Compendium is a content marketing platform company that targets mid-market to enterprise customers with products that are intangible or that are fighting commoditization.  In either case the marketer using Compendium is trying to build a differentiated picture of the company’s products or services in the mind of the customer and Compendium leverages social techniques to accomplish this.  Compendium sells in both the B2B and B2C spaces.  It does its best work in technology, consulting law and other intangibles (B2B) and higher education, hospitality, travel and specialty retail for B2C.

The company’s content marketing strategy has five parts that it calls Plan, Build, Host, Share and Refine.  Compendium works with popular social outposts (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) to reach customers and capture their input through the share and refine phases and concentrates its expertise on planning, building, and hosting.  In this it approaches providing its customers with the capabilities and techniques of an agency minus the agency price.

The plan, build, host capabilities form a marketing hub that enables marketers to strategize, plan, develop and schedule content development and distribution.  The founders of Compendium identified content sufficiency — having a reasonable amount of good content to share with the market on a regular basis — as the primary issue its customers need to deal with and they build their product with this in mind. 

Compendium is built with the idea of making document creation for content marketing quick and as easy as possible so the tool enables marketers to plan via an editorial calendar and workflow system to work with best customers and others to develop use cases and other content in an iterative document development process.  It offers nice touches like a key word dictionary that suggests words and phrases for the writer to include to keep a document on message.

Most importantly, the tool functions as a social hub and enables message development for differing requirements of social channels, the best example of which is Twitter with its 140-character limit.

The company has 300 customers and only 23 employees.  It has angel funding and says it will approach the market for funding in the next 12 to 15 months.  It is built on the LAMP solution stack of free, open source software, referring to the first letters of Linux (operating system), Apache HTTP Server, MySQL (database software) and originally Perl (but now sometimes PHP or Python), and runs on the Amazon EC2 service. 

This product demos well though the back end of the system for performing analytics and managing programs may be less advanced than the front which is not surprising in a young company and a new market.  We think that over the next year, the knowledgeable management team will coordinate development through interactions with its 300 customers and that the results will fit well with the market and the company’s mission.

Reviewed by CRM Idol 2012 Primary Judges