Today one of our twitter peers asked us how she could find people of influence for a given region. As I researched the question and solution I found that there is actually a name for what is probably the end-game for this exercise:

Influencer marketing- is a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers.

As I will demonstrate it is possible, using some freely available analytics tools, to narrow the list of influencers. However, as our own Social Network sage Matt Thomson pointed out, the analytics tools fall short in becoming truly useful and further click-based research is really needed to establish credible, influencers who may become evangelists.

Continue reading Find your ideal customer evangelists

Over the last month or so I have been busy assessing various hosting providers for our product. The host is a technical partner who is responsible for ensuring our products are always running and safe from illegitimate access.

In the past, and even today, a hosting company managed hundreds to thousands of servers and when a new customer wanted to go online the customer deduce what size server is needed or whether they can share a server with other customers. That arrangement works well but it can be expensive and it does not scale very well so what else is there? The alternative is a new type of hosting environment: Cloud computing.

Continue reading Putting the Cloud to Work for our Customers