EnterpriseWebPro

Increasing Business Growth Through Open APIs

Savio Rodrigues — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:50:35 +0000

I spoke to Sam Ramji a little while back to get an update on Sonoa Systems. Readers will recognize Sam from his previous life as a central figure in Microsoft’s open source strategy team. Sam started the call describing a shift in his work from “open source to open cloud”.

Sam explained that enterprises are increasingly opening access to enterprise applications and services to third party developers, especially mobile developers, through open APIs. The impetus? Increase application content routes to market in an effort to increase revenue potential. The increased routes to market increases the potential load on the core application or service being exposed through the open API. Without careful consideration, the potential load from a third-party application could disrupt the company’s own, likely business critical, use of the application or service.

Sonoa Systems addresses this issue through an enterprise grade platform for visibility, management and governance for cloud services and APIs. Sonoa’s flagship product, ServiceNet is available as a hardware appliance, a virtual software image for private data center or public Cloud deployment.

Sam described a major U.S. retailer whose IT department built and exposed an API to its product catalog as a skunk works project. Nobody knew the degree to which the API would be used, or the extra load to expect on the product catalog service, a business critical IT asset. Today, the API is experiencing significant usage as third party developers have integrated the retailer’s content into a mobile mashup application. Not surprisingly, the mobile application is driving workload to the retailer’s back-end services which must be managed and optimized, a sweet spot for Sonoa. However, the application is also driving new revenue, which can be tracked through the API analytics that Sonoa ServiceNet offers.

The opening up of enterprise applications and services through open APIs is heading in only one direction. Sonoa hopes to accelerate this trend through its Apigee service:

“You have Google Analytics for your website – what about your APIs? And how do you protect your app against a burst of traffic or find out if an API you are using is slowing down your app? (besides hearing from your customers)

Apigee can help you understand API usage, control traffic flow, and protect your apps and back-end from misuse or abuse.”

Sam explained that the explosion of third-party mobile applications is driving interest and use of open APIs. For some companies, this is a double edge sword. Third party use of a company’s APIs increase revenue potential, but also increase risk of core system downtime based on factors beyond the company’s control, whether through misuse or abuse of the open API.

The great thing about Apigee is that companies can use ApigeeBasic, the free offering, to protect the core system through API usage quota, rate limiting and spike protection. This enables companies of all sizes to begin down the path of getting higher utilization out of the core application or service by making it available through a much broader channel than the company’s online presence alone. The ability to track revenue associated with the open API is sure to help business case discussions that may result when infrastructure upgrades are required to keep up with the new load through the open APIs. For most companies, that would be a good problem to have.

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What You Can Learn From News SEO

Lee Odden — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:30:05 +0000

Recently I was invited to give a basics webinar on optimizing news content for search. The intersection of search and PR/communications are obviously something quite familiar and while I’ve done several such presentations with our client PRWeb, I had not done one with Search Engine Watch before.

The outcome exceeded all expectations thanks to the excellent promotions by PRWeb and SEW plus Mike Grehan’s smooth handling of moderator duties amidst technical difficulties. Over 7,000 people registered, there were over 400 questions and 650 Tweets using the #prweb hash tag during the webinar.

The way it goes with many webinars when you’re invited by an organization to participate, is that the topic and title/description are determined beforehand. The speaker adapts themselves to that. This presentation content focused on optimizing writing for the web with a particular emphasis on optimizing content common to public relations.

As promised, I’ve sorted the bulk of the questions out and will present several here along with my responses. I hope they are useful.

If I’m not currently optimizing my site and I have a limited budget, where do I start?

The first thing any marketing activity needs to start with include setting goals, understanding your audience and the market. The lowest cost method of outsourcing that kind of activity where search engine optimization is concerned, would be to hire a consultant or agency to do an audit.

An SEO audit represents the initial evaluation and research along with recommendations to be implemented by the client. Typically this involves: competitive research, keyword research, web site code/template evaluation, content optimization recommendations, link building research and recommendations, tips on content creation/promotion/repurposing and to varying degrees, social media recommendations. Web analytics, monitoring and ranking tools are also often recommended.

