One of the enduring myths involving CDNs is that paid service providers are for suckers. Free options in online media distribution markets are making compelling, though in most respects short sighted arguments for using their services. Many free providers advanced their list of features to attract more of the business market away from paid service. YouTube, for example, is releasing in June an additional white label option to its API that will allow businesses to rebrand the YouTube service for videos hosted with them. This on top of YouTube’s excellent user interfaces, fast response time for content hosted with them, and low low price of nearly nothing. Some believe the recent addition of better statistic tracking and analytics could signal the end of paid video delivery networks. Here’s why it won’t.

Understand their business model: Personal opinion of present day startups aside for a moment, for-profit companies do have business models. If a business model can tell a customer anything at all about a company, it should reveal how it intends to use your patronage to make money. This can be devilishly difficult to weasel out of some online companies; enough so as some pragmatists may suspect nothing more than a game of three card monty with a VC’s capital investment. Most online companies, however, are quickly categorized. YouTube’s focus is clearly centered on the end consumer. Their technology is dialed into the online video market for short, poor quality video content created mostly by the user community. It is a testament to their success in their core market that B2B customers would consider YouTube for their videos. The two are a complete mismatch of markets. Business to Business needs to deliver high quality, long running, small dispersal video campaigns to discerning clientèle. YouTube will never have your needs in mind for their systems.

Own your content: Your content is your own. Giving control of that content to a free CDN provider is a bit like handing over promotional work for your hot new concept car to a demolition derby organizer. Sure, they will get the word out for you for free, but you may not like how they end up using your property. We again look at YouTube as a test case. YouTube is extending their API to corporations because it makes business sense in their model. They want all videos available on their home page for people to search. Those eyeballs drive ad dollars into the pockets of Google, YouTube’s parent company. Any video you host though their service will also be viewable through their site. Google searches will find the page rank for viewing your content on YouTube’s site unsurprisingly higher than on your own site, driving traffic away from your front door for your own goods and services. This can also open up your copyrighted material to both harmless and malicious uses by pranksters and competitors. Imagine your largest competitor had their latest promotional video up on YouTube with an open, anonymous comments board right below it. Would you leave a comment? Would your competitor in the reverse situation? Paid service CDN’s give you more control over how your content is used and viewed.

Streaming vs HTTP Progressive Downloads (Technical): There is a technical distinction between what YouTube offers for video and what Network TV companies offer on their web sites. The former, called progressive download, saves video on your harddrive in a FLV file with a recorded format called H.263. This form of video is easily stored, replayed and redistributed. The latter, called streaming video, does not save anything on your harddrive and is viewable only while you are on the site. As you can see, there is a very good business justification for TV Networks to not use progressive download as their distribution method. In their world the content is better controlled when it is streamed. Streaming video has a large following in the B2B arenas, especially when used in webinars and online presentations. Paid service CDN’s handle streaming video as one of their cornerstone services.

YouTube can be the perfect solution for your company. When you need short, low-res 320×280 video hosted nearly instantly and globally, they are the best in the business. It is when your needs fall beyond this narrow band that it is time to consider some professional, paid help. I will delve deeper into CDNs by profiling a couple in upcoming posts. CacheFly and LimeLight Networks.

Since I’ve seen it covered in the news quite a bit lately, and many other vendors integrate with it, I wanted to do an overview of Twitter, which is a micro-blogging tool. According to Wikipedia, micro-blogging is:

Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web.

Twitter is a free and has an easy sign-up process. Once you have an account, you can update it (or twitter) with what you’re doing by several different means: the website, your phone, email, IM, and through twitter-specific applications. People can see your updates by visiting your page on Twitter, or by “following” you through updates on IM, phone, etc. Twitter updates can also be integrated into other web pages - such as blogs.

Ok, so why would anyone care and what good is this for B2B? Personally, you probably have friends and family who are interested in what you are doing - going to the gym, reading a book, etc. As a business, you also have customers and partners who are interested in what you’re doing as far as your business is concerned. Twittering (yes, it is a verb now) and other micro-blogging tools are a great way to send little updates to keep your customers up-to-date with just a minor effort on your part.

I have a Twitter feed for sazbean, which you can check out to get an idea of what Twittering is.

Technorati Tags: twitter, micro-blogging, B2B micro-blogging, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

Your customers are becoming impatient. The purchasing manager for CrowCo wants to see your newly updated online presentation, so she hits the ‘play’ button on the video viewer embedded in your demo site. At first nothing happens. A small graphic spins in the lower corner of the screen to stall for time while the browser downloads enough visual and audio data to begin a progressive start. The customer fidgets. After as short as three seconds, she becomes bored and looks around her desktop for something else to do while she waits. Finally the video begins. The manager settles in and refocuses her attention. This lasts all of thirty seconds at which point the video buffer runs empty, the video stalls and the customer gives up.

