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

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

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

So far, a current is running under the sessions that I have seen. In my experience, I tend to trust currents like this as indications of trends in the web market. The next big thing that has been a big thing for a while is Web Oriented Architecture (WOA)

John Musser of ProgrammableWeb gave a very good overview of how we will be building web apps for B2B in the very near future. WOA is the technique of “mashing up” the services of one or more available web application through their Application Programming Interface (API). The up side is that this market is growing beyond its roots in consumer and commercial spaces and on into the Enterprise world.

Companies like Salesforce.com have had open Enterprise API’s since 2003, however the hockey stick curve of adoption of other Enterprise APIs has been shooting up since last year.

ProgrammableWeb believes that these APIs are becoming easier to use for the non-IT person, much in the model of Excel. This may be a bit premature, and certainly there are a number of companies who can help you. Sazbean.com, for instance, is already helping other customers with specialized consulting in helping companies do business online.

Technorati Tags: web2expo, mashups, B2B

You may not realize it yet, but the Internet boom has created a global audience for your products and services. How is your website viewed by your potential customers in other countries? Is it annoying? Insulting? Inappropriate? Designing your websites properly for the culture of your audience can increase your traffic and your profits. Aaron Marcus (Aaron Marcus and Associates) presented an overview of these cultural considerations and how they influence the design of a website for different cultures.

Power Distribution (PD) is the extent to which less powerful members expect and accept unequal power distribution. A country with a high PD has centralized power in few hands. Websites designed for countries with high PD (China) have a structured access to information with emphasis on social order and focus on expertise.

Individualism vs Collectivism explores how tied-in an individual is with their family and social status. Countries with high individualism (such as the US) expect websites that maximize personal achievement, focus on consumerism, and activity.

Feminity vs. Masculinity – Men are typically focused on achievement, earnings, recognition, advancement and challenges in their work goals. Women are focused on relations, cooperation, living area and employment security. Websites designed for these audiences need to take these differences into account. If you take a look at a website geared towards women, it typically is designed around community and sharing. Websites which cater to men typically are information-heavy with little interaction.

Uncertainty Avoidance – Certain cultures feel threatened by uncertainty or the unknown. These cultures typically view teachers are experts (who know all) and have high formality in gestures and procedures. Sites designed for low uncertainty avoidance cultures (US) can be fun and whimsical, whereas sites for high uncertainty avoidance cultures need to stick to the point.

Long vs. Short Term Time Orientation – Some societies have been around for a long time and have a different view of what is important to accomplish in a time period. China, which is at the top of long term time orientation, views problems, issues, and tasks from the point of view of what needs to be done this generation whereas Americans try to solve and accomplish tasks in as short of time as possible. A website for China can be fuzzy and focuses on people, but a website for Germany is task-oriented and focuses on function mastery.

These metrics are based on older data and tend to sterotype cultures as one per country. However, these cultural considerations are important to include in your business website design to make sure your global visitors understand your products and services and can find what they need.

Technorati Tags: web2expo, usability

If Facebook had a dad that worked in accounting, drove a Taurus and considered the OpEd section of the Wall Street Journal a “weekend highpoint”, that dad would be LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the social network we point to when we want to say that the internet is serious business. It is the one example people use when trying to make an argument for expecting more than flying sheep and Parker Brother games in online communities. LinkedIn is about making (and exploiting) business connections. They must be doing something right, they turned a profit in 2006 with 5 million users. They claim 4 times that many users today.

How you can personally benefit You know a few people in your industry. You are already part of a business network that exists through conferences and gatherings, mailing lists and bulletin boards. LinkedIn makes it ridiculously easy to interconnect those business contacts that you have to an online profile. The big idea is that you can benefit from your network connectivity as an industry expert or by being introduced to other people in your field. In theory this uber networking could translate to a better job or a consulting engagement. There are job search boards and expert Answers sections that facilitate some of this for you, though it is possible to arrange things independently.

How LinkedIn makes money The business model that seems to work best for social networks relates to critical mass. Once something has grown large enough to generate its own buzz around a community, it can usually maintain a perpetual inflow of new users. It is the users, their connections and their self-identified business skills and responsibilities that LinkedIn monetizes in its business plan. LinkedIn sells introductions and InMail messages as premiere services, a easy sell for an HR department looking for new talent to recruit.

How your company can use LinkedIn This depends on how large your company is and how technical your customer base is. Most of LinkedIn’s professionals work in white collar management, tech sector or professional industries such as law and medicine. A large company working in any of these markets should consider looking at the Enterprise options for connecting with clients If you’re smaller, then the professional accounts are tiered to meet your needs. LinkedIn does support targeted advertising though their rate card is on the high end for online advertising. This likely reflects their belief in a unique audience of professionals, though an ad in a trade publication may be a better value for a comparable audience. Mostly, you want your sales people to have LinkedIn accounts and to start making connections. Sales leads that come through a recommendation network like this are worth the price of a professional account.

My take I don’t use LinkedIn personally. I have an account that I maintain modestly for my professional friends to connect to. I’m not in sales and my current professional engagements keeps me too busy to fish for work. So from the outside looking in, I see LinkedIn as just another place to keep your contact information. The likelihood that I will look here first for a business recommendation, professional recommendation, job or product offering is small. There are other places that do those things better. A deep user of the LinkedIn networking function may find unique opportunities that a surface user like me never will. My time just doesn’t lend itself to that level of involvement.

Don’t have time to write a blog? Need something more robust than microblogging? Well if you have a phone (nokia only currently) with a camera, you can capture and stream video from your phone straight to your blog, twitter, facebook, etc. Still in alpha with just a bunch of Nokia phones supported, Qik is already revolutionizing video blogging.

Once you’ve downloaded Qik’s software, you’ll be able to stream and capture video right from your phone or video recorder. You can stream that video to your profile page on Qik’s website, to your blog, Facebook, etc. Qik is still in alpha, so if you have one of the supported phones, they still have to approve your request.

For the business audience, Qik has potential for video blogging and for documenting business processes – without having to invest in expensive video hosting and editing equipment. With the advent of YouTube and the explosion of online video, the Internet audience is not (yet) concerned with quality in picture or editing. A service like Qik could make online video so easy that it may become expected on your website.

Technorati Tags: qik, video, video blogging, B2B video blogging, B2C video blogging,B2B video, B2C video, B2B, B2C, business internet reviews