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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.

How Social Software Can Impact Your Organic Search Marketing

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:00:46 +0000

Build A Community And Build Search Marketing Capabilities

Staying on top of SEO and search engine marketing strategies is a constant challenge for any marketing organization, and the battle for the front pages of search results is ongoing. While one on-site SEO strategy like adjusting titles, meta tags, and adjusting copy to include keywords is a one time or periodic activity, the challenge is the daily ongoing work — and that may be difficult for a single person or a small team to take responsibility for and execute day after day. On a more static business website, this is much the way it works — and marketing alone is responsible for the content, updates, or other activity that can help generate more search traffic to the website. Building a community using a social software platform on the site however, changes the dynamics completely and can add a whole new dimension to your search marketing capabilities. Other than the fact that social software platforms such as our own Communifire are built on a search engine friendly architecture, by building a community that’s part of your business website, you are effectively outsourcing a critical part of your SEO activities to your customers and members and leveraging “the power of many.”

By reviewing feedback from businesses that have incorporated social software networks as a part of their website as a marketing strategy, there are some clear benefits that have surfaced. Here are some key benefits of extending your website to include a community with respect to boosting its search traffic:

Increased indexed content pages: One of the first outcomes of establishing an active community of users on the site is a spurt in the amount of content added regularly to the website, as well as the number of pages within the website. The increase in pages within your website will also see an increase in the number of pages indexed by search engines, creating a wider net of content on the web that can bring visitors to the site. With such pages and content being created constantly, this grows consistently over time without needing too much attention from the in-house team.

Build up of useful content and media: An active community inadvertently creates and publishes large volumes of fresh content within your website in the form of discussion posts, blogs, articles, photos, videos, etc. … and are generated daily, adding tremendously to the search marketing opportunities. This volume of content creation and addition to the searchable content is very difficult to replicate for a single person or a small online marketing team.

Wider promotion & social networking effect: Within a social networking environment, the community promotes, shares, and markets, their own content (as well as others) both within and outside the community creating a viral effect. This will give your website a greater reach and distribute marketing responsibilities to the community.

Build up of valuable keyword density: In the course of the interaction and discussions on the community section of the website, some of the primary keywords you need your site to rank for are likely to be frequently used in natural communication, building up the density of those keywords within the site. For example, if you build a community around network security, the words network security, anti-virus, firewall and so one are going to come up frequently during interactions and the site will start ranking higher for those keywords.

Creation of long tail keywords or keyword phrases: Discussions and content on the community are more likely to build more long tail keyword phrases within your website, which even SEO experts may not factor in. This happens during every day interaction and keyword phrases like “how to protect your peer to peer network” may draw some very specific and very relevant traffic to your website. Keyword phrases that arise out of natural language communication will build up on the community and in time be responsible for a significant percentage of all traffic — and more importantly some very relevant traffic.

Quicker link building: Communities and the activity they entail encourages quicker building of both internal links within the website (including to important offering and marketing pages) as well as inward links to the website as a result of members linking to the community and pages within from their personal blogs, websites and sharing of links with others. Link building is critical to the search marketing strategy and the more links that are regularly built, the better.

Page rank development: With more conversations, discussions, and resources built within the community section of the website, search engines are likely to recognize the site as a growing useful resource within the domain and reward the site with a higher page rank — making a great impact on the search traffic results.

It’s important to note whether you use a social software platform to develop your community section or develop your own community software from scratch, for this strategy to work effectively, the platform and the community should be on your website and within your domain. Third party communities hosted elsewhere may help with traffic and marketing, but won’t maximize the SEO potential the way your own community will. There are many areas to consider while developing your search marketing, but few can match the benefits of incorporating a social software based community on your website.

Build a community – build traffic.

Lost, Survivor, or American Idol — The After Party Is On Social Networks

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 05:51:53 +0000

Lost, Survivor, Dancing with the Stars, or American Idol — if you’re a fan, the real party begins soon after each episode is aired. Location? The community sites where fans gather, tear apart, critic, discuss and share every minute aspect of the show. That’s where the real party begins.

Everyone’s favorite shows have not just hooked viewers during the half hour or hour during which they are aired. They have learned quickly to capitalize on their popularity and extend their grip over fans using social networking and community software features as an enabler. The official fan sites are equipped with blogs, videos, photos, discussion forums, wall-like updates, activity streams, polls, and everything needed for fans to come together and continue the discussion around their favorite shows.

