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B2B Social Networks – Add This!

An important part of social networking is being able to share and comment on articles and other content with your peers. Usually this is done by adding a link for an article or other content to one of the social networking sites such as Digg, Newsvine, Del.icio.us, etc. As a content producer, you want to make it as easy as possible for your readers to send your content to these social networks. One way is to add links to various social networks with every post you write (either manually or programmatically).

I’ve been investigating ways to do this automatically and have come across a service called Add This! which gives you a button that has many social networking sites already included. It has support for many popular blogging platforms such as TypePad and WordPress, and it will work with other platforms by giving you the code to insert. It also has stats on how readers are using it so you can see which social networks they are submitting your content to. There also is a customizable version which allows you to select which networks appear and have your own logo at the top. I’ve just added it to this blog, and I’ll report on how well it is working soon.

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B2B Social Networking – Ning

I’ve been taking a look at social networking sites for the B2B industry. I rediscovered Ning today. When they were first launched they were a free-only service that was geared towards only the consumer Internet audience. Now they’ve added a paid service to remove or run your own ads, increase bandwidth and storage space, and use your own domain name.

As a network administrator, you have full control of exactly how your network looks and acts – ability for blogs, rss feeds, video, audio, photos, forums, and outside plugins. You have ownership of the content on your network, with the ability to backup any code and content within it. Ning does not currently interface with outside registration services (would love to see them support OpenID), but you can import and export your registered users. There’s also the option to create a closed network so that only the people invited can get in.

In just 5 minutes I was able to create a B2B social network that I’ll eventually tweak and link up to this site. If it grows, I can change to the paid options at any time. If you’re looking for a social networking tool for your B2B Website, take a look at Ning. It may be an easy, good and cheap way to add social networking to your site.

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B2B Content – SEO vs Customer-Centric Design

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firms will tell you that you need to have keyword-optimized pages on your website in order to appear in Google’s search results for those keywords. Customer-centric design requires that your website be designed with your customer foremost in-mind. Can these co-exist? Can you have the best of both worlds?

Yes and no. Search engines put a good deal of weight on how often content is updated on the site and for each of the keywords in question. Keeping keyword-optimized pages updated can be (and usually is) a full-time job. Have you ever been on a keywords-optimized site as a customer who is trying to find something? Often it is difficult to wade through all the content written only for the search engines.

Customer-centric design means keeping your customer in mind. What are your customers looking for when they come to your website? Do most of your customers come from search engines? If so, taking a SEO keyword-optimized approach may make sense.  Or do you use other advertising methods such as web ads, print ads, word-of-mouth, blogging, conference appearances and speaking engagements? In these cases, it may make more sense to create landing pages for each of these audiences instead.

How do you get the best of both SEO and Customer-Centric Design? Create customer-centric pages optimized for what your customers are looking for and how they came to your site. Take SEO keyword optimization into account when you design those pages and your overall website. Both your customers and your wallet will thank you and, if done properly, this approach will lead to better search engine ranking for the long term.

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