A corporate blog is often a foundation for any successful content marketing program.  The blog itself can be an insightful resource for your current and prospective customers, provide material and ideas for repurposed content, and increase site traffic.  The benefits of spreading the blogging responsibilities across the entire organization can be crystal clear, but often times it may be challenging to keep motivation high, especially for those outside of the marketing department.

Here are some essentials that have driven results in our corporate blogging program.

Put one individual in charge of the blog

The blogging administrator encourages all bloggers to consistently participate in and communicates any news about the blogging program.  Essentially, the blogging administrator:

• Develops the overall plan
• Gets buy-in from the CEO or president of the company
• Works with the other employees on meeting their goals.

Hold regular training sessions

New marketing efforts that encompass the entire organization typically begin with some training, but the training shouldn’t end there.  It is important to have additional training sessions throughout the year  to keep your bloggers comfortable.  Key training topics may include:

• Keyword research
• Target audience personas
• New technology
• New topics/ideas for blogging
• Marketing the blog content

Share the results on a regular basis

Continually remind everyone of the impact and progress of your corporate blogging program.  A regular report can keep the importance of blogging top of mind and hold everyone accountable.  OpenView has set up its corporate blogging program so that almost every blogger is required to submit a blog post each week.  As a result, we send an email every Friday that shares the following information:

• Critical blogging statistics such as the number of page views, unique visitors, click through rates, and amount of search engine traffic, among others
• Number of page views per blogger to help accountability and highlight bloggers that are doing well (and not so well)
• Number of  target posts per quarter or year per person versus the actual number of posts per quarter or year
• Update on the rankings of our targeted keywords
• Number of new leads or leads converted

Hold retrospectives or progress reviews throughout the year

A regular meeting outside of your training meetings either with the entire organization or representatives from each department could also boost motivation.  This sort of meeting can help identify issues and ultimately shape future training sessions to improve the program overall. During the meeting, the blogging administrator should lead the discussion around the following questions:

• Are the topics of the posts relevant to your business objectives?
• Are you seeing a gradual increase in visitors, page views, and time spent on the site?
• Does the design quality of your blog reflect your company’s culture and style?
• Are your bloggers formatting their posts correctly to engage the audience?
• Are you using the best keywords possible to attract traffic through search engines?
• Are your blogs optimized for search engines to the fullest potential?
• What is your Google ranking for each of your targeted keywords?
• Do you have an effective strategy for releasing content regularly and consistently?
• Are you marketing your blog in the best ways possible (social media, influencers, newsletters, etc.)?
• Are your bloggers truly writing to your target personas?

Tap into your employees competitive side and hold a contest

I have written about blogging contests on CMI before, but when it comes down to it, contests are always a great way to boost motivation and excitement.  I have previously shared an idea for a weekly contest before so here is an idea for a monthly contest:

Keep track of the number of page views each blogger has every week, which bloggers land in one of the top three spots each week, and the number of posts each blogger writes throughout the month.  The three bloggers with the most page views and most posts wins.

If you decide to hold a contest like this every month, determine an appropriate prize.  Some examples could be a bottle of wine, a Kindle, an afternoon off, or a free lunch.

Just a quick note:  You may consider having a blogging contest every month until motivation and excitement remain high.

Do you need more tips for running a successful blogging initiative?  OpenView Labs has packaged a complete guide to help all companies start a corporate blogging program (Note: This requires registration). This eBook includes an introduction to corporate blogging, checklists and quick start guides for each person responsible for kicking off a successful blogging initiative. The eBook features unique tips from content marketing experts Ann Handley, Jonathan Kranz and Joe Pulizzi. Get your copy today by visiting OpenView Labs.

As young companies grow out of the startup phase, the need to recruit and hire experienced senior leadership becomes inevitable. Such was the case for Balihoo, a local marketing automation software company based in Boise.

As 2011 approached, the company found its rising fortunes slowed by challenges with its inside sales team. Balihoo founder and CEO Pete Gombert identified one of the primary issues — the lack of an experienced sales executive to lead the operation.

“We were doing the best with what we had and we were succeeding,” said Gombert. “But to say that there wasn’t some turbulence would be a lie. We were borrowing resources from within our own company to make it work. It wasn’t very efficient and if we wanted to really go after some new opportunities, that had to change.”

So in early 2011, Gombert and company teamed up with OpenView Venture Partners to revamp its inside sales process. The firm, which made a capital investment in Balihoo in 2009, offered to help provide the insight, training, and recruitment services the company needed to build an efficient and scalable inside sales organization.

In a short time, the partnership had succeeded in refining Balihoo’s database of sales leads, promoted and executed a couple of well-attended webinars, and developed a 25-page sales training handbook for both seasoned and incoming team members. Most importantly, the company found a qualified VP of Sales to lead the way.

