Tomorrow the banner ad goes away as this will be the last paid post for Marqui. I was really glad to do some in-depth looks of their product during the first three months of their campaign. But I am not sure what happened these last two months the communications has been minimal. Was this on purpose on Marqui or did the hype wear off.
Regardless I am on contract to write one final article on the product. While looking for information to talk about today I looked at some of their competitors and tried to determine what they did to counter the gain in Google exposure and general information about their product to counter the increased awareness of Maruqi by their paid to blog program.
I had done snapshots of several websites pages back in Feb and compared their website today to what was on their sites in February. I also had pubsub keywords setup and I can tell you for a fact that Marqui’s competitors have lost ground in the search engine battle on keywords that I used.
Companies have to face the fact that if they are not found on the front page of a Google, Yahoo or MSN search they are probably going to loose a lot of business. My perspective on this has not changed as I think I understood Marqui’s underlying challenge when they started this program. They needed a way to literally jump start their new company name and what not a better way to get a lot of bang for the buck in hiring and openly disclosing that you have hired bloggers to say what ever we wanted to about the product.
I remain critical on their pricing structure and as a small business owner I would be hard justified to pay the prices they have in their pricing schedule. On the other hand I also see the extreme advantages of using their Communications Management Systems as working with a distributed workforce and contractors like I have started to work with had proven to be a challenge in keeping clear lines of communications open.
I have found even with the techpodcasts.com group that working in a mailing list was easy with 10 people but has gotten more difficult as we have added members, our solution is to build a private WiKi but as we are about to start negotiating with Fortune 500 companies for advertising spots the key to our success with our members and associates will to have clear lines of communications. This is critical in any small business and if you cannot communicate effectively you are dead before you ever begin.
What do I tell people everyday and what do you hear every day. Send me a e-mail on that. The problem now is I am getting nearly 500 e-mail messages a day and have setup 27 separate rules in my address book to deal with it all. Is that crazy or what. So companies need to really think sales they are loosing because they are not communicating effectively. I truly believe that the Marqui Content Management systems is a great start to getting organized and developing work flows if your company does not have them now. It is also a great tool to use when working on forecast as the corporate library and reports are all available from within the interface. Nothing is more aggravating then having to search thru 5000 documents for the one your looking for.
Marqui is a good fit for those of you that need to get organized.
I want to Thank Marqui for giving me the opportunity and look forward to hearing about new innovations coming out of your country and for the CEO Stephen King having the foresight to launch a program that from my perspective was revolutionary and the right way to run a program in that being open and allowing us to say what we want to say without restrictions and not telling the world you were doing it. No mater your opinion on blogging for dollars people have to respect that you did so openly. I hope more companies follow your lead. For any company that does I am available to consult you on what I think Marqui did right and what they did wrong. [Marqui]