These are somewhat scary times at some B2Bs.  Despite expert advice about becoming more aggressive in a downturn (some of it summarized in our posting “B2B Marketing in a Recession”), their top management is more inclined to be cutting marketing expense than approving increased spending.  Leads are harder to come by and taking noticeably longer to close. – B2B Web Strategy – Fast fixes for B2B marketing in a sour economy

The slow economy may have given you a little bit of extra time on your hands.  Now is a great time to take a look at your business marketing plan and procedures and do some housecleaning.  B2B Web Strategy has some good information to get started, which can apply to both B2B and B2C companies.  Here are some more suggestions:

• Measurement – Take a look at your analytics and sales measurement tools and make sure you are getting the information you need to make good decisions.
• Advertising – Re-evaluate any advertising you’re doing – display, print, AdWords, etc.  What’s working well and what’s not?  Are the ways to improve what isn’t working as well?
• Customer List – Spring clean your CRM or customer list.  Are there some customers/potential customers who should be moved to the bottom shelf?  Are there customers you should be spending more time with?
• Lead Generation – Are your lead generation processes working well? Are there improvements you can make to increase leads or the quality of leads?
• Sales Funnel – Once you get qualified leads, are they becoming sales?  What can be improved to increase the percentage of leads that convert to sales?

Remember that to increase sales on your website (and in general), you need to increase traffic to your site (and keep the same conversion percentage) or increase the conversion percentage (for the same amount of traffic) or both.  Periodically re-evaluating your business marketing plan and how well it is working can help you achieve whichever goal you choose.

What fast fixes work for your business marketing?

Technorati Tags: business marketing, marketing, internet marketing, internet consulting, internet business strategy

If you are a business-to-business (B2B) company, your website audience is quite a bit different than a company who targets consumers (B2C).  To get the most of your business website, you’ll need to account for these differences in both your design and content.

Intent

Website visitors to a B2B website are people from other companies who are also trying to do business.  Their intent with visiting your site is to help them make money – by purchasing your products or services, gathering information, etc.  The B2B audience is usually online from their workplace, so time is valuable.

Small, targeted audience

The audience for B2B sites is usually much smaller than B2C, but is much more targeted.  Keep your targeted audience in mind when designing the site and writing content.  You have an opportunity to reach just the audience that you want – your customers.

Behavior

Because they are using your website for business decisions, the B2B audience will be focused on finding the information they need to make those decisions.  If they can’t easily find it, they’ll quickly move elsewhere.  However, B2B visitors are also looking to build relationships with companies and people they can trust.  If you provide valuable information, products and services, there is an opportunity for long-term partnerships.

Expertise

Your B2B visitors are experts in their field and expect the same expertise in potential partners and vendors.  They probably know your products or services better than you, so website content and layout needs to focus on this sophisticated audience.

Buying Process

The buying process in B2B is much longer and more involved than in B2C.  B2B customers are making rational purchase decisions based on business value.  They want products that will help their business be successful.  B2C customers make emotional purchase decisions based on personal value.  Information about your products and services needs to focus on business value and information necessary to make a rational purchase decision.

Value of Sale

Purchases made by B2B customers are typically much larger than B2C customers, so there is a great deal of value in the sale to your company.  It is worthwhile to put the time and effort into providing your customers exactly what they need to succeed – they will reward you with sales.

Listen

Because your B2B customers are experts in their fields, they are a valuable resource to your company.  Listen to what they have to say about your products, services and website.  Since they are looking for long-term relationships, they are often more likely to spend the time to help you improve.  Your B2B website should include opportunities to interact with your customers and for them to interact with each other.  You’ll find valueable information that usually comes with the high costs of a customer research firm.

If you have a B2B website, how do you use your website to reach your B2B audience?

For more information:

• B2B Audiences
• B2B Usability Basics – Introduction
• B2B Usability Basics – Part 2 – Layout
• B2B Usability Basics – Part 3 – Testing
• Good vs. Bad B2B Websites
• Website Content for the B2B Audience
• B2B Website Design

Technorati Tags: B2B, b2b website, business to business, b2b web design, internet consulting, internet business strategy

I’ll be honest, its Friday.  Its gorgeous outside. I’m doing research on this post by watching shows on ustream.tv.

