Una startup que combina con la novicia rebelde...

Quilters And Sewers: The Key To Startup Craftsy's Unfettered Growth

Jewelry Making and Cake Decorating.
Quilting, Gardening and Spinning and Weaving.
Knitting and Sewing some beautiful strings.
These are a few of my favorite things.

- A new take on “My Favorite Things,” Sound Of Music 

Craftsy, an online education platform, offers interactive classes in all the categories in my Sound Of Music mashup above plus more. Since the site launched in July 2011, they’ve already managed to attract over 500,000 class enrollments (paying an average of $26.50 per class) and are projected to hit over 750,000 class enrollments by the end of 2012. Craftsy’s most popular class is a quilting course, which has almost 100,000 students. The site is currently on track to become larger than the University ofPhoenix, which is considered to be one of the largest online educators.

Craftsy has one major advantage over other online educators: demographics. Almost all of its users are women and 80% of their users are over the age of 40. Most users live in the suburbs or rural areas, with over 50% of users spending more than ten hours a week crafting. The makeup of their userbase is not that of a standard Silicon Valley or New York startup.

This makes sense, considering that the Craftsy team works out of Denver, an off-the-beaten-track tech hub in the U.S. The team has built their business through very traditional marketing and advertising in trades and other decidedly low-tech venues like sewing conferences. And most important, they are going after an underserved but very large market. For instance, there are 21M quilters in the U.S. who spend approximately $3.6 billion annually, and there are 26M sewists (yes, a real word) and they spend $2.7 billion in total annually. Craftsy is the first site of its kind, and the first platform to bring these old-school, localized industries online.

I had the opportunity to connect with the founders of Craftsy, two former eBay execs, John Levisay andJosh Scott, to ask them a few questions.

Alex Taub (AT): Where do you see your business going in the next 12 months? What are emerging classes?
Craftsy Founders (CF): We are producing 15 new 4-6 hour classes per month, and will continue to ramp up production in order to produce more than 250 new classes in 2013.  Many of these new classes will expand our offerings in existing course categories, including quilting, knitting, crocheting, sewing, cake decorating, jewelry making, and cooking. We will also add classes in a number of new categories over the course of the next 12 months.

AT: Any plans to take the classes offline?
CF: Many of our instructors offer terrific offline classes, in addition to the classes they teach online via Craftsy. We will continue to work with them to promote their offline class offerings. We will also continue to have a significant presence at local trade shows and conferences in the categories we cover, like the International Quilt Festival.

AT: Why has Craftsy been so successful with the female demographic? Any plans to expand to classes geared towards men?
CF: Our core demographic has been traditionally underserved by technology companies, which ordinarily skew towards men. Our audience is affluent, well-educated, and technology savvy, and we look forward to continuing to focus on meeting their educational needs.  Our current courses are geared towards women, but we are considering creating classes which are more male-focused in the future.

AT: Where do you think the future of education is going?
CF: We think the future of education centers around accessibility. High-quality educational experiences have, for too long, been exclusively available to those with money, time, and a specific geographic location.  We look forward to continuing to create superior educational content that’s easily accessible to more people, at more times, in more places.

AT: What’s the most interesting thing about Craftsy that hasn’t been spoken about publicly?
CF: Craftsy members are not only passionate about their crafts, they are also passionate about giving. We are kicking off a holiday charity event this week where we are asking Craftsy members to knit hats for homeless children. Last year, when our community was much smaller, we collected over 3,000 handmade hats.

AT: Where do you see yourselves compared to other education startups?
CF: Craftsy stands apart from other education start-ups in two fundamental ways:

1. For students, Craftsy offers:

• Access to an interactive learning experience. Craftsy’s unique platform captures the magic of a live class experience, and discussions and interaction are seamlessly woven into the learning experience. If you have a question while watching a video lesson, simply click the “ask a question” button on the screen. Your video will pause and the question you ask (which can include a photo if helpful) will be associated with that exact time point in the play of the video. You will receive an email notification when the instructor or classmates respond to your question; typically you will receive multiple responses within 24 hours.  This integrated Q & A creates a virtuous loop of contextually-relevant interaction that makes the content more robust over time. When other students view that same time point in the video lesson, they will see your question appear contextually on their screen, and will see the ongoing threaded discussion in response to your question, so their experience will be enhanced as well.
• Access to the world’s best instructors. Craftsy aims to democratize access to distinguished teachers who are well-respected and lauded in their fields. Within each of our categories, we seek out and work with the best instructors from around the world. Our instructional design team collaborates with each instructor to design a compelling class that will deliver a great learning experience. We bring the instructor into our studios and our full-time, professional production team films the class in a several day, multi-camera, HD shoot. Our editing team then creates an in-depth lesson out of the raw footage, adding motion graphics and other supporting material where helpful.  The result is a high-quality, effective class experience.  The focus on consistent quality enables students to trust the experience they will receive from Craftsy, and save the time they would otherwise spend digging through inconsistent online offerings.
• Classes that are available for students to enjoy on their own schedule and in the comfort of their own homes. Craftsy classes are available anytime, and students can access courses as many times as they want, for as long as they want since access never expires.
• In addition to the aforementioned benefits, the Craftsy online education platform enables students to easily take and review notes while watching a class, show the projects they create as a result of what they have learned, loop over important sections until they are mastered, access closed captioning of the video lessons, and search the text of the videos and discussions to easily access and review relevant moments.

2. For instructors, Craftsy offers:

• Scalability: Craftsy classes attract thousands of students, far more than an instructor could ever manage to interact with in a live classroom setting. The Craftsy platform makes it easy to teach and interact with a large student base.
• Ease: Craftsy instructors are experts in their domain, but not necessarily experts in technology development, video production, or online marketing, so we handle all of that for them. All Craftsy instructors need to do is what they do best, teach a great class. The Craftsy team handles the rest, including production of the online courses.
• Income: Craftsy is a significant source of income for our instructors, with several earning over $100K per year.

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Como puede un emprendimiento evaluar el tamaño de mercado

How can a startup company best evaluate market size and find the market data?

Often times investors wants to know market and industry potential and stats of the startup product, how can startups best find and present these informatin?

In this blog post, my aim is to solve two common problems for startups.

1.      What is your total market potential?

2.      How much of that market can/will you capture?

Although it may be impossible to answer these questions accurately, you can use a data-driven, bottom up, and logical approach to help answer these questions in a way that will satisfy potential investors and bankers.
Calculating Market Potential – Example
I want to start by giving you a few tips and tools that you can use to help calculate your total market potential, and then I want to show you a real example of how I calculated the market potential for a product I created for this blog.

1.      Industry Reports – Depending on your market, it may be that a market research firm has already done this work for you.  Don’t make things hard on yourself, if you sell dog food try Googling “Size of Dog Food Industry.”  When I did this I found www.petfoodindustry.com which told me that by 2015 the global pet food industry should reach $56.4 billion.  I am certain that their extensive report will break down the industry by type of pet, so you would be able to find the market potential for the dog food industry.

2.      Competing Websites – This does not work for every industry, but for many industries I think this will be a good data point to use when determining the market potential.  Go to www.compete.com and search for your competitors websites.  If their websites are getting significant traffic you should be able to see an estimate of their traffic.  If you know that your competitor has 100,000 website visitors per month, at least you know that the market potential for your website is at least 100,000.

3.      Google Adwords Keyword Tool - Finally, I would suggest that you use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to determine how many searches related to your market take place on Google each month.  The data that Google provides through this keyword tool gives marketers no excuse for building a product or service that no one wants, because Google users are telling you exactly what they want through search data.

Now let me show you exactly how I determined the market potential for a product that I released on my blog called the Executive Summary Toolkit.

First, there are no industry reports that show what total market is for business plan executive summary resources, and there are not any other websites that compete specifically for executive summary related keywords only.  There are a number of business plan websites that compete with me.  Based on the Compete.com data on Bplans.com they receive over 160,000 visits per month.  This gives some idea of the scale of the potential market.  Bplans is the leader in business plan software, templates, examples, and advice, so this number helps me know that my market is probably not 10 million visitors per month, but it is also more than a couple thousand visitors per month.

Determine Market Potential with Google Keyword Tool

Now armed with info from Compete.com on my major competitors, I use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find out how many searches occur every month related to executive summaries.

So I used the keyword tool and typed in “executive summary” this gave me the monthly search traffic for that keyword, along with search traffic for dozens of related keyword phrases.  I picked the top 14 relevant keyword phrases, and then added a 15th line item for “All Other Relevant Keyword Phrases”  I listed those keyword phrases and their corresponding monthly traffic estimates.