An audit does not take the place of consulting since it’s an evaluation and recommendation, not implementation and guidance on an ongoing basis. It is however, a cost effective start. Here are a few resources:

Top 3 Tactics To Improve Search Engine Rankings

Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

Do’s and Don’ts of On-Page SEO for Public Relations

5 Online Marketing Resolutions for 2010

Should your newsroom blog be placed under the site’s domain, or maintained separately under the blog software’s domain to allow for incoming links to your main site that are coming from a different site?

There are two parts to the answer for this question. First, the reference to “blog software’s domain” sounds as though the blog is hosted with a third party service such as blogger.com or typepad.com. Example: yourblog.blogspot.com or yourblog.typepad.com

My advice is to avoid using third party hosting services for your blog. If you’re too invested in such a service or have other reasons for using them and cannot use something like WordPress installed on the server where your web site is hosted, then use domain aliasing options so that your blog URL is part of your company domain name or a domain name that you own. Example: yourblog.com or yourblog.companydomainname.com. This puts you in a position of more control since the blog content lives under a domain name you own vs a domain like blogspot.com, which is owned by Google.

While links from your blog/newsroom hosted on a blogspot.com to your company web site do count as inbound links, there’s not as much value from many links to your site from one other site vs many links to your site from many other relevant web sites.

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How Are You Tracking Your Text Analytics?

Jim Berkowitz — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:30:23 +0000

Here are several excerpts from an excellent post by Bruce Temkins, It’s Time For Text Analytics:

At the Clarabridge event this week, I got to spend time with many executives from large companies that were thrilled with the results from their text analytics efforts.

While most companies were still in relatively early stages of their deployments, the ROI of their efforts were already compelling. The business results for using text analytics came from areas like:

•   Reducing warranty costs by spotting quality issues much faster

•   Identifying underperforming franchisees that need training

•   Cutting operational costs of manually categorizing customer comments

•   Quickly identifying the impact and severity of service issues

•   Understanding “why” metrics like NPS are going up or down

Vendors like Clarabridge, Attensity and Overtone are making it easier than ever to extract huge value from previously ignored unstructured text. That’s why my #1 trend in Voice Of The Customer (VoC) programs is “Tapping into unstructured and unsolicited feedback” which I show like this…

Businesses are full of unstructured text like customer comments on surveys, notes and verbatims from contact center conversations, inbound emails, online chats, social media sites, customer feedback comments, etc. This information represents immense untapped value that I expect companies to start unlocking.

The bottom line: What’s your plan for text analytics?

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Adding A Search Engine Reputation Management Partner To Your Enterprise

Patrick Hare — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:30:43 +0000

Bad press and negative publicity can affect businesses in many different ways. In the online world, negative information can be difficult to combat, especially when it ends up adjacent to keyword queries in search engines. In many cases, medium and large companies who find themselves on the wrong side of a search engine will consult with their PR and marketing firms. Unfortunately, not every agency has team of search engine optimization (SEO) specialists on retainer.

Having a Search Engine Reputation Management Partner can be a great way for marketing agencies and PR firms to deal with unwanted search engine listings. Firms like Web.com Search Agency have in-house professionals who specialize in reducing and removing the impact of malicious, defamatory, inaccurate, or outdated online content. Even if your PR client has legitimately upset customers in the past, a good SEO campaign can reduce the stigma left behind by unhappy clients or bloggers with an axe to grind.

If you have a client who is seeing negative, unwanted, or defamatory results in search engine listings, then an SEO company is the best choice for reducing the impact of the bad postings. While it is possible to remove some postings from search engine results through legal channels, there are some websites that are either outside the reach of the law or immune from lawsuits. In the US, courts have held that defamatory forum postings are not the responsibility of the site owner. Even worse, sites like RipoffReport.com will not remove defamatory and negative postings, even if the underlying issues are resolved or the charges are untrue.