In truth it is hard to pull myself away from the high quality live broadcasts that sit up at the top of the ustream select channels.  Shows like Buzz Out Loud (a CNET property) are slickly produced and highly engaging examples of what businesses can do with ustream’s distribution technology. While CNET may have more polish in their delivery, their setup really isn’t much beyond a set on a show floor, two suits in front of a a good mic and a stationary camera.  Replace that show floor with a conference booth, or a marketing board room, store opening or factory floor and now you’re a broadcaster for your business.

ustream.tv has an interesting backstory.  Co-founders John Ham and Brad Hunstable met as cadets at the Army’s West Point Academy.  While serving as officers during wartime they experienced the troubles soldiers had in contacting many family members and friends within the short time given.  They started ustream as a way to connect many people to one soldier broadcasting over the internet.  From millitary to civilian, ustreams interactive technology fit comfortably into the Live Streaming space being left open by more established video hosting players.  In a Fox News interview the founders seem comfortable in their monitization plans which involve traditional silos as Ad revenue, partnerships and sponserships.  Funding for the live internet broadcaster has involved Angel funding from Ross Perot and the young company claim to list General Wesley Clark as a board member.

Getting away from the corporate About Us page for a moment, ustream does have a good man-on-the-street reputation.  Their video community is well policed for copyright and inapporporate content, lending to their legit rep.  Streaming tools available are intuitive to use, which is a must have for the competitve market.  Offering Javascript embedding, pre-recorded video, and chat capability is also standard selection.  Their monitization model is standard enough to say that most small broadcasters will be able to use their service for free.  Really for me the distinctive asset is a customer base which includes CNET, Penny Arcade and Digg.

Someday Sazbean will ready yet for live broadcasting.  When that day comes ustream will have our business.  Unless, you know… there is someone better by then.  Im looking at you justin.tv

As Dharmesh Shah said in our interview, HubSpot sells a product, not a service, and intends on giving small businesses the tools they need to do their own search engine optimization (SEO).  HubSpot Inbound Marketing System has a three step approach:

1. Qualified Traffic – Traffic is nice, but if the visitors to your website are not going to purchase from you, they won’t make you any money.
2. Convert to Leads – Once you have qualified visitors, convert them into sales opportunities.
3. Measure & Optimize – Take a look at how well your strategy is doing, make adjustments and continue to improve.

How HubSpot helps accomplish these steps:

Qualified Traffic

• Keyword Grader – Keywords are very important to SEO, but need to be implemented properly to avoid spamming search engines (and getting blacklisted) and, more importantly, annoying your customers.  HubSpot’s keyword grader lets you enter up to 500 keywords which are then each graded based on their relevance (which you can assign), monthly search volume (how often is the keyword being searched on), difficulty (how many competitors are there for that keyword), cost per click (if you want to buy the keyword), and competitors view (which allows you to track keywords for up to 5 different websites).  The keyword grader will give you an idea of what keywords to use in content on your website in order to build up organic authority for those keywords.
• Link Grader Tool - Websites that link to your website help improve your search engine rankings.  This tool shows those incoming links and their quality in terms of SEO (the anchor text and title tags).
• Blog – One of the best ways to increase SEO is to post relevant content as frequently as possible.  Blogging is an easy way to regularly post valuable content.  HubSpot provides a hosted blogging platform which is very easy to use and incorporates proper SEO functionality and links to social networks.  Although hosted on HubSpot’s servers, the blog is counted in your SEO by using a sub-domain of your site (ex. blog.sazbean.com) and is fully compatible with outside analytics that use tagging methods (such as Google Analytics).

Convert to Leads

• Forms – Providing a way for your potential customers to make requests from your website is key to generating leads from your visitors.  Obviously the best way to get people to provide you with their information through a form is to offer them something in return – a free white paper, consultation, etc.
• Information – What your leads looked at, which forms they submitted, etc. helps you get a better idea of what each particular lead is interested in to help you tailor your communications to their needs.
• Conversions graph – How many of your visitors are converting to leads, and how many leads are converting to customers.
• Lead Funnel – Where and how many leads are in the process of converting them to a customer.

Measure & Optimize

• Traffic – Views, visits, leads, customers for your website.  This is pretty similar to other analytics programs (like Google), but it does allow you to add events to the graphs so you can account for marketing campaigns, blog entries, etc.
• Referrers – Understanding where you are getting traffic from is important since these links help your search engine ranking.
• Visits by Keywords – This will show you which keywords are working as far as getting traffic and converting to leads/customers.

Conclusion

HubSpot nicely integrates SEO information into one easy-to-use product. The pricetag, $750 for the first month, $250/month thereafter, includes about 4 hours of consulting time on SEO practices and how to effectively use HubSpot’s product.   Most companies will make up the $3500, which is cheaper than most SEO services, in converting just one lead to a customer.  If you are willing to dedicate 4-5 hours per week to SEO, HubSpot’s ease-of-use, dedication to educating their customers and the several hours of included consulting time are worth a look.

Technorati Tags: HubSpot, inbound marketing, internet marketing, seo

The New York Times is speculating [no longer speculation] that an announcement from Google at the Advertising Research Foundation meeting this week will unveil a new product called AdPlanner.  Details are understandably sketchy, though the NYT quotes an anonymous source on the product as saying it will help Ad Agencies to find demographics that match an ads target audience.

