal: you now have more control over your content marketing strategy than ever before, and the winners of the online world will be the ones who take advantage of this reality. Unfortunately, most marketers don’t know where to start.

Start by creating content that solves your customers’ problems.

Want to take this Content advice to the next level? Download this!

Learning from Failure

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 16:00:52 +0100

Hard to believe Compendium's first ever Innovation Day was one week ago. The excitement around the projects and teamwork continue to linger in the office and the question on everyone's mind, aside getting these great features to market is, when's the next Innovation Day?!

It's great how a team can rally around the success of an idea or campaign but just as important is learning from failure.

This article from the Harvard Business Review hit my inbox today and I think it's one that every marketer should read and implement amongst their teams. My favorite line is this:

If an innovation initiative failed, ask why. Simple answers don't count. To state that it didn't hit ROI, or whatever the metric is, doesn't answer the question.

In the age of measured marketing, learning from failure is just as important as replicating success.

To bring it full circle, Innovation Day at Compendium was an enormous success because we weren't afraid to fail. We knew whatever evolved from the day would make us stronger as an organization and allow us to learn from both successes and failures. Go here to learn more about the day and innovations created.

What is Content Marketing?

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 11:49:00 +0100

Let’s start with a simpler question first: what is content? Content is anything that contains information which can be imparted upon an end-user. When we speak about it, we're usually talking about online media that is readily available for consumption. It may be a blog post, a web page, a third-party testimonial, or a news article. Content is often text-based, but it doesn’t have to be—photos and videos make for great content, especially when it comes to repurposing.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about Content Marketing. Content marketing is the process of “creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage” your target audience (Pulizzi). Your aim as a content marketer is to tell the right story, at the right time, in the right format, helping and informing your audience in the process.

I know what you’re thinking: how do I keep the lights on if all I’m doing is informing—I need to sell to stay in business! Don’t worry; we hear you. Here's the thing: content marketing is a customer acquisition tool; it’s about proving to your audience that you are the best organization to solve their problems. If you can do that (and you can), the selling will take care  of itself.
For more content know-how, download this free resource. It kicks ass.

Compendium and iGoDigital

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 17:09:16 +0100

Check out the great links below on how we are working with a partner/client, iGoDigital. This is a great showing of two sophisticated companies helping each other make our products stronger and more effective for our clients.

For an example of how we’ve applied our recommendation engine within Compendium, check out this out: http://www.compendium.com/solutions/blogging-solution.html or http://www.compendium.com/solutions/social-media-solution.html

See the “Notes from the Blog” widget on the left hand side. Just a very basic example of how iGoDigital can take the content of a page and look for related blog content. Another compelling opportunity is to recommend products related to content on retail sites, and we have done a few of these types of implementations. For example, iGoDigital would display the most popular 3D TVs next to a blog post about the 3D TVs.

FW: Thank you for participating in the Indy AMA's Spring Marketing 360 event!

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:51:34 +0100

I really enjoyed getting this email from Bryana with the AMA. She recently brought a group of talented marketers to Compendium to learn how we are helping businesses execute on their content marketing strategies.

Allison, Brian & Max,

Thank you so much again for participating in the Indy AMA’s Spring Marketing 360 event last Friday and helping us shape the next generation of marketers. The students and I really enjoyed visiting your office and learning more about Compendium. It was great to sit down face to face and learn more about your company from some of the key members of your marketing, sales and customer service teams. Thank you for not only touring us around your offices on your awesome Innovation Day, but also sharing your insights and advice with us. What a great experience for our collegiate members! I have attached photos from the event for you. I plan to highlight the Marketing 360 event in the next Indy AMA newsletter and post some of the pictures on the Indy AMA website as well. Watch for the Spring Marketing 360 event highlight in the next newsletter and on indyama.com soon.

Many thanks!

Bryana

Customers execute successful customer acquisition strategies!

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 21:53:37 +0100

This week has been an exciting week at Compendium - customers, partners and prospects have validated our vision via successfully launching content marketing strategies and story harvesting initiatives.

In fact, Allison, one of Strategic Account Managers shared the below comment from one of our great clients, Vantage Travel:

"Just implemented Compendium at Vantage, great service great company great results!"

Working with great clients, driving great results - is what it is ALL about!! If you are interested in learning more about customer acquisition strategies, please check us out at www.compendium.com , or better yet, check out one of our clients.... www.vantagetravel.com !

5 Ways to Guarantee Content Marketing Success

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 16:50:43 +0100

I got some push-back on the word "Guarantee" here. But I'm sticking with it. Do these 5 things (plus the bonus one), and good things will happen.

#5: Participation. Companies who are most successful with their Content Marketing Strategy have wide participation among all of their employees.You hire smart people who like their jobs and understand the problems of the customer and your solutions. They want to be empowered and they want to help—let them.

