Mario Fantauzzi's List: Web

• SaaS & hosted/managed platforms go mainstream. Increasingly online and multichannel retailers cut-to-the-quick and point out at the top of my conversations with them that “we are really only interested in something we do not need to support internally or host in any way.” While true SaaS products still leave some enterprise-class customers queasy, they are increasingly interested in looking at these offerings. And nearly all are open-to or motivated-to hosted/managed offerings. Look for incumbent software offerings to add hosted/managed and SaaS offerings to the portfolio and for business models to be tweaked all around to overcome obstacles in both traditional license and revenue-share models. We will be publishing a Wave report on the top 10 world-wide B2C eCommerce platforms very soon in January 2009.
• B2B eCommerce platform demand picks up. For years platform vendors have waited for the tsunami of B2B deals to come rolling in, and it really does make so much sense… efficiency, customer experience, CRM, globalization, multiplying channels, and traditional distribution channels under threat. Well, it is not a tsunami, but rather gravitational pull of another planet. Subtle but there. We will see demand for B2B eCommerce applications developing, and it will be lead but forward thinking organizations who are looking to do it right and who are not in any hurry. This is why, in this economy, it is going to build slowly. I will be covering B2B platform offerings with a market overview in Q2 2009
• Google Analytics picks up share, and the incumbents fight to retain customers. As we covered in July, nearly everyone is dissatisfied with their analytics package. Google Analytics has two advantages key to this theme, 1) it is simple and 2) it is free. As budgets come under pressure, and online retailers evaluate what is working and where they are spending their money it will be hard to justify the spend on analytics even if Google Analytics is limited in eCommerce-oriented capabilities.

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• Can Twitter actually help my business or is it a complete waste of my valuable time? This was the very question I asked myself only a few months back.

  • This is cool

• Here are all the templates, worksheets, and sample documents  we reference in our book, SEO:  An Hour A Day (2nd Edition)

• If you’re managing a community website, you need to surface that community on the website. Not only should you enable conversations, but you should highlight those conversations, and the people doing the talking. Show potential community members that you’re a website with real people having real conversations.
• • Have the community manager call out great conversation that occurred that day/week on his/her blog/newsletter and so on
   
  • Select a few conversations to be highlighted on the home page
   
  • Provide mechanisms that allow your community members to flag great content, and highlight that
   
  • Go semantic. Some sites have great metadata. If a forum message on the forum called “TopicX” is related to blogs on “TopicX”, and your community flags a message as 5 stars, how about highlighting that forum message in the side bar of blogs on that same topic?
   
  • Invest in MVP programs (Microsoft have an interesting MVP program)
• • Think about usability, about how people read websites
   
  • Provide some editorial. Have a community manager select great conversations, perhaps massage descriptions (to read better, shorter - not skew the message) and so on.

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• Social networks threaten advertising growth

  By Tim Bradshaw, Digital Media Correspondent

  Published: January 15 2009 01:41 | Last updated: January 15 2009 01:41

  Two-thirds of advertising agencies are not prepared for the industry changes prompted by social networks and new forms of digital media, a report has found.

  The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, which will publish the “Social Media Futures” report compiled by Future Foundation next week, has warned that advertising agencies face growth of just 1.2 per cent a year by 2016 if the industry fails to tackle the changes to the media created by sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

• The Citizen’s Briefing Book, powered by salesforce.com’s Ideas platform, is something that can and should be emulated by the public and private sectors.