I added all of this traffic together and came up with a total of 724,620.  Now this is NOT your market potential yet.  There are a number of considerations to include first.

1.      This is only Google search data.  Google dominates the search engine market in many geographic locations, but there is still a healthy 33% or more that do not use Google as a search engine.  So I would simply multiply that Total Search Traffic Number by 1.33.  In my example, that gives us 963,744 as the new total search traffic number.

2.      Now I want to propose for this specific situation that at least one half of these searches are the same person searching more than once, and gradually refining their search terms.  So a user may start with a general search for “Executive Summary”, but what they really want is an “Executive Summary Example Template.”  So your market potential is actually smaller than that total number because each search does not equate to exactly one person searching.  Make sense?  SO… now I am going to cut that Total Monthly Searches number in half, which brings it down to 481,872.

3.      Lastly, I want to point out that there could be potential customers that are not searching for your product or service.  Some businesses are primarily social, so you might generate a majority of your website traffic through Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.  Check out your competitors, are they active in social media?  For me, I know that historically, 25% of my website visitors come from sources other than search engines.  So for the purpose of this example, I am going to multiply 481,872 by 1.25.  Now we end with a market potential of 602,340.

4.      The last consideration is how many of these potential visitors will actually pay for something?  Again this is going to vary by industry, pricing, product quality, etc.  Unless you have some historic data you are going to have to guess here.  I would suggest a LOW number. I know that approximately 1.25% of my website visitors will purchase an Executive Summary Toolkit.  If that is a characteristic of the market as a whole, then I can take 1.25% times 602,340 which gives me 7,529 potential buyers.  If I multiply that by the purchase price of the executive summary toolkit which is $4 and multiply by 12 months I end up with a total annual market potential of – $361,400.

I think we have come up with a data-driven market potential for my executive summary toolkit product, but unfortunately I can not expect to capture the entire market.  Some of you might be working in industries that have a total market potential of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, so now the question is how do you project the market share that you can capture?

How to Calculate Potential Market Share

I am going to continue with my example, and ultimately come up with, what I hope is a realistic financial projection for my Executive Summary Toolkit.  In order to do this I am going to take a few steps back and start with our total potential visitors which amounted to 602,340 per month.  We can break this big number down with click through rate data.  As you know, there are 10 search results displayed on the front page of Google, but every searcher does not click on all 10 search results.  Thankfully, Slingshot SEO put together a great report that outlined the click through rate for a search result in each of the top 10 positions on Google.  See the table on the right.

So based on your search position the potential market share that you can capture changes.  For most search phrases your website will not show up more than once in the top 1o results, so the maximum click through rate you should expect is 18.2% if you were in the top search position.

As a startup, it takes time to get your website to rank for the keywords that you want to rank well for, so in the first 6 to 12 months of business your traffic may come entirely from sources other than search engines.

Once you start to rank in the top 10 results for some of your keywords, you can better calculate your market potential by simply applying the click through rate percentages to each keyword phrase.  For example we can look at a few of the keyword phrases that I rank well for in Google:

·        Executive Summary Example – Rank 7 – Total Searches 49,500 – CTR for Rank 7 = 1.9%

·        Executive Summary Format – Rank 9 – Total Searches 6,600 – CTR for Rank 9 = 1.5%

·        Example of Executive Summary – Rank 8 – Total Searches 1,000 – CTR for Rank 8 = 1.7%

With some simple math you can determine how many visits you should receive from each keyword phrase.  Rather than bore you by doing this for every single one of my keyword phrases, I am going to simply utilize the data that Google Webmaster Tools provides me.  For the last month Google Webmaster Tools tells me that my website has showed up in search results 250,000 times, and I have received 12,000 clicks.

Now that I have an estimate for how many people will actually visit my website, I can apply my 1.25% sales conversion rate to my 12,000 visitors per month.  This gives me 150 purchasers per month times $4 sales price times 12 months and I end up with $7,200.  Finally this equates to 1.9% of the total market potential that we calculated above.

After going through this entire process you can now say confidently that your startup plans to capture X percentage of the total market.  Rather than simply pulling a number out of thin air, you can truly use a bottom-up, data-driven approach that will put you ahead of your peers when you present your startup to potential investors or bankers.


