I generally keep this site a shill free zone, but business is business and my business is blogging for business.
Try and say that 10 times fast! At the least, while you are trying to say that tongue twister, you can alternately take some sips of free Starbucks coffee, but more on that in a second.
I have made no secret that 2 ½ years ago, when I started blogging, I was a hard-working Brand Manager and then a software sales rep. for a large technology distributor in the IBM channel. I was caught up as a (relatively) young guy in a business populated by people, mostly, at least 10 years my senior. I was still looking for an opportunity that would thrust me out of the Dilbert comic strip and into a trajectory that was satisfying, or at least not soul destroying.
Then I started blogging and my career turned upside down, in the best way possible.
Based on my blog, I got hooked up with a technology company that services the wine industry. At the time, the opportunity to join a start up company with solid funding, IN THE WINE INDUSTRY, was manna from heaven.
While that opportunity to build a direct business-to-business wine buying program was exciting, rewarding and fun, ultimately I moved on, leaving the portion of the business that I was involved in better than when I found it, which is about all you can ask of an employee from an employer perspective. Note to self—it is better to be Henry Ford then the cave dweller that invents the wheel, or the anonymous German that invented the engine, for that matter.
Then in March of this year, I transitioned to a leadership role with Compendium Blogware, a Software as a Service (SaaS) company based in Indianapolis, IN.
Off the road and sleeping in my own bed consistently has been nice, even if my drive to work contains absolutely no vineyard scenery and no KNBR 680 am. So, yes, in a relatively short period, I have moved in and out of the wine industry and now I work for a blog software firm.
Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined this just a few short years ago.
The thing that makes my current employ, Compendium, so unique and valuable is that blogging for business is on a lifecycle similar to the trajectory of email marketing circa 1998. Now, email marketing is ubiquitous. Blogging will be the same way.
However, while Typepad and Wordpress beat each other up for incremental market share trying to figure out the monetization of advertising across all of the citizen journalist sites, nobody is addressing the corporate market—folks that want a solution with light-bodied content management-like capabilities for administrative approval, and an actual way to measure results separate from mindshare and influence.
In traditional blogging, mindshare and influence are critical to success, but in marketing where real dollars are attached to a need for real results, sometimes that “influence” notion is a tough sell.
Compendium solves both of those challenges by including an administrative layer with developing enterprise blog content management capabilities and by also incorporating some secret sauce that aids in search engine optimization for customers. Therefore, it translates that “influence” to actual results.
It is all pretty cool and something I passionately believe in.
That said, our customer acquisition has been strong and steady, but in these Web 2.0 days you want to take the car from 60 mph to 120 mph. Since I lead the client services and support, I am essentially asking you to help make my life busy, very busy.
We want to scale our customer base another 3X this year.
In order to do this, Compendium Blogware and I are offering $50 worth of free Starbucks coffee to anybody that makes a referral to this link.
However, here is the very favorable and positive rub on the referral—that is all it has to be. Who do you know that should be blogging, but is not? Any wineries? Um, I think there probably are a few. So, if you make a referral, you get the $50 Starbucks gift card no questions asked and the referral does not have to become a customer of Compendium, just engage in a conversation to understand how we are different and better than solutions that are optimized for citizen journalists. That is it. It is as close as you can get to a “no-strings-attached, but you get something in return” offer.
We will do the rest and we are confident that once we get an opportunity to talk through the blog landscape and how we approach the business and blogging in general that a client will see the value and the opportunity in becoming our partner.
So, am I blogging for a purpose? You bet I am. I hope are too, please hit the link to help somebody else do the same.