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Using CDNs for your critical B2B content

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

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

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

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

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B2B Social Networks – CrowdVine

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

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

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

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

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

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CrunchBase Information
CrowdVine
Information provided by CrunchBase

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B2B Competitive Analysis – SEOQuake

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

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

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

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

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

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