Quora

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Publicidad por Gmail

If You Want To Be Awesome At Emails, Add Yesware To Your Gmail Today

One of the biggest problems in business development, partnerships, and sales is managing your pipeline. A close second is managing, tracking, and keep up to date with your email inbox. I’ve tried many tools to help both issues but each has had its shortcomings. About a week ago a friend tipped me off to a company called Yesware, a tool for salespeople that tracks emails, create templates, CRM sync, and more. With his endorsement I immediately added it to my business and personal Gmail accounts.

My inbox was transformed into a hyper-aware entity. As my day commenced I started to realize that I was getting smarter by the minute. That really important email I sent in the morning to a team member was still sitting in their inbox, unopened. I decided to head over to their desk to talk about the important matter I had emailed them about. Efficient, smart, and useful. I’ve only been a user for a week, but I’ve already upgraded to a paid account.

Yesware was founded in 2010 by Matthew Bellows (CEO and photo above),Cashman Andrus (CTO) and serial entrepreneur Rajat Bhargava, who sits on their board. In April 2012, Yesware raised a Series A of $4M from IDG Ventures and Golden Venture Partners (alongside Google GOOG +0.42% Ventures and Foundry Group that participated in their $1M seed round in 2011). During this time, the Yesware staff has grown to 17 employees, and users have increased from 5,000 to more than 120,000+. There are also a few high quality customers using Yesware, including: Groupon GRPN +0.59%, GoodData, Xactly, HubSpot, Brightcove BCOV +4.11%, Adroll, Demandforce, and Cloud Sherpas.

After playing around with the tool, I sent my praise to the Twitter-sphere and connected with the CEO, Matthew Bellows. I had a chance to ask Bellows a few questions about his business, the future of sales, and other tools to help you become awesome at business development/sales/partnerships.

Alex Taub (AT): Where do you think the future of sales is going?
Matthew Bellows (MB): Sales is at the start of a quiet revolution. It’s being driven by several factors: the broader availability of information, a more aggressive lean-forward approach to purchasing, higher expectations for enterprise quality software experiences, and more process-driven tactics to running sales teams. When customer behavior, customer expectation, and internal management processes are all in flux, it’s a very interesting time to be in sales. As a meditation teacher once said,  ”Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.”

AT: What is the most interesting thing you’ve learned since starting Yesware?
MB: As a salesperson, I started Yesware thinking that my ability to sell was going to be a defining factor in our success. In fact, our board members really had to hold me back from selling in the early days. They knew, and taught me, that before the product was actually ready, it’s counter-productive to sell. I wrote a blog post about the experiencehere). Overall, the role of the product, especially in the enterprise world, has gotten more and more important. In the old days, a great sales and marketing organization could make up for a mediocre product. That’s changing now, and traditional enterprise companies are struggling because of it. I think that’s one thing plaguingMicrosoft MSFT +0.74%. So I’ve learned that product is central to marketing and central to selling, as well as central to the customer experience. That’s a big shift from how B2B companies traditionally operate.

AT: Where does mobile fit into your roadmap?
MB: We get asked this question every day, and it’s always on my mind. In the long term, Yesware will be everywhere a salesperson is. If you are working on email, Yesware is there for you now. If you are making phone calls, Yesware should be there for you. If you are on the road, Yesware should be there to help you close more deals.

The thing is, we’re a small team delivering an enterprise-grade product to almost 150,000 salespeople all over the world. We’ve bitten off a lot by integrating Gmail and Salesforce, helping salespeople close while exposing customer response data to their teams. So we haven’t gotten to mobile yet. But we will. I promise.

AT: What other tools do you recommend for sales/bd/partnership people to use to be more successful?
MB: I’m a big fan of Mobile Day which makes conference calls so much better. I love PrepWorkwhich emails you primers on the people you are meeting with later in the day. I’m fascinated about sales compensation (I interviewed Dan Pink about ithere. Xactly has a great product for mapping innovative approaches to that thorny topic.

Speaking of Dan Pink, his book is great for everyone interested in sales. It’s called “To Sell is Human.” He takes modern social science and applies it to sales in a refreshing, human, and motivating way.

