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.

SM: Now, talk to me a bit about scaling the social media content marketing process. It’s not easy to market content, even great content.

FD: No, it isn’t, but my bet is that with the exception of things that tend to be a little more timely. If you’re talking about a recent IPO, or you’re talking about a company that’s about to go [public], those kinds of issues, my bet is that there are a number of themes that are fairly universal with some of the entrepreneurs you’re speaking to. Entrepreneurship isn’t a seasonal kind of exercise, but there are certainly businesses where you can re-purpose and re-use content because it’s seasonal and apt to get lost.

In your case, I think what would be particularly interesting is how much great content you can re-purpose and re-use. What I’m talking about here is, if I’m new to your blog, do you an email series on specific topics where we can take some of your best posts or best articles or your best interviews and turn them into a series? Or can you create an e-book out of some of your best posts on a certain topic? My bet is you can. There are ways to make those same assets go much, much further. I think a lot of people miss that opportunity. The emphasis doesn’t always have to be on what’s new. It could be on, how do I leverage this asset to its fullest? Does that make sense?

SM: Yes. We’re very much in alignment. Our content is very little news-oriented content. The kind of case study–oriented content we develop is largely evergreen. We do re-purpose it a lot. What we push through our Twitter channel are things like an interview with an entrepreneur and how that entrepreneur has bootstrapped a company. The other thing we do is a broadcast message rather than a follow-up message in our email marketing system when we have subscribers coming in to the system who look like prospects. They go into a weekly follow-up message stream, where there’s a sequence of messages that talk about different things. They link to videos on our site and specific messages on a continual basis, some case studies. As you said, it’s re-useable content that’s high-value content nonetheless.

Now, there are a bunch of issues we’re facing with social media marketing and multi-channel social media marketing channels. One of them is that there’s a huge problem with double confirmation in the email marketing systems. We run online roundtables multiple times a week. Sometimes these are business plan contests where major companies award prizes and scholarships to our program, and so on. The registration process for that captures leads. To bring that into our email marketing system, it will have to go through a double confirmation process, and we lose a lot of leads in that process, which to me is an immense problem. I have no solution for it at the moment.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium
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