Survivor now into its 20th season with Heroes Vs Villains sports daily blog posts from Jeff Probst with riveting opinions from the man himself. The steady stream of fan comments and activity provides a discussion base where opinions fly soon after each episode is aired and more is revealed.

American Idol’s site features the MyIdol Fan Community which is a full fledged community extension for die hard American Idol fans complete with blogs, photos, groups, forums and directory of members creating an exclusive online fan base.

Lost is just one of those shows where you compulsively need to discuss and have conversations after watching each episode and the show has no shortage of online communities setup to discuss this intriguing and mind boggling drama.

Fan communities have not just become a norm but have become and extension of tv shows and other events on the web. The enthusiasm they can generate brings together fans, spark conversation and turns them into passionate advocates for their favorite shows. With social networking and community software technology becoming more accessible, the ability to build such engaging social elements into a main website has been thrown open to smaller events and production businesses. One need not have the resources of ABC or Fox to learn from their community building experience and apply it to their own businesses, products, or offerings. Out-of the box solutions like the Communifire platform offer the social features needed to turn a simple information site into an activity filled, captivating community. The social network and fan community is at the end of the day, the online dimension to everything we love to rave about.

Document And File Management On Your Social Software Platform

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:00:13 +0000

Operating System Or Social Software Platform- Where Is Your Workspace?

It’s been interesting to watch responses from both technology enthusiasts as well as opinions from other big players in the space as Microsoft rolls out its latest Windows 7 operating system. After comparatively disappointing sales of Windows Vista a lot of expectations lie on the new version of Windows and all eyes are glued to how it will be received and perform.

With some competition from Apple, Linux and Google upgrading your version of Windows every time a new version rolls out isn’t as mandatory as it once may have seemed. It’s not just the competition that makes everyone a little apprehensive about how popular the new Windows will be it’s really the direction computing has taken in the recent times and how web reliant businesses and individuals are now. Google’s opinion is that the operating system is losing its status as the most important bit of software on your PC and is more of a middle layer which helps you connect to the Internet where all the real focus is.

Computing both for businesses and individuals is becoming more decentralized and also more mobile. Your computing needs are not restricted to your desktop PC rather, you need access to your workspace from where ever you are be it your mobile device, laptop, netbook or anywhere. People need access to their workspace and documents when at home, at the office, on the streets or traveling. This means that “workspace” needs to be online. Access to important files and documents that are needed for work need to be online too and while it’s possible for employees to subscribe to a third party site which allows file sharing and document upload, it makes sense for the business to provide employees with a way to upload and manage their documents. From a security standpoint, it’s always best to have all the documents somewhere on your own servers or space rather than have them scattered across other sites.

Social software platforms like Communifire which can be used to integrate a collaboration platform or intranet into an organizations website allow each user to upload their important files or documents to their personal pages within the network. This way they always have access to their files while they are still within the organization’s Intranet and kept secure. Along with discussions, communications, content and other work material, it’s good to have a centralized place for important documents without having to be restricted to a single workstation or machine and that’s what good social software platforms provide.

We can only speculate as to how well Windows 7 does in the market but one thing is for sure. The role of the operating system is changing from being the workspace to being a mode of transport to our new workspace which is on the web.

Customization Of Look And Feel For Your Online Community Software

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:00:08 +0000

The Good The Bad The Ugly Of Social Networks & Community Sections On Business Websites

Have you ever come across a company website where the design, look, and feel oozed professionalism and gave you the feeling that you were viewing a “credible website” — until you logged into the community section, forums, or the social network section of the site and you find yourself in unfamiliar surroundings again? This is usually a result of weaving in a free open source platform to extend the website to include a community section or features such as forums.

A majority of the free software hosted options for communities are not built with complete customization abilities in mind. They offer functional solutions that allow you to customize some options, and at the most, offer a choice of skins to adjust look and feel — but, to be able to add on a community area or social network as a seamless part of the website, one needs to be able to get down to the code and components that govern the basic look and feel.

While selecting community software for your website, be sure to select a platform that allows you to customize down to the fine details, and that will allow you to integrate it with the rest of your website. Solutions like Communifire, that provide access to the CSS style sheets (which are well labeled and documented) make it easier for you to customize fonts, colors, borders layout, and adjust each aspect of the look and feel to appear as a extension of your existing site.

This way, when someone comes across your site and navigates through the community (where people do spend a lot more time) they have the same design experience and familiarity carried through the entire site.

This is the kind of experience you have while using communities on sites like CISCO’s and others where the social networking and community part of the site is really a big part of the overall site. It doesn’t look like someone had a great aesthetic sense while building their main website and then decided to shabbily glue on a community platform as an extension.