AT: What are you focused on in 2013? What is important for you guys?
MB: We’ve done a decent job of making Yesware helpful for salespeople, and we need to do more of that, but in 2013 we really need to improve how we help sales managers. Teams are more collaborative, and sales management has changed a great deal from the old carrot-and-stick methods. This year you’ll see Yesware help managers help their teams be more successful.

AT: You talked about how a B2B product has to really be ready before you start to sell. Isn’t that counter to the “Lean Startup” method that’s so popular now? How do you know if your product is ready?”
MB: Great question. No, seriously, there is a big emphasis in the startup literature about “ship early and often” and “if you aren’t embarrassed by your product, you waited too long to ship” I agree with both of those sentiments actually, but they pertain more to product development than they do to sales. Ship early, and be embarrassed, but before you build a sales function, make sure your product supports a scalable sales effort. I wrote about this in an article called “You’re Not Ready for a Sales Hire.”

The way to know that your B2B product is ready for a dedicated sales effort is by inbound interest. Seriously. You should have customers emailing you, calling you, sending you meeting invites, because they want to talk about how to buy your product. Before that happens, don’t spend a dime on marketing or selling. Focus exclusively on improving the product experience. Once you start getting inbound interest, then you can start to sell.

Update: If you are looking for a solution for Outlook, check out Toutapp.

Forbes

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Aplicaciones para recorrer de nuevo la ciudad de Buenos Aires

Cómo redescubrir una ciudad con la ayuda de Internet

Varios servicios online para encontrar los puntos de interés, salidas, restaurantes y bares en Buenos Aires y el resto de las grandes ciudades de todo el mundo

Por Guillermo Tomoyose  | LA NACION

La sensación siempre es la misma al llegar a un nuevo destino, sea por cuestiones laborales, profesionales o por simple placer: la frustración de no haber descubierto una nueva experiencia en una ciudad desconocida, más allá de los lugares emblemáticos y puntos de interés que toda guía turística tiene. En ese sentido, los recursos on line se vuelven un aliado indispensable para planificar un recorrido para aprovechar de la mejor forma el poco tiempo disponible.

Existen diversos sitios que ayudan, de una forma u otra, a elegir un hospedaje, comprar un pasaje o descubrir los puntos más destacados de un destino. TripAdvisor, SkyScanner o AirBnBson sólo algunos de los recursos preferidos de los viajeros. No obstante, si un turista desea conocer Buenos Aires más allá del Obelisco, La Boca o los clásicos espectáculos de tango, las recomendaciones en Internet suelen ser difusas, a veces contradictorias y poco claras.

UNA GUÍA CON ACENTO LOCAL PARA AVENTUREROS

Recorrer las calles y descubrir bares o teatros como cualquier residente local fue una de las motivaciones que tuvo Darja Gutnick, fundadora y CEO de citibuddies , un sitio de recomendaciones personalizadas basada en los perfiles de los usuarios presentado en la demostración de emprendimientos de la aceleradora NXTPLabs en las jornadas de la Red Innova.

 

Rusa de nacimiento y viajera por elección, Gutnick padeció los problemas que enfrentaba en cada uno de sus nuevos destinos al momento de planificar sus salidas en China, Alemania, Holanda y ahora en Buenos Aires. "Sentía que me estab perdiendo de oportunidades y salidas", agrega la creadora de citibuddies.

Además de ofrecer propuestas en las clásicas categorías como cine, teatro y música, citibuddies brinda a los usuarios la posibilidad de descubrir eventos más específicos, tales como fiestas de música electrónica, teatro stand-up y eventos nocturnos. Está disponible para Buenos Aires, Rosario y con un plan de expansión que busca extenderse a otras 30 ciudades en todo el mundo.

"No generamos contenidos, sino que curamos la información disponible y nos proponemos conectar a las partes interesadas: los interesados y los organizadores", explica Gutnick. "Nuestro fuerte es la oferta de actividades nocturnas en las ciudades, como aquellos recitales que se encuentran fuera de los grandes circuitos. También nos enfocamos en las salidas gastronómicas, pero con un perfil diferente, con aquellas propuestas en el estilo de restaurantes a puertas cerradas".

