Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Monetizing because there is a lack of differentiated content. You’re absolutely right. The price comparison is possible because there is no real differentiation from the content point of view. If there were differentiation, people would find it themselves and then engage with the brand on their own.

Frank Dale: That’s exactly right. And it goes back to whom you’re good for, too. I think that’s the other problem. People want to write for everyone, and the reality is that you need to write for specific customers. You need to create videos or do interviews for specific customers and solve their problems. If you do that, you’re going to differentiate. If you’re going to differentiate, you’re going to get the margin that you want. I’m amazed by how little that’s understood. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: My blog has been around since the spring of 2005. It’s a well-known blog, but I know what kind of effort goes into it and what kind of team I need to sustain that effort, research team, editing team and so on. It’s an elaborate effort, and I think it’s very difficult for little companies to be able to afford to sustain that kind of an effort.

Frank Dale: I completely agree. Our best customers are mid-sized firms to enterprise firms for exactly the reason you’re talking about. I had someone ask me last week – and I’m not sure if you’re familiar with this effort – if small companies can do the Coca-Cola 20/20 strategy, which is basically a content marketing strategy, and the answer is they can’t. Nor should they be doing that. It’s just too involved. You’re exactly right. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I think what you’re pointing out is if you do have a more restricted area, then you do have the opportunity to optimize the time window when you send your messages.

Frank Dale: Absolutely, and make sure you’re tracking them. I know that sounds funny; that’s a basic business practice. But I think you would be stunned, certainly when you get into a position where you’re working intimately with lots and lots of marketers, by how many of them don’t actually do this. What you’ll tend to find, particularly in a mid-level enterprise – say, 100 to 1,000 employees – is that they’re adding a lot of responsibilities, but they’re not necessarily adding employees. So, these people are checking the box. They don’t have time to optimize a lot of things, which for my company is great. It means there’s an opportunity for us to do those things for them and build tools to do that. If I know that that’s case, that means that there’s  a lot of stuff that’s just getting thrown into the ether because they know that they need to tell the CMO or CEO that we have a presence on Pinterest because that’s popular right now. But they can’t tell you what it’s doing for them because they don’t have the time to track it because they’re in charge of three or four other programs. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: From a best practice point of view, how often can you trigger this kind of intrusion? You are asking a customer to take time to do something on your behalf. How often can you do that?

Frank Dale: That’s a good question. It’s going to depend heavily on the audience and the relationship. Having said that, a good frequency would be maybe one in every five interactions, unless this is somebody who is buying the same thing all the time. Then it’s probably not a good choice. If I’m running a restaurant, I probably don’t want to pay somebody who comes in weekly one in every five times. Once a month is a good frequency. It’s going to depend on the relationship and the nature of the product or the service. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kinds of customers do you work with, and what kinds of behavior do you see in your customers in terms of social media marketing adoption? Who’s succeeding? Who’s failing? And why?

Frank Dale: Those are good questions. We work with a broad range of customers. We work with both B2C and B2B customers. Our B2B customers tend to be in the software and technology space. They tend to be early adopters of most digital media strategies. That’s not terribly surprising. We also deal with a lot of consulting companies because, typically, in both cases, software and consulting are intangible products, so [people will] trust your credibility after you’ve provided a lot of information the buyer wants to understand, as much as what the service offering is. What do you like to work with? I’m putting a lot of trust in you that you’re competent. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium (Part 1)

When it comes to effectively attracting new business, content marketing is one of the latest successful trends. If you’ve ever worked with WordPress, Type Pad, Movable Type, or even Blogger, you may have noticed they have a few things in common. Rest assured that although the aforementioned blogging platforms may have a few similarities, they’re not all the same. For example, another perhaps lesser-known platform, Compendium, allows blog owners to have greater control over approval and to even list topics or target keywords so that writers always know what kind of content they’re required to produce. Co-founded in 2007 by ExactTarget founder Chris Baggot and Ali Sales Roach, the Indianapolis, Indiana-based Compendium has garnered recognition in Businessweek and the Wall Street Journal.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Frank. Let’s start with some context about you and Compendium. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is Salesforce’s reaction to what you are doing, or Jive’s reaction to what you are doing?

Penny Herscher: I believe it’s positive.

SM: Do you have relationships with them?

PH: Yes. We talk to them. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What does it take, in terms of infrastructure, on the back end to process that much information?

Penny Herscher: For us or for the customer?

SM: For you.

PH: We have a data center. We do it all in our data center. >>>