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.

SM: That’s where we came from. We had the blog first and then the 1M/1M business later. One led to the other. We had this huge asset and huge presence, which just made our lives a lot easier. That was just the platform on which we built 1M/1M. But I don’t think this is a platform that could be built overnight by anybody.

One of our 1M/1M entrepreneurs who’s looking at a blog strategy asked, “Can I hire people to write the blog?” I said, “Well, if you’re trying to position yourself as an expert in a domain, it’s not easy to hire people to write about that domain without real domain expertise.” And then he said, “Well, I’ve got people who can write SEO-enabled content, but it’s not good quality.” I said, “Never, ever make anybody write SEO-enabled content. Don’t start from the point of SEO and then optimize content because then you’re basically going to produce gibberish.”

FD: That is exactly right. Really, it’s a short-term mindset. For instance, if you look at where the search engines are going, what they’re telling you – and rightly so – is right for your audience. Our interest is in providing information that solves a problem for the person searching. That’s what we care about. If you’re just stuffing it with keywords, you’re not doing that. If you’re going to invest the time and energy in creating content, create valuable and engaging stuff because that will lead to the business objective.

I also tend to agree on the outsourcing. It’s much easier if you’re writing about something like diapers to outsource content, but one of my best customers is an engineering firm. They make things like solder paste and equipment that companies like Intel would use. It’s a company called Indium Corporation. Their engineers write their content, and they do it well because it’s highly credible. There’s absolutely no way they could afford to outsource that because realistically, the only people who can write credibly either already work at the company or work at Indium’s competitor. It’s just not a good strategy.

SM: I absolutely agree with you. If you want to have authority in a domain, you have to engage people who produce higher authority content to provide it for you. One way that we do that is with our interviews. We talk to people who have interesting points of view and authority in an area. As a result, we don’t even optimize our content.

FD: No, because you already are. You’re already doing it.

SM: The optimization is built into the process. Because we produce high-quality content, we have a high SEO ranking. I wouldn’t say we are in the top 10 or top 1,000 sites in the world, but we have strong SEO rankings.

FD: I’ll tell you the other thing that’s worth noting on that point is that if you’re not producing original stuff, it becomes hard for the buyer or consumer to differentiate you from the competitor. If you look at a lot of the data right now, one of the interesting things that the Internet is doing is rationalizing prices across a lot of industries. To some degree, it’s happening because product quality has improved, and it is harder to create separation. But it’s also happening because the marketing and communications organizations aren’t providing compelling, differentiated content to help the person on the other end to understand why the way you do it is better and worth the site premium.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium
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