In many cases, calls for web reputation management come from C-Level Executives who Google their company names (or their own names), and find information that is not complimentary. You never know when the wrong person may come across this information, so savvy businesspeople are generally more motivated to deal with any potential negativity as quickly as possible. This is always a good idea, especially considering that due diligence in any business transaction requires a thorough examination of the partner company and its public faces, and Google is now a top utility for learning about other companies. Therefore, a course of aggressive reputation management may be the difference between a multimillion dollar deal and a lost sale.

SEO agencies can use a variety of methods to push unwanted information off the first page of search results, which instantly keeps 70% of searchers from seeing the negative items. The advantage of retaining a reputation management professional like Web.com Search Agency is that your marketing firm may not have up-to-date SEO knowledge, and could exacerbate the situation by using outdated rep management techniques. SEO agencies also can work hand-in-hand with PR firms by creating new publicity, while simultaneously improving search engine positions for positive information that is already present on search engines like Google.

A Search Engine Reputation Management Partner should be part of any PR firm’s arsenal of disaster recovery tools. In many cases, adverse situations can be avoided or attenuated through a tactical approach to bad news and online customer complaints. Keeping an SEO firm in your contact list, or having a relationship with a trusted company, can ensure a timely response to publicity nightmares and unexpected situations. Furthermore, the use of an SEO firm for reputation management can be completely confidential, ensuring that your client can discreetly reduce the impact of unwanted information.

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The Next Phase Of Social Communication

Sally Falkow — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:10:59 +0000

As we move into the next phase of social communication online the idea of outsourcing your social media activity to a PR agency makes less and less sense.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do. Cluetrain Manifesto

So where does PR fit into this scenario?

An important part of social media success depends on how well you have listened to your audience. Do you know what their concerns and interests are? Do you have a content strategy that speaks to the needs of your community? Are you telling stories that resonate with people who might be customers? PR is good at doing those parts of the program. We can strategize and advise. We can find influencers and develop the content strategy. We can formulate and craft interesting pieces of content.

We know that the most powerful influencing factor today is a recommendation from ’someone just like me.” Dell’s campaign about the interesting entrepreneurs who use Dell products is a perfect case in point. It’s an integrated campaign that makes great use of social media. PR was very involved with picking the people to feature and crafting the stories.

Another good example occurred all of two years ago – clever PR content created $1million in leads for a downtown condo development in Kansas City. They profiled current buyers at the Metropolitan and created three human interest stories about the buyers that attracted like minded people.

According to the social media and PR report from EConsultancy.com only 13% of companies are ‘very satisfied’ with the social media services they get from their PR agency.

We need to figure out where we fit in the mix and do what we do well.

We can create the branded content that will pique the interest of the right people. Then it’s over to the company or organization to foster the relationships. People don’t want to speak to the PR agency. They want to speak to the actual people at the company.

“Learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.” Cluetrain Manifesto.

Keeping Your SEO Effective For Organic Search

Stephen Pitts — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:42:01 +0000

Sometimes it is easy to get lost in the details of SEO.

This is a simple game. You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball. You got it?
- Bull Durham

Don’t get me wrong, SEO does require some advanced techniques to compete in most of the top areas, but it does boil down to a couple of important aspects to be effective in performing in organic search.

Here is the easiest way I have found to explain the basics of SEO:

Content = Relevance

Links = Authority

Authority + Relevance = Rankings

Rankings = Market Share

This doesn’t address the foundation of online marketing which is the site and all of the technical concerns that need to be addressed, but most of the typical technical concerns only need to be addressed initially and monitored. Like baseball, SEO comes down to the fundamentals which are content and links, then it comes down to practice, practice, practice.

The other important thing to remember when playing baseball or optimizing a site for search rankings, you need a great team that knows how to work together to stay in the game.

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Projected Growth In Social Media Marketing Investing For 2010

Jim Berkowitz — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:30:35 +0000

Here are several excerpts from an article in thewisemarketer.com (free subscription required), Social Media Marketing to Grow in 2010:

Most marketers are planning to invest more in social media during 2010, but are struggling to find the time and resources to manage their activity, according to a research report published by E-Consultancy and BigMouth Media.