ENTRE LA GASTRONOMÍA, RECOMENDACIONES Y DISPOSITIVOS MÓVILES

 

Además de los sitios emblemáticos como el Obelisco en Buenos Aires, los servicios on line permiten descubrir más sitios y lugares de interés que escapan a la oferta turística habitual. Foto: LA NACION / Ezequiel Muñoz

Las grandes ciudades son, de forma habitual, las ubicaciones que suelen tener un mayor detalle en las plataformas on line, y Buenos Aires no es la excepción. Hay recursos locales que permiten canalizar en un único sitio las propuestas locales, y la Guía LA NACION (http://guia.lanacion.com.ar/ ) es una de ellas, al combinar un servicio de mapas con la localización de los restaurantes, bares, cines, teatro y recitales. Asimismo, el catálogo se encuentra integrado a la ofertas de descuentos de la tarjeta del Club LA NACION.

Para ser más específicos en cuanto a la gastronomía, una muy buena alternativa es Guía Óleo (http://www.guiaoleo.com.ar/ ), una plataforma que dispone de un detallado sistema de calificaciones de los diversos restaurantes de Buenos Aires, clasificados por zonas y tipo de cocina. Los comentarios y aportes de su comunidad de usuarios contribuyó a posicionar al sitio como uno de los referentes del segmento.

Por su parte, Google no podía estar ausente en el mundo de las consultas on line, y cuenta con el servicio Lugares (Places) , un sistema de guía basada en aporte de los usuarios y curado por un equipo de especialistas. Asimismo, los contenidos se encuentran complementados con las observaciones realizadas por Zagat, una plataforma que la compañía adquirió en 2009 para potenciar las recomendaciones de tiendas o restaurantes.

Con propuestas más consolidadas en el tiempo y con un catálogo más global se encuentra Yelp , una guía que resume las recomendaciones aportadas por los usuarios, con comentarios y calificaciones de lugares para ir a tomar un café, cenar o almorzar, museos y bares, entre muchas otras actividades.

En los dispositivos móviles, Foursquare es una alternativa más que interesante a la hora de encontrar qué actividad se encuentra cerca para definir una salida, con una búsqueda basada en el servicio de geoposicionamiento de la aplicación.

Con un poco de tiempo y planificación, los servicios de mapas digitales y los diversos servicios on line serán un aliado indispensable para recorrer la ciudad como un lugareño. O también para redescubrir nuestra propias calles como si fueramos turistas, sin tener la necesitad de llevar la mochila, la botella de agua y unas ojotas en pleno invierno porteño..

¿Cómo utilizás Internet para guiarte en una ciudad desconocida? ¿Cuáles fueron tus experiencias? Compartí tus anécdotas en los comentarios de la nota

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Academia de programadores para la nube de Google

Codecademy for the cloud: Google’s new Cloud Playground is pure genius
Venture Beat 

The biggest challenges with adopting a new platform are unfamiliarity, uncertainty, and switching costs. Which is exactly why Google’s new Cloud Playground is a perfect way to get serious about tempting developers to switch from Amazon or Microsoft’s clouds.

Or to start developing in the cloud for the first time.

In literally two clicks, you can start a development project in the cloud, see its code, and start playing with an app on Google’s App Engine, Compute Engine, or Datastore. That’s exactly what I just did:

John Koetsier

A quick “hello world” guestbook app in Google Cloud Playground

Sometimes you just want to dip your toes in, Google says, or try out some sample code. It’s impractical to go first through all the steps of installing the App Engine SDK, setting up an account, adding payment credentials if needed, and setting up an entire development environment. And by the time you’re finished, you’ve lost your motivation to try the code you just wanted to test.

Google’s new Cloud Playground destroys all those excuses to not try the cloud.

You can start with sample projects that Google has already created, or you can clone open source App Engine projects in Python from Github. Either way, you’ll looking at sample code and projects in seconds. Play with the variables, add a few lines of code, change some strings, and then the magic happens.

Simply click the green arrow button to watch your code execute on Google’s cloud platform, and see the results live in real-time in your browser window. Essentially, it’s like Codecademy for the cloud, Google App Engine for idiots, or cloud-enabled applications development for newbies.

John Koetsier

Plenty of projects to copy and test

There are two major opportunities for Google here.

First, Google will find it much easier to get developers to consider its cloud services even when they’re already using Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or other cloud providers’ environments. It’s super-easy to give Google’s cloud a quick test-drive. That alone won’t drive migration decisions, but the toe in the door is a time-honored sales tactic for a reason: it works.