Valleywag, though, makes the logical connection by envisioning a tool that could eliminate the need for Ad Agencies all together.  If Google is successful and all the data that an Ad Agency needs is available through this tool, it could easily be rebranded for the direct market.   This is certainly within SOA for Google; they use technology to eliminate redundancy and establish direct, dependent markets.  Some of these efforts like AdSense, AdWords and GMail are clear winners.  Others, like Google’s little know newspaper and radio ad placement drive, are mired in the mud.

My personal opinion is that Google will succeed in creating a very useful tool that will in no way replace the unique talents and skills of Ad Placement Agencies.  This is going to raise the bar for Ad Agencies expectations on reporting and information within content networks which can only be a plus for the Ad Agency’s clients; business owners buying up online ad space.

Mento, now in public beta, is a link-sharing and tagging website, similar to Del.icio.us or Pownce, with expanded functionality to create conversations around the link sharing. Creator and CEO Greg Hochmuth took a few minutes to explain how Mento is different and to share his vision for business users. Look for an upcoming Sazbean review of Mento. Greg was kind enough to provide a number of invites to Mento for our readers.

How do you see people using Mento for business? What functions do you feel are attractive to the business audience? What additional functionality are you planning that may be of interest for business use?

Greg: Our vision for Mento has three parts: at the core, it should be the central place for you to share, manage and discover links — with a strong emphasis on people you know and trust. In the current release of Mento, the first part of that vision is the most complete one and focuses on the casual, personal exchange of links among friends.

The second part and third part, which are now under active development, extend that use case in more professional and structured. In our planning, they are indeed targeted at businesses and knowledge workers. Mento will enhance the collaborative nature of its link sharing capabilities so that it will be easy for workgroups to gather links in a secure environment, discuss and annotate those links, and make them fully searchable (“re-findable”). Mento’s current “private groups” feature gives a hint of this direction and it will be vastly improved with the next release, which we have scheduled for early fall.

The third part of our vision will open Mento as a platform for publishers and businesses who want to create a branded, editorial stream of links for interested subscribers. Imagine a health care provider that publishes a weekly digest of relevant health links — or a business publication that selects the day’s highlights of industry analyses. Mento will give such publishers easy tools for compiling, editing and publishing such link streams while providing end users with a variety of subscription and personalization options.

Ultimately, our goal is to help our users manage their incoming information streams more effectively, connect with relevant content (that they wouldn’t find otherwise), and make it easy to share what they discover. Although we’re far from that goal, Mento’s tools will increasingly be valuable to business users who depend on relevant and manageable information on a daily basis.

The ability to share links with friends and coworkers on Facebook, Del.icio.us, Tumbler, Twitter, Magnolia, Friend Feed, etc. is very useful. Being able to import bookmarks from these and other services is very important to business users (and bloggers) who may already have a “wealth” of links invested in those services. Will you be adding the ability to import links from other services? And if so, when do you expect this functionality to be available?

Greg: A feature for importing links is surely in the works. In building the initial set of features, we focused mostly on “new” links that you find and want to share on a daily basis. We held back on importing links because we knew that Mento still needed better tools for managing larger collections of links. Once those are in place, we’ll gladly welcome users who want to keep their entire link archive on Mento. This will likely coincide with the release of our upgraded collaboration features that I talked about earlier.

Your service is very similar to Pownce. What do you see as your key differentiators from their service?

Greg: Pownce is a well-designed service and has a great team behind it — we like them a lot. Yes, Pownce is similar to Mento because of its feature to send links to friends — but it isn’t very different from instant messaging in that respect and it doesn’t make those shared links more manageable. Because Pownce also does file sharing and event publishing, we feel that it can focus less on the specific needs of sharing and saving just links. Mento tells who clicked on your links (so that you can create a conversation) and who visited a page together with you; it lets you create channels and use tags for your archive, personalization and higher relevancy; and it integrates much more with other services you may already use like delicious, Facebook or Twitter. And then of course, there is the screenshot feature, which has been a run-away success with our users (we recently released a Mac-friendly version by integrating with Skitch)

Being able to share a Mento feed on a blog or company website via a widget is also important to business users. Do you have any plans to add this functionality? And if so, when will it become available?

Greg: Indeed, we plan to release both widgets and a public API in the coming months. The API will be delicious-compatible so that you can use any delicious-based tool for managing and working with your Mento links.

How do you envision people using the ability to add screenshots to saved links with Firefox?

