Do you want to make your web site more engaging?

I was meeting with the CMO of a large e-commerce company yesterday talking about the use of social networking approaches for existing web sites. He echoed what he felt was most compelling about Ringside’s plans:

“If you go to any person responsible for a major web site and ask them if they want to find a way to make their web site more engaging to their users and create better ways to lead new users to their site, they will all say ‘YES!’. And it is obvious that making social applications a part of the web site will do just that.”

Of course being in the e-commerce business he needs to see proof and an ROI on the promise of increased user engagement and virality with the big social networks. Right now this company is dipping their toe in the water by opening up their own web services to allow affiliates to build applications in the large social networks – thus driving traffic and sales towards them.

Later this week and into next week I plan on doing a series of blogs about the benefits of social applications for existing web sites, and then look at some of the financial trade-offs of investing in your own web site versus spending money on advertising. Basically, does it make sense to make your own web site better by using social networking approaches?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ringside Winding Down

A year ago, a group of us met in a pizza parlor to discuss how we could bring the social web to every website and business. In January, we launched Ringside Networks with seed funding from Matrix Partners, one of the best VC firms in the country. By the end of March we released into open source an initial beta of our Social Application Server – a very ambitious project. We got some very positive reviews on our approach, our implementation and the need in the marketplace for every website to become social. We were ready for our Series A round of funding, and in late May we received a number of term sheet offers from the very best VC firms. As we were about to finalize our funding, one of the biggest non-evil Internet companies asked if we would have interest in being acquired instead. After a lot of thought and debate, we decided that the larger company would enable us to get our technology to market sooner and with more impact. The story sounds almost too good to be true. And it w
Read more

Facebook Open Sources Platform

I just got a call from Ami Vora of Facebook, who has corrected me on following the advice of this other article - http://ostatic.com/163756-blog/cpalss-whats-thatss#rss . Apparently the CPAL only applies to open sourcing the files that are changed. So if a class is extended, or the database access logic is put into an API call, then that gets open sourced under the CPAL as well. Facebook’s use of the CPAL open source license is a step in the right direction. We love the fact that the community is required to donate changes back to the open source project. This is the reason we use the LGPL at Ringside. The downside of the CPAL is the requirement to give attribution. This means a little Facebook badge comes up on all websites that use the Facebook software. This makes sense from a Facebook perspective because it helps them to build their brand in return for donating their software. On the other hand, if every open source project required this, then there would be nothing on web p
Read more

CRM Version 6 – This time for Races

Image
I’ve been lucky to use CRM in various ways over the past 35 years. The RunSignUp implementation is the 6 th major implementation of CRM I’ve been involved with over the years. From the beginning, RunSignUp has implemented many of the key concepts of CRM so that races can maximize customer satisfaction and retention and lower costs of customer support – all with the goal of engaging their various communities to maximize the impact of their race. Right now, we are consolidating our various features of Participant Management, Marketing Automation, and central consolidated database to bring a comprehensive set of CRM benefits to races. It might be interesting to see my personal journey and compare how CRM has matured over the years. 1.      1987 - Digital Equipment Sales Tracking. I did a side project to help the District Sales Manager and her 50+ sales people do a better job of tracking their prospects and sales. This was back in the days of Act!, which was built on PC’s,
Read more