Within your environment, free them to blog, Tweet, and promote their own content to their personal social networks—good things will happen. We just did an internal analysis of our blog post traffic sorted by Author. The person who keeps our laptops and networks running wrote the second-most trafficked post over the last 30 days. This is a guy who doesn’t talk a lot in the office and in a ‘traditional’ world would never be given the keys to a corporate blog. Progressive organizations like ExactTarget have over 160 employee bloggers. Sears actually has participation in blogging as part of the job requirements.

#4: Transparency. We all know intuitively that people buy from people, and the more transparent an organization the more human you become. Successful content marketing organizations make sure they include the human aspects of the business. Birthdays, anniversaries, parties, and awards all become part of the content mix. Along with this transparency comes the responsibility of honestly facing shortcomings and address problems. Companies who aren’t transparent aren’t trusted. The Iowa legislature is on the verge of approving a bill that makes it illegal to film animal feeding and processing facilities. How do you think this will affect peoples excitement for eating meat from Iowa?

#3: Focus on the customer. The most important person in any business is the customer. What all content marketing efforts demand is that content needs to be focused on addressing and telling the stories of the customer. The greatest selling tactic in the history of mankind is “The Similar-Situation Story”. Tell me a story about how you have helped solve a problem like mine, for someone like me, and I’ll trust you can solve my problem.

This is best accomplished via email or other interaction with your existing customers soliciting their stories. Not necessarily reviews (content about you) but use-cases, situations and recommendations to others.

Suppose you sell treadmills.

You are going to have a picture of that treadmill and odds are you will have a model of some sort posing on that treadmill. That is a similar-situation story. Depending on that model, customers will imagine themselves and think “this is the right treadmill for me”.

Now imagine you capture pictures and stories from hundreds of customers. You are going to get all kind of stories, use-cases, and pictures of customers of all shapes, sizes, dispositions, etc. All this leads to dramatically increasing the types of similar-situation stories you can tell, directly increasing your opportunities for success.

#2: Focus on sharing. You create content to educate, engage, and enable discovery. Sharing is key, but it doesn’t happen by itself. Successful strategy requires active management of your sharing program. ‘Active’ shouldn’t intimidate you as something that requires an inordinate amount of work. Tools like Email, Co-Tweet, and a host of others make sharing programs easy. Sharing is more about using your imagination.

Think about using email to point customers to their own stories with giant share buttons.

Marketing 101 tells us that your best prospects are the people who share the behavior and characteristics of your existing customers. By definition, they are probably the FRIENDS of your current customers. Do everything you can to help your current customers share THEIR stories on THEIR Facebooks.

Another great tactic is to hold contests among your content creators (customers & employees) to see who can get the most likes. You will be surprised how much spread you can get with simplistic contests and incentives.

There was a great book in the 80’s called “Hope Is Not A Strategy,” yet so many Content Marketers seem to live on the ‘Hope’ that their content will be shared. Make it happen.

#1: Think like an SEO Expert. There may be some who will protest, but let me state unequivocally the number one benefit of Content Marketing is the qualified traffic you will get from search engines. I recommend that every marketer take the time to review their keywords at least weekly. Guide your writers and your audience to use these words in your content. Was is Matt Cutts who called keywords “The Language Of Your Customer?"

Understanding your keywords is understanding how your customer is interacting in your industry and how they are thinking about their problems.

I once was looking for rubber floor mats for my garage to park my cars on. After a herculean effort, I find them on a catalog site labeled “PVC floor covering." (I'm sure some lawyer was like: "We can't call them Rubber.") My perception of PVC is white plastic pipe for plumbing, not something to park my car on.

Remember—and if you don’t believe me, check your own analytics—most of the consumption of your content is coming from a First-Time Visitor.  Our studies show that, on average, 80% of all blog reading is done by people who have never been there before. Thinking like an SEO will help you grow your audience by targeting the right people.

__________________________________________________________________

Bonus! Pay attention to calls-to-action & conversions. I can’t tell you how many blogs I see with no CTAs. Remember that your goal with content marketing is to grow your business.

When you're operating online, this is best accomplished by converting traffic towards a deeper relationship. Don’t forget this. Sometimes it may be hard to increase your traffic, but you can almost always increase your conversion. Focus on what you want the consumer of your content to do. Share? Download? Buy? And don’t forget to test.

Fwd: An Unprecedented Agenda at the Search Insider Summit

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 20:34:05 +0100

I just wanted to share this eamil from the Search Insider Summit. Should be a great event if you can make it...

From: Search Insider Summit
Date: April 18, 2011 7:48:41 AM PDT
To: Chris Baggott
Subject: An Unprecedented Agenda at the Search Insider Summit
Reply-To: Search Insider Summit <shows@mediapost.com>

May 4 – 7, 2011 · South Seas Island Resort · Captiva Island, Florida

No Topic Will Be Left Uncovered
All themes get the full treatment on Captiva Island...

After the Sunset Cocktail Party kicks things off on May 4th, the Search Insider Summit will begin on the morning of Cinco de Mayo with a brand new format designed to thoroughly examine all search-related themes and concerns.