Greg: It’s been the feature that our users have loved the most so far. Many say that it makes it easier for them to highlight the important, noteworthy part of the page that they’re sharing, to “crop” a larger image on the page, or to give a better impression of the overall experience (especially for dynamic interfaces like Maps or Flash-driven content). Personally speaking, I also find that it helps make my links more memorable, which will be even more useful once we add alternate ways of exploring your archives and browsing larger aggregates of Mento links.

Why did you decide to create Mento? What are your plans for the future?

Greg: There is more and more noise in our information environment every day and it’s getting harder and harder to filter the meaningful signals. We’re on a mission to make your daily information streams more manageable and more meaningful. With that in mind, there is a lot left to build and a lot of room for improvement.

You seem to get quite a bit done with a very small development team. What’s your secret?

Greg: There is no secret other than dedication and knowing what’s important to us. We think that we’re slow, to be honest — we would love to iterate at the speed of thought but until that’s possible, we’ll work long hours and enjoy what we’re building!

Technorati Tags: mento, social bookmarking, B2B social bookmarking

I have mentioned before that hosting Rails applications is one of those great opportunities to avail yourself of assistance. The guys behind Engine Yard saw their chance to help the community and build out a solid foundation for a business. I had a chance to talk with Lance Walley, CEO of the San Francisco based hosting company about Ruby, Rails and their business model.

Sazbean: What problem is Engine Yard solving?
Lance: We make deployment and scaling of Ruby on Rails applications easy and largely hands-off. Our customers pay for great infrastructure and excellent people running it, all focused on Rails apps. In the end, they see us as inexpensive payroll on top of great hosting infrastructure. Some of the basic technologies (Ruby and Rails) can be improved or augmented our support of Rubinius and Merb are helping both move forward and grow to answer customer needs. We are hosting + expertise + software development to make Ruby and Rails better for all!

Sazbean: So how can EY help the average B2B company?
Lance: B2B companies will certainly want to develop web apps to support internal needs and external needs (customers). Ruby on Rails is great for fast development of those apps. Engine Yard is great for no-thinking, just-get-it-done-without-me deployment and management of those apps once they’re developed.

Sazbean: Obie Fernandez wrote in a January 2008 article that there was a waiting list for new customers. Is this still true?
Lacnce: We massively built up our support organization, which includes sys admins, Rails experts, and database admins. That solved the waiting list issue. We now have a queue of about 5 days, mostly because customers take time getting info to our guys that our guys need to deploy customers’ apps.

Sazbean: Does EY consider itself a silicon valley startup?
Lance: We’re a Sacramento / San Francisco startup. We modeled this business to be profitable and not need VC [Venture Capital ~ed]. We later took VC to pursue areas that represent a huge opportunity, and which we could not pursue quickly without VC and we’re about 2 years old and didn’t take VC until we were 1.5 years old so I’m not sure if that all adds up to traditional valley startup.

Sazbean: Unlike startups with a software product, hosting solutions like EY have a large barrier to entry. You need hardware, you need specialized skills and you need capital. So, why hosting?
Lance: It was a natural outgrowth of a previous business. We have an older company that does consulting; we saw that clients didn’t want to do this stuff, but they wanted really good solutions run by top-notch people. We created Engine Yard. while it did take some capital up front, we knew from the experience of others that it’s a quick cash generator vs. some other businesses. We literally saw it as a pretty quick path to cash generation and profitability. We’re now doing a lot of stuff that goes beyond that original idea, but we always saw hosting as a good business in which to start in a new market like Rails.

Sazbean: Many B2B companies are untrusting of startups and of new ventures. It means something that you are profitable and stable and up front about it.

Lance: Yeah, we experienced some of that back when we started in 2006. People had to get to trust us and our financial footing also helps when they know that we founders are all small business guys in the past… never huge companies, but real, profitable, decade or more companies each Now, of course, with pretty big VCs involved, that’s also a good thing, but I suppose VC makes some people suspicious, too. We have still kept our basic business philosophies of running a tight ship, not burning cash without need, etc.

Sazbean: You mentioned your people a few times tonight. Do you consider your people the distinguishing part of the equation?
Lance: There are 3 distinguishing parts.

1. The infrastructure we designed is extremely solid, very redundant, etc. We’ve been at it for 2 years and the architects are incredible people. Customers are buying that.
2. The staff that supports our customers directly is top-notch. There are between 35-40 people in Support now, spread from CA to NY to UK to Australia. Customers are paying for the ability to get help and wisdom from this staff 24/7. As well as stuff like database tuning, etc. The people component is very important to customers.
3. We have some of the best people working on those open-source projects that promise to improve Ruby and Rails for everyone. Our customers are indirectly buying into those people, too. There is a general feeling by customers that they get all this expertise for a relatively low price in terms of human costs.