The report, entitled ‘Social Media and Online PR’, was based on a survey of more than 1,100 companies and agencies, and examined the ways in which companies are using online PR tactics and social media (including sites such as Twitter and Facebook) for marketing and customer service.

According to the report, 86% of the companies surveyed plan to spend more money on social media in 2010 than they did in 2009, and a further 13% are planning to at least keep the same level of budget.

The biggest barrier to better social media engagement for companies surveyed is a lack of resources, with more than half of companies (54%) citing this as a significant problem. Some 90% of businesses said that social media is taking up more time internally than it did in 2008.

The research found that many companies are experimenting with social media without yet reaping any measurable benefits. Only 25% of companies said that they have gained “real, tangible value” from social media, while 60% said that they have gained “some benefit, but nothing concrete”.

The full report has been made available for download from E-Consultancy’s web site; (free registration required).

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Which SEO Strategies Really Work And Which Don’t

Stoney deGeyter — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:30:29 +0000

Small businesses are often seen fumbling around in the dark when it comes to figuring out which SEO strategies really work and which don’t. There is an onslaught of information freely available online, much of it contradictory or confusing. Small business owners who attempt to perform SEO for themselves don’t often know which strategies are more important than others, which are worthwhile and which are worthless, or how do you tell the difference.

Slogging through SEO forums, blogs and article sites can provide a great deal of good information, but it can also leave the small business owner confused on what–or what not–to do.

Those that choose to hire an SEO provider can push some of their SEO decision-making burdens off onto someone else, but some then open the door to a whole new set of worries that can circumvent their online success, even with a successful SEO working for them.

Spending nights worrying about your SEO campaign can eat up a lot of energy that is better applied to other, more important matters. While every business owner needs to be fully aware of the progress being made by their SEO’s efforts, they also need to trust that the SEO knows what is needed for them to succeed. For that to happen, here are a few things the business owner need to stop worry about. Failure to do so can kill an SEO campaign in its tracks.

1) Worrying about making page edits

Without changes there is no SEO. You can focus on link building, social media, ad campaigns, etc, which can bring you limited success on their own. However, if you want your site really perform for your targeted keyword phrases, you have to be willing to make keyword focused and other architectural edits.

All too often site owners don’t want to make necessary changes to their site’s because they are afraid of losing customer focus. This is a legitimate concern but also one that is often misplaced. Site improvements designed for search engines often align with site improvements for your visitors. If searchers are using specific phrases in their search, it makes sense that your visitors will be served seeing those very same specific phrases on your site.

Don’t be afraid of making changes to your site. The goal of any good SEO is not to just improve your search engine rankings, but help you increase your business.

2) Worrying about shifting rankings

It’s a simple fact of life that search engine rankings change. New sites are always going online, old sites are disappearing, new information is added to the web, and new competition with fresh marketing dollars emerges. Add to that the fact that search engines are always tweaking and adjusting their algorithms and you’ve got a search engine ranking roller coaster.

That doesn’t mean that you ignore keyword rankings completely, but if you’re compelled to monitor your rankings, don’t do it on a day to day basis. Most search engine ranking changes are insignificant and just part of the normal fluctuations that occur.

What you do need to be concerned about is overall trends. If you do start seeing a month to month trend of a loss in rankings dropping that’s when you need to start looking at things more closely. Don’t sweat the small stuff, but instead look at the bigger picture.

Another problem worrying about small shifts in rankings is people often get concerned about the wrong keywords and the wrong engines. Google drives the most traffic, but isn’t always the best at converting. Improvements in other engines that may convert better may be worth a sacrifice of lower rankings in Google. Again, it’s about the big picture.

3) Worrying about trying new things

Good optimization and marketing isn’t a linear process. Every site is different as are the site’s needs. Many changes recommended will be standard fare while some will seemingly come way out of left field. Give all proper consideration, and don’t be afraid about doing something different.

