Meryl's Notes Blog

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Disclaimer: I’m paid to talk about Marqui in however manner I would like.

Stephen King, CEO of Marqui, took a moment to answer questions. And no, this is not the author of horror books. Ya’d be surprised how many Stephen Kings are out there.

How did you decide to go into the CMS business? What is the story behind Marqui’s starting up?

SK: The story actually starts the same day that my last company, Merant, announced it was being acquired by Serena in a $380M deal. I received a call from the folks at Marqui (then called Maestro CMS) asking if I was interested in taking over the CEO role. At the time, the company was focusing more on traditional content management. When I saw how the product was architected, it occurred to me that it was perfect for marketing and communications professionals.

So, I joined the company in July 2004 and we re-launched under the name Marqui in November 2004. It was fortuitous timing really since marketing professionals are starting to get more and more attention in the press as being an underserved market.

Many CMSes, at least the ones I’ve seen, are supposed to make it easier for marketing and non-techies to add content to their Web sites. How is it an underserved market? Or what target audience do most CMSes aim for?

SK: Many CMSes claim that they are easy to use and “marketing person friendly,” but they are still fundamentally geared toward IT people. You can tell by the types of features they promote and the lingo they use. We’re trying to move away from this since by and large most marketing people (particularly in the non-profit sector) still aren’t very comfortable with terms like “configuration management,” “meta tags” or “RSS feeds.”

How did the Payblogger program come about?

SK: It came up during a dinner brainstorming session. Marc Canter and I were discussing how best to reach out to the developer community (a very influential audience in our opinion) and ways to tap into the power of the Web.

Blogs are an excellent way to do both since they can be used to develop an ongoing dialog with specific communities, get real-time feedback, generate new ideas, etc. The whole “payment” part came about since we needed a way to get bloggers’ attention and make it worth their while.

It was obvious this program was going to be controversial. How did you come to decide to pursue it?

SK: Many bloggers already offer advertising opportunities on their sites to help cover their costs so we saw this type of arrangement as the next logical step. The idea has certainly come under fire by critics who claim participating bloggers are jeopardizing their credibility and the credibility of blogs in general, but this simply isn’t the case.

We don’t require bloggers to write only favorable things, they can write whatever they want. We also ask that they display a logo which clearly states they are paid to write about Marqui. How is this any less ethical than advertising or other marketing tactics?

In fact, in many ways we are setting a new standard for honesty since we are so up front about our practices and open to both positive and negative feedback. One of Marqui’s goals is to revolutionize the world of marketing and we see the blogosphere program (and the controversy that goes with it) as directly in line with this.

Since the launch of the payblogger program, what effects has it had on your business other than increasing search engine optimization?

SK: The search engine optimization piece has definitely been the most visible—we went from 2,000 results on Google to more than 250,000 in less than two weeks. We’re already starting to see an increase in inbound leads, which we credit to the blogosphere program as well as some other marketing programs we have in place. We’ve also been able to use the feedback from bloggers to make some adjustments to the Marqui Communications Management Suite (CMS).

The payblogger program is for three months. What are your plans after it ends?

SK: That remains to be seen. So far, it’s surpassed all of our objectives… but we are only halfway through the program. If it continues to do well, we might offer to extend the program or even expand it.

How many sales have there been since the blogosphere program launched? SEO doesn’t guarantee ROI—it’s the orders that come through that make the difference. So businesses will want to know if paying bloggers is paying off in terms of dollars and not just recognition.

SK: It’s too soon to tell whether the program has generated ROI beyond awareness since 70% of our sales close within three to six months of initial contact. We are seeing an uptick in partner awareness, which is a measurement of our original objectives being met: developer awareness. We should know more in the next month or two, particularly since dabble mode (a trial version of the product) will be available and that will increase the number of incoming leads.

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