Axero Pulse » blogging

Business Blogging Software Platforms

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:00:08 +0000

Corporate Collective Blogging

The blog is now an integral part of any business website. Along with the standard sections of a website such as ‘about’, ‘products’, ‘contact’ and others, ‘blogs’ is one you would expect to see not just in businesses that have a social strategy but any website. It’s almost as if the blog is the first step for many businesses foraying into the “social” organization space. Whether for marketing products, building relationships with customers or simply sharing thoughts and experiences, the business blog is an important component of doing business online and needs a good software platform which is well suited to its objectives.

It’s interesting to notice, in most small to medium businesses you may be more likely to have just one or two representatives posting actively on a single blog. It could be the CEO and the Marketing head or any two managers who are active on social media channels blogging and most blogging platform like Type Pad, Wordpress, and others could serve the purpose well.

When you look at larger corporations, businesses and other organizations it’s almost expected that they have a larger representation on their blog or website. You’d expect their CEO as well as other top management to contribute something to the blog and address the community. They need to be seen as “more accessible” online if they stand any chance of being accepted as a social organization. This is usually where businesses decide to take the collective blogging route and it need not be restricted to large businesses.

When it comes to collective business blogging, there is greater participation from more members of the organization voicing their individual thoughts and ideas through their own blogs but collectively under the same website on a single platform. This is where you’ll come across the “blogs” section versus “blog” which is more common and while you have access to blog posts by different members within the business, it’s multiple blogs under one roof.

Collective blogging, community blogs or enterprise blogs as they are sometimes known as comes with its own unique set of challenges and requirements. Companies like CISCO and IBM, which have their employees contributing to the community through their blogs ensure they are not scattered across different hosted blogging software platforms but on a single platform which can be managed effectively and has centralized administration capabilities much like the platform Communifire carries. This is a critical feature to have in a collective blogging environment where there are multiple contributors and some amount of centralized administration can help keep some uniformity and give direction to the efforts.

Our community for ASP.NET developers www.codeasp.net is an example of such an environment. On this community we have myself and Vivek who blog frequently on our own blogs within the community and also have a number of other contributors which you’ll find appear under the blogs section. It enables all of us to contribute content to the community using a single platform which is far better than each of us having scattered blogs which would not just be a challenge to manage but would mean we will have a fragmented community and not have all readers on a single site.

The use of collective blogging is growing and can be great way to drive your social outreach. With the right software platform to manage all the individual contributors you can truly have a collective blog.

Why Consolidating Your Company’s Online Communities Makes Good Business Sense

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:00:40 +0000

Using social networking sites to build exposure for ones business and then build communities is a great strategy which can result in some really strong long term benefits. It’s little wonder you’ll find a large percentage of fortune 500 companies along with small to mid-sized businesses actively working on Twitter, creating Facebook fan pages, Linkedin groups, uploading YouTube videos and encouraging employees to blog on blogger and other hosted blogging engines. It makes a lot of sense at the earlier stages of social networking and media efforts to start building communities on these sites as each of them is a massive marketplace within themselves. As the social networking program of a company matures, it’s likely to find small pitfalls in this approach of building and interacting with their communities. Why?

Hosted solutions apart, would a company like to build a customer database in another organizations premises? No! A company’s customer database is treated like a closely guarded asset of the company. It has a financial value attached to it as something which can generate future revenue for the business. Is an online community any different? A well developed online community to which you can send out messages to and communicate with is also an asset and also has the same revenue generation potential. Why is it alright to have those scattered around different websites where a business can only have limited control over their administration and very little control over how long they have access to it. What if a company’s 30,000 strong Facebook fan page was to be blocked by a change of policy?

Perhaps it has very little to do with a conscious decision by a company. Building communities on these sites has a clear advantage in terms of popularity and existing traffic already on those sites. To build a similar network independently could take a lot more effort and time but on the bright side, the company has complete administrative control over what it has built over time and it can’t be easily taken away as it may be possible on other websites.

Despite the effort involved, consolidating a business scattered online social network communities into their own website is an angle worth looking at in the long term. Using a social networking software platform such as communifire makes building all the features of a social networking website into a business website simple. What needs to be addressed is how to redirect those very users from other sites and provide them an incentive to keep the same activity levels on the business website.

Despite the difficulties, as the business value of social networking is maturing rapidly, the need to be able to protect valuable communities built on these networks will also grow. The need to have greater control over them than social networking sites allow becomes an important issue. Building these social networks around a business website and consolidating their online audiences will most likely be an important strategy. After all… doesn’t it make good business sense?