Our tolerance for delays online has become unreasonably short. The success of YouTube in the online video market has eroded what little patience we had with content delivery times. Online consumers already expect video services to provide instant starts and they are noticeably disappointed when a company falls short of that mark. This comes at a time when video is becoming the goto tool for communicating information in compelling ways. It has the capacity to captivate your online audience like no other medium.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) exploded into market in the late 90’s to tackle this special problem of content delivery time. Akamai began life as a website caching company, back when sites were finding their highly stylized, intensely graphical web pages were slow to load. The solution, put simply, was to copy the content onto many internet hotspots that were closer to the web surfer. Like an expressway, once Akamai was able to reroute your page request to the nearest data center, they could serve up the content with much shorter delays. Fast forward 10 years and little has changed in the CDN world. The technology has improved, but their goal is still to get your content as close to the web viewer as possible. This means video hosted on a CDN has a much greater chance of starting right away and finishing without buffering issues.

In following posts I will discuss some of the services that a CDN can provide your B2B company. I will also review two CDN networks, Cachefly and LimeLight Networks.

Technorati Tags: video, content delivery networks, CDN, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

Aaron Worsham, my husband, has agreed to explore the hardware, network, development side of B2B Internet vendors. He’ll be posting on Mondays and Wednesdays. He co-owns both Sazbean.com and Dynalink, LLC. with me.

Aaron is a Software Development Manager at a Mid to Large print publisher where his team writes all of the products and applications used online. Before software, he spent ten years as a Cisco Network Engineer in the telecomm and banking industry.

When not working, you can find him being a very good father and a slightly less terrific woodworker and furniture maker at a wood shop he owns with his father.

Aaron is going to start things off with Content Delivery Networks (CDN). We hope you enjoy his hardware, network, and development reviews.

Do you need a quick and dirty social network right now? CrowdVine offers a free social network with basic features that takes just a couple of minutes to create. CrowdVine’s networks are centered on allowing network members to connect and communicate. Everything on the network exists to facilitate this communication - profiles, comments, blog posts, and profile questions, all of which are featured on the homepage.

Connecting with other users is primarily through keyword clouds or by seeing an interesting update on the homepage. CrowdVine’s networking assumes users are familiar with keyword clouds and know to click on the keywords to see users associated with them. The keyword clouds are generated entirely from answers to the profile questions, which places an extreme importance on both the questions and the answers in order to properly connect people. Browsing members is also possible, but you have to click into each member profile to get any real information, which can be tedious for a large network.

As stated previously, setting up a CrowdVine network is extremely easy: choose a url, a network name, some colors, and your questions and you’re done. Inviting members is through email, Facebook, or other CrowdVine networks. Obviously the latter two are only useful if you have a group of people who use either, which is probably fairly limited in the B2B world.

If you’re looking for a fast and easy social network with no cost and just basic features, CrowdVine may be worth taking a look at. Keep in mind that your members will need to be savvy with keyword clouds, your profile questions are extremely important, and you’ll need a very active community to get things going. CrowdVine also offers a social network for events that we’ll tackle in a future installment.

I created a sample CrowdVine network, feel free to take a look, join, comment, and get a feel for how it works.

Technorati Tags: crowdvine, social networks, B2B social networks, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

If you want to get a nice snapshot of what search engines really feel about your competitors, SEOQuake will probably give you more information than you can handle. SEOQuake is a free web browser extension for both FireFox and Internet Explorer. Once installed you can see information on any page you browse to either up in the toolbar or as an overlay at the top of the website in question.

For each web page you can get the following information from the default package:

• Google PageRank - the rank Google assigns to the site (higher is better on a scale of 10)
• Google index - how many pages Google has from the site in its index
• Yahoo links - how many pages Yahoo has from the site in its index
• Yahoo linkdomain - how many pages on Yahoo linking to the site (has been flaky lately)
• MSN index - how many pages MSN has from the site in its index
• MSN links - how many pages on MSN linking to the site
• Alexa rank - the rank Alexa assigns to the site (lower is better) based on traffic estimations
• Age - first archive date taken by the Internet Archive
• Delicious links - how many times the page has been saved with Del.icio.us
• Whois - information about who owns the domain name from DomainTools, including some SEO information (worth checking out)
• Source - the html source of the page (also a viewable option in most web browsers)
• Keywords density - a breakdown of the keywords on the page (very valuable for how the search engines see the page) by single words, 2-word phrases, 3-word phrases, 4-word phrases and a keywords cloud to show you the most repeated keywords
• Internal links - links on the page which lead to another page on the site, includes SEO info for each link in a table format
• External links - links on the page which lead to a page off the site. This seems to use the full url to determine if a page is on site or offsite, although it may also use the IP address. For example if the page we’re looking at is www.website.com then hiring.website.com is considered an external link

For the more technically inclined, SEOQuake also allows the ability to create custom parameters. They also offer a list instructions for some useful parameters. Plugins can also be customized, but they offer a plugin list of ones you can download and install.

