Smoosiers featured in today's Indy Star

Two Smoosier companies, including my new company, Raidious Digital Content Services, and Erik Deckers at Pro Blog Service were both featured in today's Star:

New industry keeps online content growing for clients
Providers fuel blogs, profiles, chats for corporate sites

By Erika D. Smith
Posted: September 28, 2009

Week after week in city after city, businesspeople turn on their computers and write blog entries, Facebook posts and Twitter updates for the first time.

Problem is, after a few weeks or months, many of them give up.

They run out of time. They run out of resources. Corporate blogs languish. Twitter pages grow stale. Potential clients surf away.
It's a problem that has created a lot of losers in this still new and evolving realm of online social networking. But it's also a problem that has created a new industry of companies that exist solely to solve it.

They call themselves "content providers" and managers of "owned media." What they do is hire writers to blog, update Facebook and MySpace profiles, and chat with customers on Twitter on behalf of corporate clients.
"There was a huge need for this particular service," said Taulbee Jackson, president and CEO of Plainfield-based Raidious Digital Content Services.

His company is one of at least two content providers in Central Indiana. The other is Professional Blog Service near Broad Ripple. There also are a few local entrepreneurs who work alone.

Most of these companies have been around for only a few months, but they've managed to grab a fair number of clients. Raidious, for example, is in talks with Marsh Supermarkets and radio station WTTS-FM (92.3) for various services.
"Business has been good," said Erik Deckers, co-owner of Professional Blog Service.

And it probably will continue to be good, said Chris Baggott, co-founder of Compendium Blogware, the Indianapolis maker of business blogging software.

Blogging the right way means doing it often, usually several times a week. That will get a company ranked high in Google's search results and, therefore, garner more attention and more customers. Blogs also give companies a chance to engage customers in a conversation and build loyalty to their brand. The same is true of social networks.

"To compete in marketing, it comes down to telling a lot of stories, and that comes down to content," Baggott said.

The time it would take to produce all that content initially scared away Gary Pino.
"I'm thinking to myself, 'Hey, I've these other projects I'm working on, I may not have time to sit here and blog,' " he said.

But his Indianapolis interior design firm, i.d.o. Inc., recently renewed its commitment to blogging by deciding to share the responsibility among several employees. If the blog takes off and gets too unwieldy, Pino said, the company may pursue a contract with a content provider.

Professional Blog Service focuses on blogs. Its half-dozen writers crank out 10 to 20 entries a month for corporate clients.
"We look at the blog as sort of the hub of a social networking campaign," Deckers said.

Raidious takes a slightly different and much broader approach. Social networks are within its umbrella of services.
Jackson said the company assigns a team to a client and, first, identifies the goals of an online campaign. Is it to create general brand awareness, for example, or to promote a particular product?

Once decisions are made, Raidious takes over.

Its writers get approval for content when needed but try to take the burden of running an online social media campaign off the hands of clients.

Raidious monitors feedback from customers and responds when appropriate. The company also handles online public relations disasters, calming the masses after an employee, for example, uploads a video that disparages the client's brand.

"The way the Internet has evolved, companies have kind of become their own publishers," Jackson said. "Being able to manage, moderate Facebook and Twitter -- a lot of agencies aren't set up to handle and manage social networking content."

The big picture is that companies are wading into new areas of marketing, he said.

Companies know how to buy ads, and they know how to hire public relations specialists and send out news releases. But they don't know how to handle the online content they're creating on social networks, and they don't know how to make money from it.

Jackson calls this "owned media." And it's here that he thinks content providers have room to thrive as an industry.
"All of these channels work splendidly if they're used properly," he said of blogs and social networks, "and they don't work at all without content."