The main stage content will be divided into 5 general sessions (Reinventing Marketing I, Reinventing Marketing II, Reinventing the Organization, Reinventing the Customer, and Reinventing the Search Experience). To wrap things up, Enquiro's Gord Hotchkiss will sit down with journalist, philanthropist & entrepreneur Esther Dyson to review and summarize all of the Summit's main takeaways.

If you've been considering attending a Search Insider Summit for a while, now's the time to take the plunge. Here's a peek at just a small handful of brands sending top executives to participate:

Register today and prepare to take your search campaigns to the next level! (Registration includes: full access to keynotes, general sessions, workshops, meals, Captiva Island activities, cocktail parties and networking functions for three days.) Don't get shut out! Click the register button below!

Collaborate & Innovate! Compendium's Innovation Day!

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 18:18:05 +0100

Last Friday, Compendium employees participated in Compendium's first ever Innovation Day. To kick off the day, each employee submitted an idea for enhancing our platform. The catch -- the chosen concepts or ideas had to be easily developed in just one day. The winning team left with eternal glory and bragging rights moving into the next Innovation Day, TBD.

It was an incredible day with many takeaways about how concepts and big ideas come to life. At the end of a grueling 8 hours, three concepts were left on the table for debate:

- Content Compass
- Click, Target & Test (aka A/B CTA)
- Copy to Post

Ultimately, the Content Compass team emerged victorious...a sad blow to the Click, Target & Test contingency. Check out the following link to learn more about and see behind the scenes footage from Innovation Day.

Compendium Innovates

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 17:32:58 +0100

Last Friday our company had it's first annual Innovation Day on site. Over a 12 hour period (that's right, we worked overtime!) we pitched ideas for the platform, validated those ideas with current customers built prototypes, and presented completed projects to a panel of experts. Then, we celebrated...

You can check out the experience and the excitement here:

http://landingpages.compendium.com/innovation-day.html

Or get a better sense of the timeline here:

http://bit.ly/fXEX8z

The results? We created approximately 3 products that are very close to market capable. They include:

A way for Administrators to approve posts on the go.
The ability to blog directly within a browser.
A more interactive user interface showing leaderboards, successful content, etc.

Now comes the final test. Getting them out to our customers. Our President had this to say:

"Awesome job last Friday! We are committed to finishing all three projects, but the projects belong to you. That means each team is responsible for finishing the product, developing the launch plan, and getting it to market."

More details on that soon. At this stage, I simply want to thank everyone who was a part of innovation day.

Do You Measure Your Facebook Page?

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:19:04 +0100

I came across a great post by the Social Media Examiner team on how to measure Facebook engagement. While companies are clamoring to create fan pages and increase the their 'Likes,' they often fail to measure the success, or failure, of their pages.

As the article points out, around 90% of Facebook users don't return to a page after they've Liked it. So what is your community doing and how can you determine if your Facebook strategy is effective? Social Media Examiner recommends:

Monitoring Per-Post Insights including what you posted, number of impressions and your feedback percentage.
Monitoring Daily Story Feedback which encompasses measuring Likes, comments, unsubscribes and unlikes.

You can look at analytics for your Facebook page at facebook.com/insights (I highly recommend you do). Also, when creating your social media strategy consider your audience. If you keep all of your content in a contained environment you're shooting yourself in the foot in terms of your organic search strategy.

Facebook, your blog and other social media marketing strategies should all be working together. Make sure you measure your results and remember to harvest Facebook stories for your blog -- which will be visible to people searching for your goods and services...people who don't know you, I might add.

Fwd: Final Days to Save Big on the Search Insider Summit - Register Now!

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:25:52 +0100

I just wanted to share this with everyone. I'll be speaking at the Search Insider event in a couple of weeks. Should be really strong and in a great location. My session title is Becoming a Content Marketer.

Today is the last day for the discount so read below and I hope I'll see you there!

From: cbaggott@compendium.com

Sent from my iPad
Begin forwarded message:

From: Search Insider Summit <shows@mediapost.com>
Date: April 13, 2011 8:01:09 AM MDT
To: chris@compendiumblogware.com
Subject: Final Days to Save Big on the Search Insider Summit - Register Now!
Reply-To: Search Insider Summit <shows@mediapost.com>

May 4 – 7, 2011 · South Seas Island Resort · Captiva Island, Florida

Now is the Time to Register Online!
Save a full $1,000.00 - Now Through Friday Only!

If you've been considering attending a Search Insider Summit for a while, now's the time to take the plunge. Here's a peek at just a small handful of brands sending top executives to participate:

Register today and prepare to take your search campaigns to the next level! (Registration includes: full access to keynotes, general sessions, workshops, meals, Captiva Island activities, cocktail parties and networking functions for three days.) Don't get shut out from the savings! The Early Bird registration special expires on Friday at 6:30pm PDT. Click the register button below!