One thing to keep in mind is that success comes through trial and trial produces error and failures. We’ve all heard the story that when Thomas Jefferson failed thousands of times for every success he ever made. Hopefully you won’t have to fail that often in your website marketing, but be prepared for some things not to work.

Fear of failure is not a reason not to try. We tell the same to our kids and we need to take that to heart in our businesses. Step out, and be willing to try something new.

4) Worrying about making large-scale changes

Before a site can be optimized for your targeted keywords, it needs to be optimized for search engines. I call this having a “search engine friendly” website. A lot of sites are build by developers that don’t know much about SEO beyond meta tags. The sites they build may look good but won’t perform well in the search engines because the site architecture isn’t search engine friendly.

The last thing you want to do is to pay a lot of money on an expensive optimization campaign if your site isn’t in a position to be optimized. That’s just putting SEO frosting on a website dung pile. Big changes need to be made before you can really start focusing on the actual on-page keyword targeting. In many cases you have to be willing to burn the site to the ground. Other times it’s less severe but many structural changes will need to be made before any SEO can be effective.

Failure to make these big changes will ultimately result in poor performance of any optimization campaign you implement. Don’t be afraid to make the big changes necessary for your small SEO changes to succeed.

5) Worrying about investing in long-term SEO

SEO is a long-term investment, not a one-time expense. The changes you need to make to optimize your site will cost you both time and money.

All too often businesses looking for an immediate boost turn to SEO as if it’s some sort of magic bus ride to the top of the search engine rankings. They don’t want to spend much money but they have very high expectations. Unfortunately, SEO isn’t like building a fence. There is much more to it than having a bit of knowledge and a few tools to work with.

Those who are afraid to spend what it takes for their SEO campaign to succeed rarely ever do succeed. They limp along with sites that under perform and ultimately cost more to market than if the money was spent sooner to make the changes requires.

Worry tend to cause bad decisions. When we worry, we tend to make decisions based on how we feel at the moment rather than basing our decisions on facts and evidence. When you turn your SEO campaign over to another person, or even do it yourself, there is enough to worry about without adding to it.

As business owners you have enough on your plate. Make wise SEO decisions but leave the worries over superficial matters behind. By focusing on the wrong things you can sink your SEO campaign before it even has a chance to get off the ground.

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Taking A Look At Online Video Engagement Within Blogs

Manoj Jasra — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:30:08 +0000

Sysomos recently released a study which takes a look inside online video engagement specifically how videos are used within online sharing sites such as blogs. This study, exploring the use of online video services by bloggers, is based on a collection of more than 100 million blog posts collected from July to September 2009.

Here are some highlights from the study:

Market Leader: YouTube - Not surprisingly, YouTube is the most popular video-sharing service used by bloggers, attracting 81.9% of all embedded videos and direct links. Vimeo is a distant second with 8.8%, followed by Dailymotion and MySpace.

Young Males Engage the Most - 20-to-35-year-old males constitute the most engaged demographic group in our study. In total, 77% of users are under 35-years old, while 60% of all users are male.

Asian Users Engage Differently - 90% of the users from Asia and Oceania are under 35-years-old. In comparison, a third of North American users are over 35-years-old. Bloggers in Asia and Oceania are less likely to use services other than YouTube, with 89% of the links and embeds pointing to YouTube.

Gender Balance - The most male dominated video service is Break.com (88%) vs. (12%) females. The most female dominated video service is MTV (68%) vs. males (32%). The most balanced video serviceis MSN (56% male and 44% female).

Countries and Cities - The countries with the most bloggers embedding and linking to videos are the U.S., Brazil, Spain, the U.K. and Canada. In terms of cities, the most active bloggers who embed and link to videos live in New York, Sao Paulo, London and Madrid.

Engagement Peaks on Tuesday - The most popular day for engaging with video in the blogosphere is Tuesday and Wednesday. The most active engagement takes place between 11a.m. and 1p.m EST.

