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

Cubeless is a fun and easy-to-use corporate social network platform which provides a virtual water cooler for employees to share information, jokes, insight and to connect on a personal level even if they are miles apart.  The platform is revolves around questions - employees asking and answering questions from/for each other, but adds fun features to keep them coming back.

Once an employee has logged in, they see the ‘Hub’ or an overview of everything that is currently going on in the community:

• Latest Community Question - Lists the last question asked by anyone from the company.
• Recent Notes from friends/coworkers (to the employee) - Peers can leave notes for each employee.
• Hot Topics - By tag cloud.
• Watch List - Questions an employee wants to track.
• Ask a Question - Employees are able to ask a question right from the first page.
• Explore Profiles - Pictures of other employees with links to learn more about them.
• Questions With New Answers - A list of questions that have new answers.
• Referred Questions - Questions that have been referred to the employee to answer.  This allows people to get a question answered by the person who knows best.
• Questions I Can Help Answer - Questions the employee has selected as ones they can help answer.
• Latest Picks - Restaurants, Companies, Attractions, etc. other employees have recommended to each - a fun way for employees to find new places to eat or meet.
• Who is Online Now? - Who else is on the community right now.
• Company Stream - List of last 20-24 actions any employee has done on the community.

Just like many social networking platforms, Cubeless allows employees to create their own profile with picture, blog, and join groups.  But as an employee asks and answers more questions, visits the sites regularly and contributes, she gains Karma points.  This is a fun way to encourage employees to continue to use the network and to interact with each other.  Cubeless may be a great alternative to the bland Intranet/Portal solutions out there if you just need a place for your employees to share information and learn from each other or if you have employees who do not all work in the same location.

Technorati Tags: cubeless, social network, intranet, employee portal

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.

Continue Reading »

Continuing the web advertising thread, we are going to look at an Ad Hosting service provider.

ThruPort Technologies, the company behind the AdJuggler ad hosting service, was started in 1999 by Bruce Waldack of digitalNation fame. Bruce founded digitalNation in ‘91, which was early enough in the dedicated server space to gain market share and grow it to one of the largest players in dedicated hosting at the time. In 1999 he sold digitalNation to Verio and started ThruPort the same year. AdJuggler was launched as one of ThruPorts first named services. As ad hosting services go, AdJuggler is well known in community. There are a few competitors to AdJuggler on the market, mainly because hosting ads itself is not a high technical feat to accomplish. That having been said, reliability and reputation carry a ton of weight in the advertising game and AdJuggler currently seems to have both.

AdJuggler offers up its service in three flavors. For the Enterprising web provider, Adjuggler will sell a license to run their code at your hosting location on your equipment. Ill get into why that is a great option later on. They also offer the traditional Turnkey service where all hosting and storage remains within their location, you simply link up a JavaScript tag on your site to pull the ads down. Lastly, they are available as consultants and API solutions for the roll-your-own crowd. Having worked with the guys at AdJuggler on integration projects with their API, I can say that they do know a thing of three about serving up web ads.

The technology behind their service is, as I said before, basic stuff. Basic is not a bad thing, especially when you have a solid foundation of hosting experience backing you up through ThruPort Technologies. While hosting ads is the foundation, reporting clicks and impressions is where the real work is done. They do a nice job of providing many reporting options for you at the web application. For that extra special reporting itch, the API is available through authenticated SOAP. I like to combine my AdJugger statistics with my registered user information from my web app and my traffic logs from the Apache server. The API lets me pull that information down easily and store it locally in an aggregated format. The Enterprise solution is a cool option for sites that are big enough to conduct pre-processing on their ads before sending them out to the reader which can increase cache-worthiness of the page as well as compression and optimization of the media files. It also makes the stats and the workflow a whole lot easier to tie into your system.

Price: AdJuggler charges by the impression. They do not provide pricing information publicly on their web site though Jonathan Rivers, Executive Vice President of Ad Juggler, has indicated to me that their contracts start at a $.04 CPM range (CPM is cost per Thousand impressions, think Roman Numeral M).

Technorati Tags: AdJuggler, thruport, advertising, ads, display ads, online advertising

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

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

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)

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

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.

Technorati Tags: diigo, social bookmarking, B2B social bookmarking, business social bookmarking, B2B, B2C, business internet reviews