Social Networking Platform – Blog Features

Tim Eisenhauer — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 08:04:17 +0000

Communifire, our social networking platform in ASP. NET, contains a ton of functionality…including forums, events, friending, article management, internal messaging, photo sharing, video sharing, blogs, and much more. In addition to the functionality I just briefly listed out, Communifire contains a very extensive and feature rich blogging system. Here is a rundown of a list that I wrote up to share those features with you…

Communifire Blog features

Communifire Blogs is a simple, yet powerful blogging system designed to increase the interaction between the community members and engage your readers and customers.

Publishing features

Multi-author support – Every user in the community gets a blog to publish their content and thoughts on for the community to read.
RSS feeds for all blogs – Each blog is syndicated using RSS / XML feeds. Your users can subscribe to your RSS Feeds using their feed readers to stay updated when new posts are made.
Advanced commenting system – Comments are a very important aspect of a blog. Strike up conversation and allow readers to comment on all blog posts. Add unlimited comments to each blog post. Blog authors can enable or disable comments, can mark comments as spam, or delete them using a very user friendly interface. Administrators have full control of how the comments are managed; choosing whether they are automatically published or you can choose to moderate them before appearing publically.
WYSIWYG Editor – The article manager contains one of the most well known and most used rich text editors. There is no need to know HTML to format your articles – just use the built in editor.

Images, Media, Files

Upload attachments – Upload an unlimited number of images or file attachments to each blog post. You can display the images anywhere within your blog posts.
Image resizing – You set the size of the images that are uploaded. If the images exceed the size you set, they will be automatically resized.
Image thumbnails – Whenever you upload an image, a thumbnail is automatically generated for you to display as teaser image next to your blog post title.
Embed videos – Easily embed YouTube, MySpace, Google, or any other types of videos into your articles. It’s as easy as copying and pasting the video code into your article.

Public features

Blog homepage – The blog homepage shows a list of all user blogs, a list of blog archives by month, and a list of the most recently published posts. Each post item contains an excerpt of the post and also a teaser image that you are able to upload when publishing. Clicking on a user filters the list of blog posts to display only those published by that user. Clicking on a blog archive month displays only those blog posts published during that month. You can also filter the blog posts per user and per monthly archive.
Blog post page – The blog post page displays an individual blog post, the bio of the user who made the posting, and provides a number of different functionalities to benefit the end user, including:
- Print – The print option displays a printer friendly version of the post, making it simple for your customer to print your blog posts.
- Email / Share with a friend – This option allows your readers to forward blog posts to their friends or colleagues by email. The emails that are entered are automatically saved to a database so you know where your blog posts are being distributed.
- Ratings – Get instant feedback on blog posts. Members of your community can rate each blog post indicating whether they found the post helpful or not. Ratings help to improve content quality, remove confusing content, and filter the wheat from the chafe.
- Change text size - Users can conveniently use this feature to increase the text size of the blog post for easier reading. User can increase or decrease the text size three times.
- Latest blog posts – The sidebar contains a list of the users’ latest blog posts as well as a list of the latest blog posts made by the entire community. This helps to increase readership and the time spent on the website by providing options for users to read additional content.

Search engine optimization features

SEO optimized out of the box – We spent a great deal of time optimizing the layout of the HTML and using the proper HTML tags to help search engines index and understand your content.
Keyword friendly URL’s – Create keyword friendly URL’s for your blog posts. URL’s that contain keywords are often given higher rankings in search results because they appear to be more relevant.
Customizable H1 tag – You can create a custom H1 tag for each blog posts you publish. H1 tags are known as heading tags that describe the content on the page. Search engines are known to give emphasis to those pages with highly relevant H1 tags.
Custom Page Titles – You can create your own optimized page title for each blog post. Search engines have been known to favor pages with relevant page titles. If you don’t want to create a custom page title, the blog platform will use the post title.
Custom Meta Descriptions and keywords – The blog platform allows you to create custom Meta description and keywords for each and every post that is published. Search engines often use the Meta description and keywords to describe your website within search results. Provide an optimized custom description to entice users to click through to your blog posts.

Administration features

Moderation - With our advanced moderation tools, you can remove obscene or inappropriate content quickly and easily.
Management - All blogs, posts, and comments can be fully managed by an administrator

Ok, so there you have it — a listing of (most of) the features of the blogging functionality in the Communifire Social Networking Platform. And if you’re interested in checking out a live social network running on Communifire, you can check out CodeAsp.Net – an ASP.NET Community. You can click here to see the blogs.

And to learn more about Communifire, click here to read the Social Networking Platform in ASP. NET.