“Without question, what they did in less than three months would have taken us at least nine. We went from flying blind to a singular, repeatable sales process in one quarter,” said Matt Borud, a senior member of Balihoo’s Client Development and Program Management team.

To learn more about this partnership, please read the case study in full.

About OpenView Venture Partners

OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion stage venture capital fund with a focus on high-growth software, Internet, and technology-enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, who collectively bring several decades of technology and management experience to the firm, OpenView is able to help portfolio companies with quickly ramping up Product, Go-To-Market, and Organizational and Operational functions to best practice levels. The firm was founded in 2006 and has a total capital under management of approximately $240 million. OpenView Venture Partners is based in Boston and invests on a worldwide basis.

Skytap, Inc., the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced new cloud testing capabilities that leverage HP’s Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions. Skytap also announced integration with HP’s ALM 11 suite to enable customers and HP partners to more easily leverage the cloud for comprehensive software development and testing.

“Enterprises are increasingly turning to cloud computing to reduce business costs and provide greater flexibility and scalability,” said Scott Roza, CEO of Skytap. “Skytap provides a cost-effective, agile solution to accelerate the development and testing of applications. Our collaboration with HP provides customers with a best of breed solution for application development and testing that leverages HP’s ALM offerings, Skytap’s cloud platform, and HP partner services.”

According to Gartner, Inc., organizations that want to extend the application life cycle beyond development to production environments using a consistent application model should evaluate development tools or point solutions that provide out-of-the-box integration with development build tools. Additionally, they must determine whether life cycle tools can address the needs of multiple teams (such as development and testing), while also meeting broad enterprise requirements; this will reduce costs.*

Skytap’s integration with ALM 11 enables enterprise customers to access the full lifecycle of application development and testing in the cloud. Customers can now plan, build and release higher quality applications while leveraging the cloud for scalability and agility, while distributed teams can access cloud-based testing environments to enhance collaboration and sharing for rapid bug reproduction and issue resolution.

Capabilities enabled by the integration include:

• Requirements management for agile development and testing environments to be delivered in the Skytap Cloud.
• Performance, load and stress testing of applications with the dynamic scale out of cloud-based load generators from HP Load Runner to cost-effectively simulate thousands of virtual users. With this capability, customers can now fully test the performance and scalability of applications before they are deployed.
• Automated functional and regression testing utilizing HP’s Quick Test Professional. This capability allows software teams to automatically set up, run, and tear down Skytap environments directly from the HP ALM interface.
• Distribute development and test workloads between on-premise private cloud and Skytap cloud environments.
• Create secure hybrid cloud architectures in under 10 minutes using Skytap’s self-service user interface.
• Application security testing utilizing HP’s Application Security Center that simulates cloud or on-premise based attacks.

Through this enhanced product collaboration, Skytap and HP customers, as well as HP partners, can utilize Skytap and HP ALM to meet all of their application development and pre-production testing needs in the cloud. The integration leverages several new features from Skytap including security policy management, advanced virtual data center (VDC) options and self-service hybrid clouds. These capabilities are critical in helping development and test teams cut costs by more than 70 percent, and accelerate development and deployment cycles by 75 percent or more.

“Organizations moving their applications to the cloud require a solution that allows all stakeholders across development teams to accelerate and manage application delivery,” said Jonathan Rende, general manager and vice president, Applications, Software, HP. “The integration of Skytap with HP ALM gives application development teams a single tool to collaborate in the cloud, helping to further reduce application delivery cycles and significantly lower costs.”

“Orasi applauds these integrations as they allow us to provide accelerated validation capabilities in a simple, self service, and solution-orientated cloud environment,” said Caleb Billingsley, area vice president of Orasi, an HP partner. “This significantly reduces complexity for our customers as we help them roll out reliable, scalable, and secure business applications.”

In addition to the HP ALM integration, Skytap also announced its upcoming DevOps Webinar, which takes place on June 14 at 10am PT, and features Rachel Chalmers, research director at The 451 Group.

*Gartner, Inc., Managing Between Applications and Operations: The Vendor Landscape, Ronni J. Colville & Donna Scott, April 5, 2011.

About Skytap, Inc.

Skytap is the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions for dynamic workloads. Skytap enables users to run enterprise applications unchanged in the cloud, collaborate securely with global teams, and gain unparalleled business productivity. Additionally, IT organizations can gain visibility and control over cloud projects, align capacity with demand, and reduce costs by 70% or more. Enterprises can securely connect Skytap to their data centers and create virtual private clouds. Skytap is ideal for any dynamic workload including application development, testing, virtual training, application migration and sales demonstration projects. To buy or learn more, visit www.skytap.com.

