A Blog About Software As A Service
This blog is all about software as a service (SaaS) for business. If it is in the cloud, you will find it here.
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SEO In The Real World
Posted on June 22nd, 2009 No commentsYou know you may have a problem when you see something when driving and think "Wow. That’s a good example of search engine optimization." You are certain that you have a problem when you then take a photo of said location and blog about it.
The photo:
I apologize for the quality of the image. It was rainy, I was using my iPhone and I was in a moving car. Not the optimal conditions.
I saw the location as a web site, and the entrance you see here is their home page. The other entrance is right by the white car you can see underneath the sign. That’s a landing page.
Here’s what we see on the home page:
- Vegetables Flowers and Plants- This is their page headline, and they’re using an <H1> tag around it.
- Northshore Flower Exchange- This is their page title and the name of the site
- Plants and Flowers- This is their subheadline. They believe that the majority of people searching for what they offer use the words "Vegetables flowers & plants", but know that some people search for just "plants and flowers", leaving out vegetables all together.
On the landing page they have the same sign as #1. It feels like a landing page, as you can’t actually get into the parking lot there. You have to follow the call to action and drive around to get in. I’m reasonably certain that if they had a third road-facing side, they would have another large sign that says "Plants and Flowers". You know, for A/B testing purposes.
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Marketing Profs B-to-B Forum 2009
Posted on June 8th, 2009 No comments
Happy Monday.The good people over at MarketingProfs were kind enough to give yours truly a press pass for the 2009 Marketing Profs Business-to-Business Forum here in Boston. So I’ll be checking out all the sessions today and will be covering them on a few of my blogs: Blogstring.com, MarketingStartups.com, and BtoBSaaS.com.
The sessions I think I’ll be checking out:
9:00 am- 10:15 am- Bringing SEO In-House Without Missing a Beat
10:15- I’ll be running out to my car to feed the meter so I don’t get a ticket (fingers crossed)
10:45- 12:00- Developing Robust Online Content To Keep Prospects and Customers Engaged
1:45- 3:00- Make Every Investment Count: The Measure of Marketing
3:30-4:45- Putting Measurements into Action to Improve Leads, Conversions and ROI
After that, looks like there’s a cocktail thing and a dinner, which should be excellent.
I’ve decided to shy away from the Social Media types of sessions, as I’ve been to LOTS of them lately. So, if you’re here, be sure to say hello.
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Collective Intelligence And SaaS- Learning From The Community While Keeping Your Data Anonymous
Posted on June 3rd, 2009 No commentsI just read an excellent article on Cloud Ave entitled "The Cat is Out of the Bag (Again): The Hidden (?) Business Model in SaaS" which covers one of the truly unique (yet almost never talked about) benefits of SaaS: the ability to benchmark against aggregate community data.
While the article talks about community data in the context of companies that are going to sell anonymous aggregate community data, it does a good job at pointing out the benefits of benchmarking against live data:
Benchmarking has long been a lucrative business, practiced by research firms like Forrester, Hoovers, Dunn and Bradstreet, as well as specialized shops like the Hackett group - none of which were affordable to small businesses. More importantly, all previous benchmarking efforts were hampered by the quality of source data, which, with systems behind firewalls was at least questionable. Now that SaaS providers have access to the most authentic data ever, they can aggregate and process it, producing the most reliable industry metrics and benchmarking.
and
Now clearly there’s a whole world of difference between selling aggregate customer data to advertisers, benchmarking, or sharing transactional data within your supply chain, but let’s now focus on what’s common in all these cases: new business models emerge, not simply representing additional revenue sources for the SaaS vendors, but also enabling them to deliver enhanced services to their customers, services that were simply not possible in the previous, behind-the-firewall fragmented data model.