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Adding More Communication To Your Site Through Sidewiki

Neville Hobson — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:42:13 +0000

Google Sidewiki launched last month and opinion online is wide and varied. Much of that opinion suggests a brewing crisis for companies, their brands and other things of interest to them if people can comment at will on anything on the web, positive or negative, with no control at all, just with their browser.

I don’t know about any crisis. What I do see is opportunity, for companies and for anyone else with an opinion.

Take Trafigura, for instance. This is a company whose name was unknown by most people until it was propelled into the news headlines a few weeks ago as a key protagonist in the gagging the Guardian debacle.

The screenshot above shows Trafigura’s home page with Google Sidewiki enabled in my Firefox browser (it works in just two browsers at the moment: Firefox and Internet Explorer via the latest Google Toolbar). The sidewiki is like an overlay: clicking on the link in the toolbar toggles its appearance on or off.

There are two comments as you can see, as could anyone else in the world on the internet with a browser that has Sidewiki installed. The two comments you see are pretty innocuous; factual rather than opinion.

Trafigura can also comment if they so choose. Indeed, as a site owner, they have first call on a comment that is linked to their site, which would appear before anyone else’s comment.

To get a good sense of Google Sidewiki and how it works, I suggest you take a look at the website and view the 1-minute video Google produced.

And so what should organizations do about Google Sidewiki?Is it something to be alarmed about, seeing it just as a threat, another example of diminishing control?

Good questions, similar to ones that I discussed with Ged Carroll of Ruder Finn in a PR Week Video Podcast, published last Thursday and embedded below (RSS subscribers: if you don’t see it, please visit this site or PR Week’s).

I liked Ged’s simple explanation of what Google Sidewiki is: I think anyone would understand the concept from how Ged describes it.

As I said in our conversation, I do believe Google Sidewiki presents organizations in particular, as well as opinion-makers, with more opportunities than threats (and, yes, there are some).

I reckon the biggest threat is ignoring sidewiki comments, in a sense pretending they’re not there (eg, if you can’t see them, well, they don’t exist). Google Sidewiki is a tool you have to actively get hold of by downloading and installing the latest Google Toolbar. Then you have to explicitly choose to use it. And it works in only two browsers at the moment. So there are quite a few hurdles to jump.

It’s clearly early-adopter territory at the moment so usage is certainly far from widespread. To give you an idea of how far that is, I checked the websites (home pages) of the top 15 companies listed in the FTSE 100 by market cap. Only one company, BP, has any comments in a Google Sidewiki when I checked: one comment, positive sentiment.

Note that’s any comments – including a primary statement as a comment from a site owner, something I’d recommend a company does. I have such a statement on this blog: if you have Google Sidewiki enabled, you can see it (the screenshot shows what it looks like).

One point about comments left by people. To start with, you can only leave a comment if you have a Google account and if you’re logged in to that account. Note the two in the Trafigura site, above, have the names of the commenters as hyperlinks. If you click a name, you go to the commenter’s Google Profile where you can find out a little about that individual: useful for monitoring and making assessments of influence and authority online.

From a commenter’s point of view, connecting with his or her profile is good for demonstrating your credentials as all your Sidewiki comments are aggregated there as well – a central comment repository that connects you to all the places where you left them.

So as I’ve said, I do see Google Sidewiki more as an opportunity for organizations than as a threat. If you want to know more about that, with some other points of view, I have a list of talking points I prepared for my own use in the PR Week podcast discussion which I’ve included in this post, after the jump, below.

Meanwhile, get to know Google Sidewiki. Maybe that’s better said as get used to Google Sidewiki: the concept of commenting anywhere, anytime, in just your browser – which is the wiki concept – will go mainstream from a user point of view once it’s integrated in your browser and not something you have to separately install, because it will then be so easy.

From an organization point of view – and this mostly means from a monitoring point of view – mainstream will be when tools like Radian6 include Google Sidewiki in their broad measurement and analytics offerings.

I’d give it less than a year. Good time to get well prepared.

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