If the bad weather’s keeping you inside despite the temptation of a long weekend trip out of town, at least you’ll have plenty of time to catch up on the week’s news. For everyone else on the go, read below and we’ll get you up to speed with plenty of time left to spend with the family.

But the story that really had people chipping in with their two cents was the report on Vodafone increasing the price on iPhone 4s, by around $300 each, despite a strong Kiwi dollar which – if anything – should have brought the price of the product down.

More bad news for Sony. At the beginning of the week it announced its hacked PlayStation Network would be fully restored by the end of the week. Instead, hacker group Lulzsec apparently has it out for the company and hacked its sonypictures.com website, apparently compromising a million users’ details in the process.

Both Domino’s Pizza and job search site Seek saw mobile as the way to go, releasing mobile ordering/application sites.

It’s been a quieter week for Telecom, after the hurly burly of last week, but bad news did come in the form of another credit rating downgrade, this time from Fitch. The telco also announced a reshuffle of its wholesale division, sending acting CEO Nick Clarke to demerging Chorus.

Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced that Adobe® Genesis™, powered by Omniture®, has surpassed 1000 accredited customer implementations, reaching an unprecedented industry milestone.

Genesis, which boasts digital marketing’s largest ecosystem of application providers, automates the integration of partner solutions with the Adobe Online Marketing Suite. These Genesis integrations easily and reliably bring together data in one place, enabling customers to analyze and optimize campaign and conversion performance across multiple applications.

“Businesses have to interact with their customers in more relevant and personal ways across an ever-growing number of touch points, making it essential for marketers to have a holistic view of all their digital marketing initiatives across multiple applications,” said John Mellor, vice president of strategy and business development, Omniture Business Unit, Adobe. “The record-setting number of customer implementations of Genesis integrations, coupled with the 50 percent year-over-year growth in Genesis customers, is indicative of the value and importance our customers place on the Adobe Online Marketing Suite as the hub of their digital initiatives.”

Genesis provides the only online marketing platform where partners can create pre-built cloud connectors and test them via standard APIs and a development sandbox, then submit them for accreditation. With Genesis, ad technology and agency partners have access to self-serve development and testing tools through the Online Marketing Suite Developer Connection and an extensive and advanced customer base. Customers benefit from one standard view across all their marketing initiatives and the ability to target consumers at the best time and place and with the most relevant message.

“Online marketers need more efficient ways to drive actions from their data,” said Bill Gassman, research director, Gartner. “Fortunately, an ecosystem of cloud-based digital marketing solutions is available, offering self-service integration with analysis tools, so that an intelligent process for optimizing marketing performance can be achieved.”

Adobe Genesis accredited partners offer integrations in multiple categories, including: email, ad serving, social media, performance management, user experience, ratings and reviews, site search, CRM, marketing optimization, site auditing, ad network, content management, content optimization, SEO, chat, and customer satisfaction.

“Relevant, actionable data that gives us a clear picture of where our customers are coming from, what they are buying and why they are converting is critical for our success and continued growth”, remarked Sandy Martin, senior manager of marketing, Dollar Thrifty. “Adobe Genesis provides us with the technology necessary to connect to the Online Marketing Suite platform to create and send highly relevant email, remarketing campaigns to customers, resulting in significant growth in our email program,” she added.

Tim Kopp, chief marketing officer, ExactTarget added: “Eliminating silos between online channels is essential to creating effective interactive marketing. Through a seamless integration with ExactTarget, Adobe Genesis provides our more than 400 joint clients with a powerful and reliable solution to easily harness their Web data to create highly personalized real-time email campaigns that drive conversion and generate new revenue.”

eEye Digital Security, a provider of IT security and unified vulnerability management solutions, will exhibit at the Phoenix ISSA Chapter’s Information Security Conference on June 7, 2011 at The Buttes resort in Tempe, Arizona. The Phoenix ISSA Chapter conference provides an educational forum for its members through industry-expert and thought-leadership presentations, as well as open discussions on topics highly relevant to the information security industry.

eEye CTO, Marc Maiffret, is a featured speaker in the conference’s “Security Technology” track. He will present “On the Frontline of the Threat Landscape” to inform attendees about the latest IT security dangers, including zero-day vulnerabilities, recent high-profile attacks, and how many of these can be avoided through a combination of technology solutions and pragmatic security practices.

In the conference’s vendor exhibition, eEye will showcase its Retina CS Management solution, Retina Insight reporting engine, as well as add-on modules for Configuration Compliance, Regulatory Reporting, and Patch Management.