Sazbean: Any well known Rails websites using EY that you can disclose?
Lance: Sure If you check out http://rails100.pbwiki.com/ we are literally involved thru Engine Yard or Quality Humans, Inc with 33-50% of those sites. Hulu (#3) for instance is NBC + Fox we helped them build that site back in 2006 or 2007. Seeking Alpha is a cool financial info site, they provide data to Yahoo Finance. Kongregate was a VERY early EY customer. I think they just took an investment from Jeff Bezos, who does not invest lightly.

Sazbean: Impressive.

Lance: It’s not yahoo or google, but they’re coming.

Technorati Tags: engine yard, rails, rails hosting, internet consulting

In Part 1 , we discussed how to know when and what are said about your company and products on Twitter. Now that you know, how do you respond? Let’s start with a story….

I recently had my Internet service go out when I was working from my home office (which I twittered about). It often seems to go out in the afternoons during the week, but usually only for 20 minutes or so. This time it was over an hour and a half, so I got fed up and called Comcast. They could see a signal going to my house, but couldn’t see the cable modem. They even tried resetting the signal, but suggested that I schedule a tech to come out the next morning to check everything out. Two minutes after I got off the phone, my service came back on. I twittered about this and suddenly received a response on twitter from comcastcares that this was normal. We had a bit of a sarcastic conversation back and forth, but the point is that Comcast almost immediately responded to my tweet (my second one, not my first):

• sarahworsham: Called Comcast – they said poor signal strength – now suddenly I’m back

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham That can happen with signal quality. If it keeps up, let us know

• sarahworsham: @comcastcares Kind of strange that it came back immediately after the phone call, don’t you think?

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham Not usually. If signal quality is weak they should have you check cables, then they reset signals

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham Sometime that corrects the problem

• sarahworsham: @comcastcares or they turn the pipe back up

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham Actually they do not control that. There is limited abilities representatives would have

• sarahworsham: @comcastcares trying to sell me phone service when my internet isn’t working wasn’t helpful tho

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham I would agree with that. First priority is resolution

• comcastcares: @sarahworsham I apologize for the trouble

Their immediate response to me seemed a bit creepy and I already had scheduled an appointment for the techs to come out. I’m not sure what else they intended other than to respond to my public tweet. Mostly it seemed like a PR ploy because they could have easily replied to me directly instead of publicly. However, I did appreciate the apology. Comcastcares is manned by Frank Eliason from Comcast Customer Outreach. Browsing his twitter feed you can see that he obviously is trying to help. The question is, does the company follow up and actually fix the problems? (Our Internet did get fixed – so far) Has their customer service improved because of this outreach?

In my opinion, monitor twitter for comments about your company or products, but take the conversation offline to protect and respect the privacy of your customers and avoid the possible PR nightmare. Follow up with great customer service and work to improve your products. Your customers will write and share the great experience they had – which is the most valuable kind of PR.

What are your thoughts on using twitter to respond to your customers?

Technorati Tags: twitter, comcast, customer service, B2B, B2C, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting, B2C internet consulting, business internet consulting

We’ve been discussing how to know what your customers are saying about you on the Web. Posting opinions or comments on a company doesn’t even require a blog, as we saw in the post about MicroBlogging with Twitter. So if your customers are tweeting (the verb of to twitter) about your company, how do you know (Part 1) and how do you respond (Part 2)?

One tool I like to use, TweetScan, allows you to search Tweets by keyword, user, and time. Once you have your keyword search, you can then subscribe to that search using RSS to keep track of what people are saying about your company and products. Or you can link to it and come back to see who else is talking about you. I suggest adding the RSS feed of the search of your company name and major products to your RSS reader and checking it with the rest of your feeds every day.

You can also take a look at the Public Timeline on Twitter to see what’s going on.

Here are some links to more tools, etc. about Twitter:

• Twitter Toolbox (Mashable)
• Five New Twitter Tools You Should Know (Online Marketing Blog)
• Five Twitter Tools We Love (GigaOm)
• 8 Cool Twitter Tools (Wired)

In Part 2, we’ll discuss how to respond to all these tweets about your product or company.

Technorati Tags: twitter, micro-blogging, tweetscan, B2B, B2C, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting, business internet consulting

Interesting information regarding online consumer use of blogs, video and podcasts:

Groundswell: From the chart: In the US, of online consumers, 25% read blogs, 14% comment on blogs, 29% watch user generated video, and 11% listen to podcasts. The US is the clear leader in both creation and viewing of user-generated video, which is at least partly due to the fact that YouTube is mostly in English….Podcasts still haven’t caught on the US after years of availability.”

These numbers will be different for the B2B audience, but are very important for the B2C audience.  B2B often follows directly in the footsteps of the consumer market, so they’re interesting from a trend point-of-view. Looks like video is still pretty important.

One way to know what people are saying about your company or products is to have a place where people can post their opinions and ideas.

Similar to Get Satisfaction (covered in my last post), UserVoice provides a forum for customers to post their ideas, opinions and ideas. Once a company sets up a profile, their customers are asked directly for their input at the top of the page which says “I suggest…”. Each idea can be voted and commented on by the entire community. Companies can leave an official response and mark each idea with a status: planned, started, declined, or completed. Ideas can be searched for or browsed by top, new, accepted and completed. Customers can also add ideas free form from a widget that companies can place on their website or blog.

UserVoice is geared towards customer feedback and ideas, but lacks tagging, related issues, general discussion and a tie-in to a larger community. However, segregating the forum for each company could allow customers to feel more comfortable leaving their feedback. Voting on ideas is another valuable feedback, but without negative votes, you only know how many were for it (everyone else either abstains or doesn’t care). UserVoice is still in beta (free for now) so it will be interesting to see how their features develop over the next few months.

Technorati Tags: uservoice, customer service, customer support, customer-centric, B2B, B2C, B2B internet consulting, business internet consulting

Lets continue our theme of Ruby on Rails reviews with the advice I give clients thinking of trying out RoR for a project.

My first piece of advice when evaluating a new language or technology is for a company to get dirty early on; get at least one small project under your belt before reaching out to a consulting group. Sure its strange advice from a consultant but it’s grounded in solid personal experience. Companies that have had first hand experience with a product or language are often more comfortable with the advantages and limitations of said product or language. That means their expectations are correctly grounded in reality. Here are some expectations that I’ve found to be true through personal experience:

• Rails is good for delivering dynamically generated textual content over the web. Really good, actually. Really really good.
• Rails is not as good at maintaining session state as other languages, such as Java Swing. This makes it a poor platform to replace that desktop accounting app. Better to look at a Java Hybrid product like Oracle Application Server with Forms and Reports.
• Rails can handle Interactive Media, but not as well as Adobe Flex.
• Rails can do AJAX well but the Scriptaculous tends to be a weighty download. It is cache-able, though so your experience may differ. I prefer JQuery Having said that, the RJS libraries in Rails makes writing JavaScript much less painful.
• If something is working in one language, don’t redo it in Rails just to keep the source code in one silo. If PHPBB works for you, great! Stick with it.
• The Rails Persistence layer ActiveRecord is very cool. It can greatly simplify database access for new users. However, don’t expect it to solve all data access woes.

My second piece of advice is to break the Test Once Live habit. This one is a tough sell since people love the time saved in development using Dynamic Languages and loath the trade off spent writing solid tests. Here is the reality, your application will run just well enough to get everyone excited about it. It will also fail you the moment you show it off to someone you want to impress. Here are some testing tips that I have learned the hard way.

• Write RSpec tests before you show it to anyone. RSpec, once you learn it, can be the stories given to a consultant. We’ll love ya for it.
• Do end user testing with JMeter and FireBug. JMeter will to load testing and FireBug will tell you more about what your browser is getting from the server.
• Once you have a working application start running AutoTest on startup. Let it sit in the background and just forget its there. Then, when you have the last second really important change you need to make before 8AM, it can catch and alert you to a test failure before you find out live.

Knowing what people say about your company is pretty important for maintaining your brand image and quality of service. The Internet allows people to easily post opinions, problems and reviews. How do you know what people are saying about your company?

One way is to provide a forum where people can go to post reviews, problems, questions, etc. Get Satisfaction provides neutral ground for this conversation, which you can easily link to your website. Anyone can startup a conversation about a product or company, but if you own the company you can claim them (Get Satisfaction then verifies your claim). Once you’ve claimed or started a conversation, you can represent your company as an official representative or just an employee. More importantly, you can interact in an official manner with your customers and potential customers to provide your own side to any problems, questions or issues. As a customer-centric company you should take this input in order to improve your products or services and then interact with the community to get their continued feedback.

Besides linking or creating a badge to the conversation from your website, Get Satisfaction also provides the ability to add topic widgets in order to increase the visibility of your customer support conversation. These topic widgets can be customized by topic, order, number, summaries, etc. and you have have multiple widgets if you want to target different topics. Anyone can add their own customized topic widgets to their own sites – allowing your customers to increase visibility of the conversation as well. If you insist on keeping the conversation on your own website, an API is provided for integration with your site.

Conversations are organized by products, tags, questions, ideas, problems, and talk and can also be identified by recently active, latest and unanswered. Replies to the conversation can be rated by the participants so you can quickly get an idea of the overall emotion of the community to any particular idea – information that has previously been the realm of in-person focus groups.

For companies looking for a quick and easy way to interact with customers, Get Satisfaction can offer a great deal of functionality for free. However, keep in mind that the company is still in beta and hasn’t yet decided on how they will make money. Obviously without a business plan, the company may also disappear at some point – but right now, according to The NYTimes, they have comments on over 2,000 companies with 40% of the companies responding.

Technorati Tags: get satisfaction, customer service, customer support, customer-centric, B2B, B2C, B2B internet consulting, internet consulting, business internet consulting

Your customers – current, potential, disgruntled, etc – are talking about you. Do you know what they are saying? Do you know where they are saying it? How do you keep negative comments from tarnishing your brand image?

In his post, Who do people trust? (It ain’t bloggers), Jeremiah, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, has gathered data which shows that people turn to their peers – or people they know when they need information (especially information for making a purchase). When people are researching your products or services, they are going to turn to their peers to see what they think about them.

The Internet makes it extremely easy for anyone to post their opinions on your products – good or bad – and it is very easy for your potential customers to find these opinions. This easy of posting and the ability to easily find competitors has created the need for customer-centric websites and customer-centric companies. You need to know what people are saying about your products and services so you can address those people (to help them and to improve your products). There are many ways to find out what is being said about your company, and in my next series of posts, I’ll be running through some valuable tools in the battle of your brand awareness.

Technorati Tags: brand awareness, customer-centric, internet consulting, B2B, B2C

What do RoR, APIs, Interactive Media, Mashups, and Product Communities all have in common? Well other than they all make up the bottom row of this year’s Buzzword Bingo card, all five are technologies that you aren’t using but should be.

Here’s a truism – Really good websites create buzz about your product or service. To create that excitement, you have to find a compelling feature, function or attribute that causes a positive reaction. When Macromedia’s Flash first came out, people were unimpressed. So it was a web animation tool for advertisers to make monkeys move really fast back and forth in a banner ad, big deal. It only became a big deal when really talented designers began making sites that generated attention. That attention separated the really good sites from the no talent hack imitators, solidifying their product and/or service in the minds of their viewers. The same can be said for each of the technologies in that list. Used properly and in moderation (as with most things in life) you can create some truly impressive results. Those results, in collaboration with smart marketing, will never fail to deliver the all important buzz.

In what looks to be a longish series of posts, I hope to convince you that one or more of the above can help your business website stand out.

• Ruby on Rails (RoR) thinks it can, and does
• Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) and why they aren’t just for geeks
• Interactive Media talks back
• Mashups = Your chocolate in my Peanut Butter
• You can make a community about anything these days (Product Communities)

Using personal analytics to create a better user experience will help you gain insight into your business and your customers (thus increasing revenue). Ankur Shah (from Techlightenment) used the example of the village bakery in the 1970s – the baker knew what you liked and could make recommendations on what to try based on knowing what you chose for years in the past.

On the web we’ve traditionally asked users for information via long registration forms (which are boring for the user), but there is a lot of information available without having to ask. Amazon.com recommends books and products based upon on what you’ve chosen in the past and what others have chosen is similar to the village bakery. These types of recommendations are part of the implicit web and are valuable for both the user (who sees more things that may be of interest) and to the website (who can sell more books).

Think about every interaction on your website as data about your users which should be treated as content. When your users click on a link, when they signup for an enewsletter, and when they come in from a a search engine, they are giving you valuable information that you can use to enhance their experience. One of the most basic enhancements would be to acknowledge users who come in from search engines with the keywords they came in with and give them relevant links from all over your site.

Obviously there are some fairly large privacy issues with using personal data, but if you are upfront with what you are doing and are providing a valuable service, people will be willing to share their information in exchange (just make sure you are providing valuable, relevant services in return).

Technorati Tags: web2expo, analytics, personal analytics

Kakul Srivatava from Flickr spoke about how tagging is evolving. Tagging started as a way to find things or to play with friends and family. Then additional meaningfulness was found from community tagging – things the author would not have thought to mention. Inferred tags used in clustering, hot tags, places, etc. can show you what is important at a point in time.

What’s next?

• More Metadata – using subtags (people, regions, etc), machine tags, “suggest” tags, “correct” tags, “play” tags to merge data sets and get new connections and meanging.
• More Network Magic – is this interesting? is this related? is this a story? is this news? To find more information and new relevancy.
• Greatest Challenge – all this data requires more and more screen space so how do you make it available and useful?

Using tagging on your business website can help your readers find more relevant content on your site, which increases their length of stay (and the opportunity to brand and/or sell to them).

Technorati Tags: web2expo, tagging, flickr,

The wave of tech information is starting to drag me under. So many great web solutions to problems that businesses have. As the last day of the conference, I’m starting to reach critical mass.