Here is a check list of design elements you should check for to see if you will be able to edit or modify them to gel with your look and feel while selecting a social software platform:

Layout, spacing, and borders
Images and icon sets – including avatars
Colors – including background, foreground, font, borders, hyperlinks, etc.
Fonts and text style / formatting
Ability to add on components and widgets, like forms and anything else that may be needed

The entire point of evaluating a good social networking or community platform is to avoid having to build everything from scratch — but you still want your community to give the end user a seamless experience. If you select a platform which gives you that, you’ll have a community that’s functional and looks right!

Collaborative Enterprise Blogging Lessons

Tim Eisenhauer — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:34:37 +0000

Enterprise Blogging & Social Media Lessons From The Big Guys

Social media marketing is not just a buzz word anymore. Businesses are taking it very seriously and despite the drop in budgets and spending on several other forms of advertising, reports show that the social media spend is still on a rise. The food giant General Mills employed the social media power of 900 bloggers about a month ago to promote their range of products. 80% of the bloggers comprised of moms and housewives, which also the largest demographic of the company’s customers, and there is probably no person more credible to blog about a Betty Crocker double layer choco chunk cake than a mom. But just how did they pull off a collaborative blogging effort of this size? By building MyBlogSpark which was based on a strong social media software platform.

An AdWeek press release by Brian Morrissey stated:

“MyBlogSpark has recruited more than 900 bloggers — over 80 percent are moms — to register to be eligible for everything from sampling campaigns to product coupons to news of a new ad campaign. General Mills plans to use the network to promote its wide portfolio of products in the food and beverage, beauty, home, electronics, health and automotive categories.”

General Mills can be confident the program will fill blogs with positive reviews. One of the requirements for participation reads:

“If you feel you cannot write a positive post regarding the product or service, please contact the MyBlogSpark team before posting any content.”

Collaborative blogging is an extremely powerful source of word-of- mouth marketing. Whether it’s paid or for some incentive, as in the General Mills case or it’s done by a community that is simply passionate about a business or its products, it’s still perceived as a more credible source of information than PR and press articles. Your customers and online community are your best PR agents, provided that you give them a good collaborative platform to talk about your products and services. There is no better PR agent for a small software company than a small group of software experts who use their products. There is no better agent for a small online musical instruments business than a group of musicians. There is no one better to market a local SCUBA dive shop than a group of divers who have been there.

Even the small independent music store can mobilize the community to blog collectively and help promote its business online. It may not be 900 bloggers and moms but even 10-20 music enthusiasts working together to blog and promote the business can create a lot of word of mouth marketing and go a long way. Social software platforms like Communifire, which offer not just the software but the option to fully own the source code too, allow a virtually unlimited level of customization and can easily be used to build something along the lines of MyBlogSpark or make a perfect base for the collaborative social media and blogging campaign. There is a lot you can learn from the big guys — but you don’t have to be one to build a strong community to represent your business. Use community power!

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.

ASP.NET Community Software: URL Routing added to Communifire

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:51:38 +0000

Today we added a cool feature to Communifire, a social networking platform in ASP. NET.

URL Routing / Mapping – The URL Mapping module will help you maintain your existing search engine rankings for the various pages in your website. When you upgrade into Communifire from your old website, you can map your old URLs to the new URLs you create within the Communifire platform. This is done using dynamic 301 redirectes from within the system.

How does this help you? Well, it makes sure that all of your “old pages” maintain the same rank, apart from seeing the benefits of the new custom URLs.

Axero Solutions launches CodeAsp.Net, a social network for ASP.NET developers

Tim Eisenhauer — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 10:03:30 +0000

Axero Solutions launches CodeAsp.Net, a social network gor ASP.NET developers.

It’s a rich and trusted resource that offers valuable and powerful articles, blogs, and know-how to help you increase and develop your ASP.NET software development skills – allowing you to work better and smarter. The CodeAsp.Net community is made up of a myriad of software professionals, ranging from seasoned ASP.NET developers to Architects to beginner programmers. No matter what experience you may have, the CodeAsp.Net community will help you in your day to day programming, navigate your way to the top and keep you informed of the newest and best tools.

If you’re an ASP.NET developer or programmer, check it out and sign up today!

CodeAsp.Net runs on top of Axero’s flagship software product, Communifire. Communifire is an online social networking software platform that integrates blogs, discussion forums, events, photo sharing, video sharing, article management, and a whole lot more. It enables you to quickly add social networking functionality to your website or business.