Robert Dempsey has an excellent talk up on Confreaks where he looks at the Ruby language accessing Cloud computing.  As Robert knows, Standard Operating Procedure for a high level talk is to define the terms for the audience.  For this group the term ‘Ruby’ was a given, so he wisely focused on the Cloud.  Lemme recap what he lists as NOT being a Cloud if…

• You cannot buy it with your personal credit card
• They are trying to sell you hardware
• There is no API
• You need to rearchitect your system for it
• it takes more than 10 minutes to provision
• you need to specify the number of machines you want up front
• you own all the hardware

This, in my opinion, is an excellent primer for evaluating that ‘Try our new Cloud Computing Service’ pitch your VAR is feeding you.  I can only add one point of my own, as in my mind it is not Cloud Computing if…

• The the business model hinges on lock-in

Value Added Networks (VANs) can have a cloud-like smell to them when they branch beyond simple traffic passing and on into backend processing, but I have difficulty reconciling the lock-in potential.  If you cannot shift your system to a new Cloud provider easily, then I believe you are dealing with an entirely different animal.  Buyer Be Ware.

Joshua Porter is offering a free chapter of his book, Designing for the Social Web.  The book is geared towards web designers and developers, but this chapter has some great tips for what to put on your website or social network to entice visitors to sign up.  Most importantly it shows you how to put yourself into the shoes of your visitors to understand what information they need in order to understand what your website is about and what they’ll get out of signing up.  Next is understanding how the site works and how to sign up…. worth checking out.

If you offer advertising (or want to) on your business website or blogs, you may have been holding off because of the cost of using online ad management systems.  Sure, there are “free” ad networks, but most of those don’t allow you full control over the ads that show up on your site.  Google’s Ad Manager allows you to sell ads, but also to supplement those ads with ads from Google AdSense and other ad networks.  TechCrunch has more information: Google Will Now Manage Your Website’s Ads, as well as Ad Operations Online: Google Ad Manager out of Beta; All AdSense Publishers Can Use It.

Sazbean is about online business strategy and we work hard to keep this blog as accessible to our readers as possible. ‘Say it with words, not code’ is one of our guiding principles which keeps us honest when covering technical topics with applied business uses. A principle, I should add, that I will be flagrantly ignoring for this post.

It isn’t always wise to hold back that urge to express our deeper technical understand of a subject we are passionate about. Instead, we have opted to create a segment called quick bites that will be short, technically focused example posts about some subject we are currently working.

I was recently building a UI for a client in Rails and found a good use for a show/hide button in the design. Show/hide buttons, as their names describe, reveal content when pressed and then hide it when pressed again. Typical example code for this using Rails and Javascript might be…

Continue Reading »

There has been quite a lot of press lately about whether or not you need a PR firm for your business.  At the top of the current buzz is a blog post Jason Calcanis, CEO of Mahaolo, wrote: Jason Calcanis On How To Get PR For Your Startup: Fire Your PR Company.  An excerpt:

My philosophy of PR is summed up in six words: be amazing, be everywhere, be real.

You don’t need a PR firm, you don’t need an in-house PR person and you don’t need to spend ANY money to get amazing PR. You don’t need to be connected, and you don’t need to be a “name brand.”  Silicon Alley Insider - Jason Calcanis On How To Get PR For Your Startup: Fire Your PR Company

Obviously this post has caused a bit of a storm of PR and marketing folks looking for blood.  But the fact is that most small businesses (tech startups or otherwise) don’t have the budget for an expensive PR firm.  Jason has some great tips that businesses of any size can put to use - whether or not you use a PR firm.  An overview of the ten tips:

1. Be the brand
2. Be everywhere
3. Always pick up the check — always
4. Be a human being
5. How to bond with a journalist
6. How a CEO should e-mail a journalist
7. How a CEO should speak to a journalist
8. Invite people to “swing by” your office
9. Attach your brand to a movement
10. Embrace small media outlets

Do you have your own tips for PR?  Please share in the comments….

If you’ve been blogging for awhile or have a good number of posts, you may have noticed that there are particular older posts that still get pretty good traffic.  Usually these posts are popular either with search engines or social media.  These older posts are a great place to connect with new readers and Traffikd has a great post with some tips on how to keep these old posts working for your business: 7 Ways to Improve Your Old Social Media Posts.

Is blogging right for your business? If you’re considering adding a blog to your business website, Marketing Moves to the Blogosphere from the Washington Post is worth a read. It includes information from Bill Marriot’s blog for Marriot International and the blog for Viget Labs.

