Blog Integration

Listed Companies and Blogs

Ok, blogs aren’t for everyone. But if your company persona includes a blog, which is of interest to investors, then you have some information that they will be interested in.
 
At IRM, we publish a blog, visible on the website under the main menu item IRMatters. We think it's a cute name, and there’s lots of great information and stories in the blog.

Ours is powered by HQi, our content management system. So, there's no need for a separate blogging app to share updates because the blogging system is integrated within our website.

Whether you choose to blog using the HQi Blog, or with a separate WordPress blog, IRM HQi websites and IRM Newsroom can embrace your blog posts and publish them to your audiences in a number of different ways.  

Issues with Usability of Blogs

However, we find the blog is a bit like our email inboxes. Items appear on top, hang around for a while, and then disappear off the bottom of the screen. Out of sight and mind. But in fact it’s a bit worse than that. Unless you draw someone’s attention to the individual blog post, why would people come to look at the blog?
 
And if the plan is to draw investors to the investor website, how does it make sense to in fact divert them to a different site – the blog – and also reduce the search results strength by having two URL’s to spread the traffic over?

So it's actually best for SEO, for your own site maintenance, and for usability, if you use the HQi blog instead of the WordPress blog. Fortunately, IRM has tools to migrate your current library of WordPress blog posts to the HQi blog.

IRM Newsroom and Blogs

We see the publication of a blog post as another source of news for the company website. Individual blog posts can be brought directly into IRM Newsroom as a source of news, whether from a WordPress blog (using the IRM Newsroom WordPress Plugin) or directly from an HQi blog.

When the blog has Categories, IRM Newsroom can understand the Categories, and behave differently for each. So blog posts can appear in different sections of the website, perhaps mixed with other news. Some can be emailed to the Email Alerts list, or re-posted to Social Media. Immediately the blog is published on your website through HQi.

And there's one additional features useful to companies with multiple websites - say in a group of companies. Publish your blog post in one HQi website, and use it as a Newsroom input news source in another instance of Newsroom. Or vice versa, or in multiple relationships. Useful for groups of companies with parent / child relationships.

Example of Blog - www.irmau.com

The IRM website is an example of a blog within an HQi site. You will see that this site has a list of blog posts under a news heading in each section of the navigation. It also has the full blog within the website under the IRMatters top level navigation. IRM can decide to distribute its blog posts to different pages of the websites, to the Email Alerts list maintained in this website, or to social media, automatically and instantly, using the power of IRM Newsroom. 

IRM Newsroom and WordPress integration

IRM also offers a WordPress plugin that automatically sends new and updated WordPress blog posts to IRM Newsroom. The plugin allows the full blog to appear in the investor website with all the same navigation as the website, without additional or duplicate coding.