“Especially given the numerous high-profile breaches of major enterprises in the past weeks, members of the Phoenix ISSA chapter will likely have plenty of questions and concerns to be addressed,” said Marc Maiffret, CTO, eEye. “I look forward to sharing the latest ‘threat landscape’ information with them and providing guidance on best practices and other strategies to protect their organizations.”

eEye will also encourage conference attendees to take advantage of free resources that the company provides to the IT security community, including a free vulnerability scanner, Retina Community. Most recently, the Company released a new IT security research report, In Configuration We Trust, which outlines simple configuration changes that can dramatically improve an organization’s security posture. eEye’s Zero Day Tracker provides an online catalogue of the newest zero-day vulnerabilities, instructions for quick remediation, and a historical record of past vulnerabilities. eEye’s Vulnerability Expert Forum (VEF) webinars, hosted monthly by CTO Marc Maiffret and the eEye Research Team, continue to attract hundreds of IT security professionals seeking insight and information on recently announced critical vulnerabilities from Microsoft and other software vendors.

About eEye Digital Security
Since 1998, eEye Digital Security has made vulnerability and compliance management simpler and more efficient by providing the only unified solution that integrates assessment, mitigation, protection, and reporting into a complete offering with optional add-on modules for configuration compliance, regulatory reporting, and integrated patch management. eEye’s world-renowned research and development team is consistently the first to uncover critical vulnerabilities and build new protections into our solutions to prevent their exploit. Thousands of mid-to-large-size private-sector and government organizations, including the largest vulnerability management installations in the world, rely on eEye to protect against the latest known and zero-day vulnerabilities. More at eeye.com.

Skytap, Inc., the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced that Sundar Raghavan, chief product and marketing officer, will host a hands-on cloud development and test technical workshop at the concurrent Better Software and Agile Software Development conferences in Las Vegas on June 5-10.

Hands-On Workshop for Cloud Enabled Development & Test

What: Want to learn how Ellie Mae and LANDesk accelerate their development and test cycles? They use Skytap to automate their cloud projects. Register Today for Skytap’s technical workshop.

When: Wednesday, June 8 at 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. PDT

Where: Better Software / Agile Software Development conference
Sicily Room, Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, NV

The first 25 pre-registered participants will get hands-on experience to build a sample development/test environment in the cloud, collaborate with developers, and resolve complex bugs in their application using Skytap.

In this workshop, Sundar Raghavan delivers a step-by-step learning session, enabling attendees to create a multi-machine development/test environment on-demand, test an N-tier retail application in production-like data centers, identify a complex bug and collaborate with developers to resolve it.

Be sure to visit Skytap, a Gold Sponsor, at exhibitor booth #1 on the expo floor.

Not attending the show? Register for the DevOps Web Seminar

The upcoming Skytap DevOps Web seminar takes place on June 14 at 10 a.m. PDT and features Rachel Chalmers, research director at The 451 Group.

DevOps is quickly becoming the new process for leading IT organizations that are enabling development teams to embrace agile methodology and launch new applications faster. Smarter IT professionals are upgrading their IT skills and leading the Cloud IT change to make processes move smoother and faster. The Skytap seminar will show attendees how DevOps techniques enable development and test teams to expedite their software shipping cycles, and how acquiring DevOps skills will enable IT professionals to bring order to the complex world of agile application development and testing.

Register today or to learn more visit www.skytap.com.

About Skytap, Inc.

Skytap is the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions for dynamic workloads. Skytap enables users to run enterprise applications unchanged in the cloud, collaborate securely with global teams, and gain unparalleled business productivity. Additionally, IT organizations can gain visibility and control over cloud projects, align capacity with demand, and reduce costs by 70% or more. Enterprises can securely connect Skytap to their data centers and create virtual private clouds. Skytap is ideal for any dynamic workload including application development, testing, virtual training, application migration and sales demonstration projects. To buy or learn more, visit www.skytap.com.

What: AgilePalooza is a community event presented by VersionOne. Meant to be a fun, low cost event linking internationally recognized coaches and trainers with the local software community, AgilePalooza is a day of collaboration, education and advancement of agile methods.

For $89 attendees receive a full day of agile learning, lunch and a choice of participating in one of two tracks; Practicing Agile or Planning Agile. These tracks offer topics ideal for those newer to agile as well as more experienced practitioners.

Where: AgilePalooza Philadelphia will be held at:

Crowne Plaza Valley Forge
260 Mall Boulevard
King of Prussia, PA 19406
Phone: 610-265-7500

When: June 10, 2011

Who: AgilePalooza Philadelphia has secured a line-up of experienced and talented agile experts and educators, including:

Diana Larsen consults with leaders and teams to create work processes where innovation, inspiration, and imagination flourish. With more than fifteen years of experience working with technical professionals, Diana brings focus to the human side of organizations, teams and projects. Diana co-authored Agile Retrospectives: