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

To be fair, I have not read the book version of ‘The Long Tail’.  I do, however, feel like I have if only because the title finds its way into many strategy sessions for online products and services in which I have participated.   The argument, as I have understood it from Chris Anderson’s own writing on the subject, purports that Brick & Mortar stores are not and cannot meet the demand of the market by only shelving known hits.  The physical limitations of shelf space are removed in online markets and should result in greater diversity of product selection. Online retailers should expect that diversity to translate into longer purchasing curves from their customers as untapped demand beyond those hits start to become fulfilled.  That customers will begin to spend money on niche areas is what is meant by the long tail of products sold in a new marketplace.  The Harvard Business Review has a good writeup here.

The Harvard Business Review also published an article which investigated possible markets which should exhibit this behavior to see if they followed the long tail curve.  Their findings are interesting, if not conclusive in my opinion.  The data shows that blockbuster products, those products which are both highly publicized and in high demand, are still a solid marketing technique in the online retail space and that stores should not underfund or abandon support for popular products in lieu of diversified selection. While this flirts with the fringes of obvious, it is supported by what looks to be solid research numbers which is always a sound practice when analyzing popular pet theories in the business community.  It further infers that the ‘Long Tail’ is greatly helped by having these popular titles in the inventory and possibly acts as a catalyst for more diversified sales.

Starting on page 4 of the report the author has given the online retailers and websites (presumably the reader of the article as well) a wonderful list of suggestions drawn from her research.  Visit the HBR site for more details.  Techcrunch’s Erick Schonfeld also has a good write-up on the article here.

My personal take on the article has more to do with the presumption of availability.  Both the Long Tail and this article make clear the need for an inventory to not languish in the back unseen.  How easily your customers can find the niche products has a huge impact on those sales graphs and it is brought up as an aside in the article.  The requirement for businesses to connect customers with relevant, niche inventory is not limited to retail.  Digg just implemented a recommendation engine that has been largely covered in the press.  The simple act of bringing uncommon or less popular content to a visitor based on their viewing patterns is every bit as much about the Long Tail of content consumption as is Amazon’s product recommendor.  Bringing in the customers with the Blockbusters is half the dollar you can earn.  The rest comes from connecting that customer to other products you have and getting those products in their shopping cart.

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.

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