Yes, this raises a number of serious questions: How far can SaaS vendors go? What are the security / confidentiality / privacy implications? Are they reselling data, or services based on data that the customer owns in the first place? If the customer owned the core data, who owns the aggregate? And just what is “aggregate enough” and “anonym enough”? The industry needs to address these issues as a first step towards a paradigm-shift: while current concerns about SaaS mostly focus on the security, privacy, and consequently isolation of business data, eventually a culture of controlled sharing for business benefits should develop.
Those couple of paragraphs make some great points about using community data for benchmarking purposes:
- Before now, small and mid-sized businesses simply couldn’t afford to pay for expensive research firms to give them "benchmarking"
- Even if they could, the quality of source data is questionable
- SaaS providers now have access to real, live data. The article uses the word "authentic" and I think that’s right on
The last paragraph brings up the point of data ownership and privacy/confidentiality, which is incredibly important. It calls into question notions of trust and security, both issues that absolutely have to be addressed by any SaaS vendor that features benchmarking based on live data. And when a SaaS company can ensure that the data displayed in benchmarking contains nothing that can identify any customer or company….well…..just imagine how awesome that will be.
Just picture it…..imagine being able to compare your data environment against others to find out
- If you’re paying too much for storage
- If you have a similar distribution of file types
- If your usage patterns are normal or out of whack
- If your security policies are as good as others
The list goes on and on. Hmmmm. I wonder if there’s a company out there building something like this.
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Weathering the IT Budget Storm of 2009
Posted on June 1st, 2009 No commentsI believe this may be the understatement of the century, but hey, I’ll go for it anyway: IT Budgets are not increasing this year. Yup, I know. Really stepped out on a limb there and took a chance, now didn’t I? With budgets in nearly every business unit being cut, it is no surprise that companies are trying to cut back on any new spending - even when it comes to mission-critical IT expenditures. And with mid-market IT managers expected to perfiorm miracles daily in order to keep everything running smoothly, how are they expected to maintain the same level of awesomeness with a smaller budget? Well, here are a few ways for IT pros to maximize their current environment.
First, let me take a few steps away from conjecture. Rather than just taking my word for it, let’s look at some real numbers on IT Budgets. Just today, IDC put out a report that IT spending will decline by 1.8% in 2009. That’s the bad news. The good news is that:
Declining information technology (IT) spending by clients will bottom out in 2009 and will experience marginal growth in 2010, market research and advisory firm IDC has said. Global IT spending is expected to grow 2.9% in 2010 before nearly doubling to 5.7% in 2012.
Okay, so if IDC is right, 2009 will be a year of doing the most with what you’ve got, while 2002-2012 should be a lot better froim an IT Budgeting perspective. So what can you do to maximize your current environment? Well, I’m glad I pretended you asked.
1. Save Money On Network Storage- All right, that’s an easy one, right? No? In theory, it should be fairly simple to figure out how to save some valuable dough on network storage. Some ideas:
- Find Old Files- Find out which old files can be archived, moved or deleted and get them off your network
- Find Files That Shouldn’t Be There- You’ve probably got files on your network that shouldn’t be there in the first place. We’re talking about MP3s, Movies, Family Photos and more. Your users shouldn’t be using your expensive network storage as their own personal entertainment center/ photo album.
- Find Out What Users/Groups are taking up the most space- Understanding the owners of data can help you with chargebacks or at least it can help you find the right size for their needs.
2. Find Out What Others Are Doing- How does your IT spending compare with others in your industry? What’s your storage and management cost per GB, and how does it compare with companies of similar size with similar retention and archiving policies?
3. Take a Look At SaaS/Cloud Offerings- Sure, I’m a little bit biased here, but you owe it to yourself to see if there are SaaS-based solutions that can both save you money and alleviate some of the burden of your IT staff.
Well, that’s just a start. I’d love to hear you other suggestions on ways to keep costs low to keep within a declining budget.
Nathan Burke is the marketing manager at Aprigo, a Waltham, MA-based startup developing online data management tools for IT Managers. To learn more about the company, go to the Aprigo site, or to sign up to be notified when Aprigo launches, click here.