Second, Google is appealing to a massive cohort of developers and companies who are not yet using the cloud to build and deploy applications. With Cloud Playground, they now have no reason not to take a few minutes, an hour, or a day to play, and learn, and get a sense of what their apps would do in the cloud.

It’s just too easy to not give it a shot.

After years of yeah-it’s-there-but-so-what, Google is pushing its cloud solutions hard, adding PHP support for the five million PHP programmersaround the world, and cutting prices by up to 25 percent to push Amazon on cost.

This new move is likely to open up the floodgates for cloud novices to try — and maybe buy — cloud computing services.

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Los medios sociales como B2B

How B2B's Can Leverage Their 140-Character Tweets

WhiteSpace

Twitter presence can be a powerful part of your business' social media marketing strategy. Used successfully, Twitter can provide tremendous results, both for brand awareness and for driving leads. However, I'm betting that most B2B marketers (and that may include you) are struggling with either how to use Twitter effectively or how to optimize their approach.

 

According to a survey conducted by Social Media Examiner , earlier this spring, the survey asked more than 3,800 marketers where they focus their social media activities, how much time they invest and what the rewards are for doing so. Although their report claims that 82% of B2B companies are using Twitter for marketing purposes, I'll bet that a vast majority of B2B's are really working to incorporate the channel into their marketing strategy.   

Adopting a proper Twitter strategy will help you realize the hidden benefits of using such a platform for your business. So, if you're looking to move beyond the occasional tweet, and are ready to take full advantage of Twitter as a marketing tool, here are some helpful tips to get you started.

1) Create great content and share it
Any inbound marketer today will endorse the fact that 'content is still king'. In fact content marketing is at the core of most B2B marketing programs. Marketers with the most successful sites specifically design content to draw buyers into the sales cycle. For many business-to-business sales, the cycle may involve many steps and multiple buyer personas, and may take months or even years to complete. That means that prospects must be nurtured over time through the decison cycle. To nurture leads, you will often create a series of relevant content pieces, such as blogs, whitepapers and webinars.

Twitter provides a great way to distribute that content, such as your blogs and other articles, links, and short comments that appeal to the interest of your target audience. And why not take advantage of that tweet, linking it back to a landing page to download or receive an offer. If the content on your site is truly remarkable, people may start tweeting about it on their own and sharing your resouces to their followers on Twitter. And, that's how you grow!

2) Monitor activity
Monitor your brand on Twitter. Either go to the Connect tab on your Twitter navigation, sign up for email updates, or use a software  like what HubSpot offers to help you monitor all activity. If you find someone tweeting about your products or a person who is looking for a solution that your product provides, let him or her know!

3) Use Favorites to your advantage
Use the Twitter "Favorites" feature as a list of company testimonials. When you hover your mouse over an individual tweet in your Twitter stream, a few options appear, including the option to "Favorite" the tweet.

When you click the little star that appears, it turns yellow, and that tweet gets added to your "Favorites" tab. As you track what people are saying about your company in Twitter Search, add the positive tweet to your Favorites. Public, third-party testimonials are valuable validations of your company. The next time someone asks about your company, send them the link to your Favorites page!

4) Promote events
Use Twitter to promote events, webinars, fundraisers, and campaigns. The next time your company holds such an event, tweet about it! One best practice is to send people directly to an event sign-up page. Think of a hashtag for your event or webinar before you start tweeting about it.

5) Share expertise
Establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. By tweeting about useful resources and thoughtful tips, you and your company will eventually be considered an expert in that particular subject. Be sure to link to your own resouces as well as others.

6) Employ external tools
Twitter monitoring and participating sounds like a whole lot of work, but it doesn't have to be. Use third-party tools to ease the process! At WhiteSpace we use Hootsuite  to help us plan and execute our tweets on a regular basis. Actually, you may have found this blog through one of our tweets.

7) Experiment with Twitter advertising
Use Promoted Tweets  to amplify your message with targeting options on Twitter and across mobile devices to reach the right person, in the right place, at the right time. Twitter offers several paid advertising options; Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends, Promoted Accounts, but I'd say the most effective of which is the promoted tweet. Promoted Tweets targeted to search terms appear at the top of the results page. Since more people see these tweets, more people will click on them and thus become part of your prospect pool.

Have you been using Twitter with success? Let me know how your business has been able to leverage Twitter for your business.

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