Yesterday I watched two internet titans decide to embrace open, user friendly web platforms for us mortals. This could be exciting for our business web developer community.

In their keynote, Yahoo! announced a Herculean task to re-wire every part of their platform to open up access to outside applications. Starting with the recent announcement of Search Monkey, Yahoo! is making bold moves to bring web developers into their house and offer them warm cookies and fresh milk. Their idea is to make their web properties sticky, keeping people on Yahoo’s network though stealth because the interconnections made though 3rd party web apps will drive them back in. Thats not as sneaky as it sounds, many many web application platforms work in the same way (Facebook is natorious for its locked-in platform for web applications). The appeal to web app developers like me is the potential for huge, fire hose style traffic curves coupled with some of Yahoo’s cooler properties like Flickr, Mail, Search and Finance. This won’t happen overnight, but if Yahoo can keep its focus though all the distractions, then they have a real chance at stealing the hearts and minds of some influential developers. Those developers may just change the web.

Later that same day, Google took the mic in the big hall to discuss Google Apps Engine. The company line here is that Google wants to “help the internet scale” by opening up access to its massively scaled data hosting platform. That’s a cute little sound bite, but I personally suspect it has more to do with the decision to monetize spare computing power, a decision Amazon had years ago Google’s offering goes a bit further than Amazon, building out every aspect of the stack to allow web sites and web apps to use Google to host up their online ideas. Once you get past the initial ‘I can have my little web site running on Google’ daydream fantasy, you see that there are some severe limitations as of today. Apps need to be written in Python, which may be a hurdle for some. They need to interact with Big Table, Google’s unique persistence layer. Big Table is not a relational database, so you really need to rethink how you interact with your data. Outbound web interactions are limited to 1MB transfers per connection and http calls only for outside web services. The service is free today for beta but expect that to change in the future. These limitations aside, you cannot deny that when Google sets a path for the future, it draws a considerable crowd of followers (some may say sheep) If Google can make this app engine viable, they may have once again changed the web as well.

Technorati Tags: web2expo, google, yahoo, web development

In his talk, Maximizing Ad Revenue Through Format Optimization, Paul Edmondson from YieldBuild shared their data on how to change the advertising on your website in order to increase revenue. With so much advertising on the web, the audience has become increasingly blind to ads, which drops their click-through-rates (CTR) and revenue. However, very subtle changes to the ads on your website will prevent a dip in revenue (if you measure performance).

There are four pillars of ad optimization:

• Ad Size – Size matters. 728×90 (leaderboard), 300×250 (medium box) and 160×600 (wide skyscraper) are the most effective ad sizes (with the most clicks). Different ad networks have different rates of success of selling clicks for certain ad sizes, so be aware of that when choosing one.
• Format attributes – such as rounded corners, background colors, borders, font colors, etc. Grey background with little border works best. Try testing variations on link colors, font colors, highlight colors, of your website.
• Placement – Design your site to accept the best ad sizes (see above) to make every ad account. Don’t underestimate below-the-fold value. A 300×250 ad placed in the center of the content will get better click-throughs than skyscrapers above-the-fold. For your title bar, ads aligned to the right perform best.
• Ad Network – Choose the right ad network for your blog or website. Look for ad networks which allow geo-targeting to match ads to your audience. If ads served on your site don’t seem to match your content, try a different network.

For smaller websites who would like to try to monetize their content, try placing one great ad unit in a prominent position for a high-value return. Overall, keep in mind that more ads are not better and not only are they decreasing value on your site, they may be slowing down the load time of your site, which will eventually deter your readers (and then your ad revenue will decrease with less traffic).

Technorati Tags: web2expo, ads, ad revenue, B2B

So you think you should add a social network or blog to your business website. What planning should you do to make this an effective undertaking and one with measurable ROI? Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research presented a simple strategy from their book Groundswell: POST.

• P – People – Access your customer’s social activities. There are different roles people play on your website/community (from Forrester’s social technographics ladder): creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives.
• O – Objectives – Decide what you want to accomplish. Different departments in your company will probably have different objectives (research – listening, marketing – talking, sales – energizing, support – supporting, development – embracing).
• S – Strategy – Plan for how relationships with customers will change.
• T – Technology – Decide which social technologies to use. Since you know the objectives these will be measurable.

To create a successful community you’ll need to engage your audience by creating a place they want/need to go regularly – asking them questions, listen to their ideas, create a place they can get advice and help each other. Start with your customers, choose objectives you can measure, line up front-office backing, get the naysayers on your side, and start small, but think big. Adding community to your business website can help you understand your customers and improve your products and services to increase sales.

Technorati Tags: web2expo, community, social networks