The amount of information that you can obtain from a website for free using SEOQuake is amazing. If you had time and were inclined, you could get this information with various tools on the search engines and indexing services, but this puts all the information together in an easy-to-read format. You should be able to get a good idea of how the search engines view your competitors websites as well as your own. This tool is particularly useful to use before, during and after a redesign and before and after any types of Internet promotions.

Technorati Tags: b2b competitive analysis, competitive analysis, keywords, seo, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

We’ve been discussing tools to use to find out how your competitors are doing on their websites and how your customers and competitors seem to know so much about your website. Last week we covered one tool for getting information about other websites - Alexa. This week, we’ll take a look at another similar tool - Compete.

Compete is very similar to Alexa in that it uses a toolbar installed in the web browser to generate estimates and statistics about various websites. Similarities really end there, as Compete is a paid service, and provides much more information that just estimates about a site’s traffic. A trial account starts with 5 free credits and various reports cost different amounts of credits (the ones I tried seemed to either be 1 credit or 4 credit).

Site Analytics - This service is similar to Alexa (estimates using a toolbar) and allows you to compare up to 5 websites at once in terms of Visitors (People Counts - Monthly, Rank - Monthly, Visits - Monthly), Engagement (Attention - Daily, Attention - Monthly, Average Stay - Monthly, Pages/Visit - Monthly), and Growth (Velocity - Daily). Unfortunately, unless your website (or that of your competitor) has quite a bit of traffic, these are very rough estimates.

Search Analytics - This is the more useful of Compete’s services - Site Referrals, Keyword Destination, and Compare Sites.

1. Site Referrals - lets you see what keywords are sending traffic to a website, as well as the site share, keyword engagement and keyword effectiveness for each. The top 50 keywords will cost 1 credit, and the rest of the report will cost more (mine was 4 credits for 243 keywords). This can be very useful both for optimizing your website and for adwords. Use this on your competitors websites to find keywords to use on your own site, or ones that are not in use for Google AdWords campaigns. If you run this report again other on the day you originally ran it, it will cost you additional credits.
2. Keyword Destination - gives you the top sites that get a click from a particular keyword as well as information about the keyword share, site share, and average monthly search referrals. Use this tool to find who your competitors are on particular keywords, especially if you advertise using Google AdWords.
3. Compare Sites - compare two websites in terms of keywords which are ranked with keyword volume advantage and engagement advantage. This tool would be useful after you’ve optimized your website to see how well your efforts stack up against your competitors (at least in terms of keyword searches).

Cost - You start with 5 free credits which you’ll use fairly quickly (just one or two reports). Reports seem to range from 1 credit for partial reports to 4 credits for full results. To purchase additional credits (bonuses included at higher amounts): $25 for 10, $45 for 45, $100 for 110, $500 for 560.

Summary - Compete is a good tool to use if you are heavily using Google AdWords to drive traffic to your site and if keyword optimization is very important to you. If you do decide to use a Search Engine Optimization firm, spend a few bucks to use this tool before and after to see how well they did (remember you may need to wait a few months afterwards for the keyword traffic to actually increase). Best of all, you can play with some of the basics for free and pay going forward for when you actually need their keyword services.

Technorati Tags: b2b competitive analysis, competitive analysis, keywords, seo, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

You may have run across customers or competitors who claim to know your website traffic or how your site is doing compared to their own. How do they get this information? Typically it is from a service, such as Alexa or Compete (we’ll cover Compete next time).

Alexa has a traffic comparison service (along with a search and some other web information services). Some people have installed Alexa’s toolbar in their web browsers and Alexa uses information about their browsing habits to estimate traffic on websites. For each website, they have an overall traffic ranking, reach, and page views per user (all estimated). Each of these stats also has a 1 week average, 3 month average and 3 month percentage change. If your site has a high enough rank, you’ll be able to view these stats in graph form and compare them to other websites as well.

What is Alexa good for? Part of competitive analysis is knowing where your website stands compared to your competitors. Alexa can give you a general idea of where your website traffic is compared to your competitors as well as other industry-leading websites. Find an industry website that you consider to be well-designed with good content and use it as a standard to measure your own website improvements. Use Alexa to track how well your improvements and promotions are working compared to your industry-standard site and your competitors.