“It’s a phenomenal promotion vehicle for a company, or a great crisis tool or a great customer service tool,” said Geoff Livingston, a public relations strategist and social media expert.- Washington Post - Marketing Moves to the Blogosphere

Matt Cuts, who works for Google, also has 3 Tips for “company blogging”.

PPC or pay per click advertising is an Internet advertising model where advertisers only pay when visitors click on their ads.  These types of ads are typically found in search engine sponsored listings such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN adCenter, but can also be found in many advertising networks as well as content networks for the search engines.  Here are some terms and concepts you should be aware of if you’re considering PPC advertising:

• keyword bidding - Many ad networks and search engines use keyword bidding to help decide which ads should be shown for a particular keyword.  Usually you can set a maximum bid for what you are willing to spend.
• CPC (Cost per Click) - How much it will cost per click.  Set either through keyword bidding or a rate card.
• Clicks - How many times your ad has been clicked on.  Visitors clicking on your ad should go to a landing page (see below).
• Impressions - How many times your ad has been viewed.  Impressions also have value since there is some branding effect so make sure you include your company or product name in the ad.
• CTR (Click Through Rate) - The percentage of clicks you are getting related to the number of times your ad is viewed (impressions).
• click fraud - Abusive clicks by competitors or others intended to drive up the cost of the ad in question.  Most PPC ad vendors have sophisticated anti-click fraud systems in place, but this is something you should verify before advertising with any vendor.
• Content targeting or Contextual Ad - PPC ads also show up on websites near content (a content network).  Ads which relate to content being seen are more likely to be clicked upon.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - Attempts to increase the visibility of a website on search engines through multiple methods, including search engine optimization (SEO) and paid inclusion (PPC).
• Landing Page - To run an effective PPC campaign, you need to send the traffic from the ad to a landing page which has all the information the visitor needs (make sure you cover what was in the ad), as well as some sort of call to action (this is where you offer them something free in return for their contact information - lead or directly to a sale page).  Your landing page needs to be specifically tailored to the ad in question, don’t just dump people to your homepage - they’ll quickly leave and you’ll be paying for it.

Did we miss anything? Please submit any terms or concepts we missed in the comments.  Thanks!

Technorati Tags: PPC, pay per click, PPC ads, search engine marketing, SEM, internet marketing, internet business strategy

These are somewhat scary times at some B2Bs.  Despite expert advice about becoming more aggressive in a downturn (some of it summarized in our posting “B2B Marketing in a Recession”), their top management is more inclined to be cutting marketing expense than approving increased spending.  Leads are harder to come by and taking noticeably longer to close. - B2B Web Strategy - Fast fixes for B2B marketing in a sour economy

The slow economy may have given you a little bit of extra time on your hands.  Now is a great time to take a look at your business marketing plan and procedures and do some housecleaning.  B2B Web Strategy has some good information to get started, which can apply to both B2B and B2C companies.  Here are some more suggestions:

• Measurement - Take a look at your analytics and sales measurement tools and make sure you are getting the information you need to make good decisions.
• Advertising - Re-evaluate any advertising you’re doing - display, print, AdWords, etc.  What’s working well and what’s not?  Are the ways to improve what isn’t working as well?
• Customer List - Spring clean your CRM or customer list.  Are there some customers/potential customers who should be moved to the bottom shelf?  Are there customers you should be spending more time with?
• Lead Generation - Are your lead generation processes working well? Are there improvements you can make to increase leads or the quality of leads?
• Sales Funnel - Once you get qualified leads, are they becoming sales?  What can be improved to increase the percentage of leads that convert to sales?

Remember that to increase sales on your website (and in general), you need to increase traffic to your site (and keep the same conversion percentage) or increase the conversion percentage (for the same amount of traffic) or both.  Periodically re-evaluating your business marketing plan and how well it is working can help you achieve whichever goal you choose.

What fast fixes work for your business marketing?

Technorati Tags: business marketing, marketing, internet marketing, internet consulting, internet business strategy

The perils of preroll appear to have been vastly overstated, according to Nate Elliott, research director at Jupiter, who suggests audience loss as a direct result of prerolls could be as little as 5%. - Advertising Age - Fear of Preroll Ad Eases

If you’re considering advertising your business on online video, this study shows that viewers are not likely to leave just because you advertise before the video (a preroll ad).  However, viewers will leave if they feel that the content is not valuable.