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B2B Micro-blogging – Twitter

Since I’ve seen it covered in the news quite a bit lately, and many other vendors integrate with it, I wanted to do an overview of Twitter, which is a micro-blogging tool. According to Wikipedia, micro-blogging is:

Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web.

Twitter is a free and has an easy sign-up process. Once you have an account, you can update it (or twitter) with what you’re doing by several different means: the website, your phone, email, IM, and through twitter-specific applications. People can see your updates by visiting your page on Twitter, or by “following” you through updates on IM, phone, etc. Twitter updates can also be integrated into other web pages – such as blogs.

Ok, so why would anyone care and what good is this for B2B? Personally, you probably have friends and family who are interested in what you are doing – going to the gym, reading a book, etc. As a business, you also have customers and partners who are interested in what you’re doing as far as your business is concerned. Twittering (yes, it is a verb now) and other micro-blogging tools are a great way to send little updates to keep your customers up-to-date with just a minor effort on your part.

I have a Twitter feed for sazbean, which you can check out to get an idea of what Twittering is.

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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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