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Business Video Blogging – Qik

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.

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CrunchBase Information
Qik
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Business Knowledge Sharing Community – Diigo

Billed as a research tool and knowledge-sharing community, Diigo (still in beta) has many of the same bookmark-sharing features as Ma.gnolia. You can tag and share your bookmarks with your friends and colleagues, and find new people to connect with in the social network. Unique to Diigo, the ‘People Like Me’ suggests people with similar interests based on tags and bookmarks. Suggesting new people requires enough tags and bookmarks to work. However, importing bookmarks from del.icio.us (281) either did not work with this function or wasn’t enough information for a recommendation. Along with matching tags, connections can be made with others currently online, new to diigo, featured people or searching. Diigo offers browser add-ons to make adding bookmarks, comments, tags, etc. very easy.

Most impressive and innovative is the ability to annotate and highlight content on webpages which will appear the next time you visit the page or when you share these notes with others. This note-sharing functionality makes it possible to use Diigo to share research with colleagues and co-workers, which could be very beneficial in the B2B marketplace. If a webpage is of interest to your coworkers, not only can you bookmark and share it with them, you can highlight specific content and makes notes on the webpage which they can see when they visit. Your coworkers can then make their own notes and highlights, which creates a very powerful shared research environment. (This could also be very useful for web designers who could have their clients markup website designs with changes right on the website – no more faxes and pdfs!)

The layout and design of Diigo is not as polished as Ma.gnolia, but is fairly usable. Editing bookmarks that I imported from del.icio.us took almost 30 seconds to save changes. Using the browser add-on, adding a bookmark did not ask for any tags or descriptions (which del.icio.us does), and sent the bookmark to my unread portion of my profile. This seems strange since I was the one that added the bookmark. One would expect unread bookmarks to come from friends or coworkers.

Overall I think Diigo has some very promising functionality, especially in the annotations and floating sticky notes, but seems to be very slow to use. It is still in beta, so hopefully some of these quirks will be worked out to make it a much more useful tool for business websites.

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CrunchBase Information
Diigo
Information provided by CrunchBase

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Good B2C Websites

Since I covered an example of a bad B2C website last week, let’s take a look at a couple of good B2C websites and what makes them good.

  • L.L.Bean – This site has been one of my favorite consumer websites for several years. Why? Because I can always find what I’m looking for. If I need help there are multiple different ways to contact the company: email, phone, online chat which are clear from every single page. I can find products by their catalog number, by searching, by browsing (in multiple categories). Browsing allows the ability to narrow your choices by several different types of information (dependent on what you’re looking at) – for example, on comfort fleece, I can narrow my choices by department, attributes, price and colors. When I add an item into my shopping bag, I can label it with different names if I have items going to different people and during checkout it will ask me for different addresses and gift card information. I also can save items in my bag for later if I’m considering different items or shopping around. They have details on every product including the ability to zoom in to see more detail. L.L. Bean is a catalog company so if they lose a visitor off their site, they’ve lost a sale. You can’t get much more customer-centric.
  • Lands End – Also a catalog company, Lands End has many of the same functions as the L.L. Bean website (they compete on many of the same items). I think their display of items is somewhat better since they offer several different views of each product and offer recommendations on how well something will fit you (based on your personal measurements). They also offer the same great customer service options and abilities as far as finding products.

Obviously eCommerce sites are going to be very different than other B2C websites and different from most B2B websites, but they are very good at being customer-centric since they must be so to compete. Most B2B websites are also selling products, but often forget to offer good customer service and to think about what their customers want when they are on their website.

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