More importantly, in my opinion, is knowing about Alexa’s service and how it works in case your competitors are advertising their traffic compared to yours or your customers seem to know a lot about your traffic rankings. In both cases, be aware that Alexa does not factually report your traffic statistics, they are simply an estimation based on a small percentage of people. They may be useful for comparison purposes, but only if you take into account a margin of error for how many people in your industry use their service. The only way anyone can know your actual traffic statistics is if you share access to whatever tracking program you are using (or if they somehow have access to your web server log files).

Next we’ll take a look at Compete.

Technorati Tags: b2b competitive analysis, competitive analysis, customer-centric, customer centric, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

Even if you’ve never done a formal competitive analysis, you probably have at least taken a look at the competition by strolling past their booth at a trade show or picking up their brochures. How important is competitive analysis to your b2b website and what tools are available to get a view of the competitive landscape online?

Where to start? The best way to start is just to take a look at your competitor’s website. What types of content do they have on the site? Do they have a blog, a board, videos, podcasts, case studies, etc.? How often does it look like they update the site? Take a look at the design and layout of the site. Is it is pleasing to the eye? Is it easy to find everything?

Don’t know who your competitors are? A simple google search for keywords in your industry (that you would use to describe your own business) can give you a good list of competitors. Also, take a look at google local for geographically close competitors. Even if you do know your major competitors, taking a look at a couple of searches every few months can keep new ones from sneaking up on you.

Now what? Obviously you should look at your competitor’s products and services to know what they are offering. As far as their website design and content, these will give you an idea of the type of customer support they are giving. Websites with more content (useful content), that is updated frequently, are typically more customer-centric. Customers are more likely to visit their website to solve problems and keep up with what’s new. The more times a customer visits a website, the more likely they are to become repeat customers. In order to become the destination for information within your industry, you will need to invest some time and effort into useful information for your customers and potential customers.

Next we’ll take a look at a couple of tools to use in your competitive analysis.

Technorati Tags: b2b competitive analysis, competitive analysis, customer-centric, customer centric, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

Bulletin boards, forums and wikis are a great place for your customers to get support and to form a community, but they are often difficult to use for finding information. Searches or tags that do not have any intelligence about what is truly important make it difficult to filter for relevant information. Your customers are often the most knowledgeable in certain aspects of your products and/or industry. It takes time and effort to create documentation to help and support your customers. Is there a way to tap into the expertise and effort of your customers to allow them to help themselves more effectively than you can?

GroupSwim’s unique product creates this intelligent community by tying together traditional board and forum functionality with semantic search, tagging, ranking and expertise so that important information is easy to find. How does this all work?

• Tagging - Tagging is a great way to get an overview about the subjects a post covers and is usually useful for searching. Typical boards and forums may allow tagging, but require people to add their own tags to posts, many of which do not. In GroupSwim, every post and comment (and any other content) in the system is automatically tagged using a semantic engine (you can also add your own tags) and your community can be pre-loaded with tags that are important to your industries or situation (including alternatives and synonyms).
• Ranking - In busy communities, important posts are often missed or buried within a long list. Business readers do not have time to read an entire forum to search for answers. GroupSwim automatically brings important posts and content to the top to make them easy to find .
• Expertise - In every community there are recognized experts in certain subjects. In traditional forums, these experts are found only through personal experience reading the forum. GroupSwim identifies experts by allowing readers to vote on posts and responses. These experts are identified for subjects and their responses and posts are ranked higher in searches and browsing. Customers can easily identify experts in each subject and build trust that they have the answers they need.
• Search - Search is key to finding information buried in a forum, but GroupSwim combines semantic search, tagging, ranking and expertise to give you intelligent answers. Searches include posts, tags, groups and member results all on one page. Search results can be ordered according to relevance, recent activity and popularity.

GroupSwim’s hosted application has member groups and privacy controls. Profiles are created automatically and contain all the activity for that person, including posts, tags, replied and ratings. Video, audio, documents, etc. can be posted and readers can create watchlists and subscribe to rss feeds to keep up-to-date on what’s going on. The addition of wiki-style pages is in the works for a future release.

Pricing is very transparent and is based on the number of users and file storage, with discounts for higher numbers of users. Starting at $150 minimum per month, this solution can be both affordable and scalable for even a small business.

If you just want a community for social networking, look elsewhere. But if you want to create an intelligent community to tap into expertise with little effort for a knowledge base, technical support site, or Intranet, add GroupSwim to your short list.

Update: I’ve created a B2B Knowledge Base & Discussion Board using GroupSwim. Please feel to check it out. I hope you consider joining if you’d like to have a discussion about the issues facing B2B Websites.

Technorati Tags: community intelligence, knowledge base, customer support, intranet, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting