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After launching eCrowds in a beta incubation stage just over a year ago, we've gained valuable insight from those organizations, including our own, using the product to manage their web content and B2B web communities. As 2009 draws to a close, we're getting ready to kick off some exciting new development work to the eCrowds SaaS content and community management system in the New Year.

If you currently use or have interest in using the eCrowds system and have suggestions for the product, we request you submit your ideas via our idea exchange. Your feedback is critical in shaping the development of the system and we will continue to actively incorporate user ideas into the eCrowds product in 2010.

The eCrowds system provides a taxonomy-based architecture model that allows you to add and remove sections of your site with the click of a mouse. We advise using a logical, hierarchical structure when creating your site taxonomy. To do so:

1. Login to the eCrowds system at http://go.ecrowds.com
2. Enter your user credentials
3. Click "Components" in the left navigation and select "Taxonomies"
4. To create a new taxonomy, click "Create new taxonomy"
5. Start by logically naming your taxonomy. While right now you may only have one main portion of your site, you may later decide to add additional sites and subsites to accommodate your growing needs. Name your taxonomy with a specific and intuitive name.
6. The "Empty" region should already be highlighted. Click "Edit Selected" or Fill in a name and click "Add Category."

The base of your site taxonomy should also be named logically and refer to the site its managing. If this taxonomy you're setting up is for your main website, naming your base level something like Home, or CompanyA-Home is advised.

7. Add sections and subsections stemming from your home level to demonstrate the actual intended structure of your website.

For example, maybe your site is going to have top-level navigation items or headers, with sub-pages within each (as is the case with most web sites). Each of these main "headings" should be their own top level entries in your site's taxonomy. 

8. Within each taxonomy category, add sub-categories that will represent the drilled-down pages and categories in each of your main taxonomy categories.

Let's say under services, you have Service A, Service B, and Service C. The products portion of your taxonomy should look like this:

You can edit any taxonomy category at any time and are even able to customize what content types each section of your site indexes. For example, you may want the "blog" section of your site to only index blog posts and not other page types. With eCrowds, you are able to determine what content is indexed where at the taxonomy-level.

For more information and suggestions about setting up your site taxonomy with eCrowds please visit our "Taxonomy Best Practices" article.

We've recently been exploring some of the key practical applications and functionality that comes out of the box with eCrowds. In keeping with this theme, one purpose for which the eCrowds SaaS content, community, and SEO management application is frequently used, is to manage product knowledge bases.

With a taxonomy based architecture for websites managed in the system, eCrowds makes it easy to add new sections to your knowledge base. For example, let's say you organize everything in your KB by user level. Maybe your knowledge base has an end-user section to and another section for developers. If you decide to add section with information for web designers, building our your site taxonomy is a breeze with a simple point and click addition of a new category to the site. Users are able to add an unlimited number of categories and sub-categories for a completely scalable site creation process.

More importantly than the ability to scale out your knowledge base as your product grows, is the inherently social set of features that come with eCrowds. Users are able to rate content on a scale of one to five stars, tag content with keywords, add comments to documentation, thumbs up/down content, and create some of their own in areas that you provide access for community members.

The best part is, you as a power user get to determine which of these features community users have access to. So whether you're looking for the fastest, most scalable way to manage your knowledge base website, or, are looking for a socially collaborative way to make your documentation resources more effective, eCrowds can provide the functionality you're looking for. Even better? It's free, so try it today.

Everything these days is about efficiency. More and more when asking the question "who is successful?" it's likely the same answer given in response to "who can do the most with the least (and the fastest)?" While your competition may be lacking the insight needed to know which system can best manage their website, at the lowest cost, with the fastest implementation, you're no longer in the dark. The answer is eCrowds.

Aside from the fact that it's free and developed by trusted and established vendor, Hannon Hill Corp., it's also a hosted content and community management solution that's so easy to use that in less than a day, even my mom could get up and running with eCrowds.

When you sign up for an eCrowds account, right out-of-the-box and without any work on your part, you get newly created website populated with an idea exchange, forum, and blog. Adding new content such as pages is as simple from clicking "Create" on the live site itself. We also provided you with Getting Started documentation that helps you maximize your use of the eCrowds WCM system with ease.

If desired, templates can be created and manipulated visually without code and you can add completely new sections to your site and navigational elements with only a few clicks of a mouse. If you're having trouble believing a web content and community management system could be this fast and easy, you can try it for yourself, for free.

More importantly, if when trying out the eCrowds system you have suggestions for the product, please contribute to our idea exchange. eCrowds is currently in its beta incubation phase, and we are actively incorporating user feedback into the system. Make your job of managing your website and community easier by signing up for your free eCrowds account today.

Many of our current eCrowds users are familiar with the idea exchange functionality provided by the system. However, there are inevitably those that overlook the innate brand/reputation management benefits of using an idea exchange.

With an idea exchange, such as the one (powered by eCrowds) seen below, your users can visibly share feedback and ideas on your products or services on your own website.



This provides several benefits:

• added quality content and keywords added by your user-base to your site for increased SEO
• added visibility and understanding into client wants/needs
• more fluidity in your road-mapping process

However, the most notable benefit, and the one most often overlooked, is the ability to take this feedback and respond to it! If one of your customers suggests an idea and you end up implementing it, be proactive and respond to inform them. This lets them know that your company is taking their feedback into account and builds credibility and transparency from you as a vendor. In turn, your client base will inevitably continue to contribute ideas to your site with the hopes that more of their ideas will be incorporated into your product of service.

Just another valuable benefit of using one of the many free eCrowds features.

In our last blog post, we outlined some basic ways users can maximize their reach and influence using Twitter. However, in addition to following industry experts, engaging in conversation, using eCrowds' automatic Twitter tweet functionality, and tweeting content of value to your constituents, analyzing growth in your Twitter clout is equally as important.

Below we've outlined several important key performance indicators to measure and several services that you can use along with your eCrowds efforts to further maximize your social influence.

1. Track growth in your followers and evaluate key ratios - for example, if your following grows substantially as you follow more people, you may already be tweeting content effectively and just need to maximize visibility.
2. Track the number of times your business name, product name, and brand-unique hashtags are used. A good service to track hashtag and brand presence is http://www.tweetvolume.com/
3. Use end-user friendly Twitter analytics services, such as TwitterAnalyzer, which allows you to track volume of tweets, readers reached, and retweets.
4. Use a service to track how often links in your Twitter tweets are clicked. For example, we like StumbleUpon's Su.pr. There are a variety of options out here, here's a great blog post exploring some of them.
5. Keep track of lost followers and when you lose them. To do so, you can simply follow http://www.twitter.com/tless and you will receive a weekly update with lost follower statistics.

Twitter has admittedly taken the social networking world by storm. Parents, celebrities, vendors, and consumers alike are using Twitter to stay in touch via the site's quick microblogging functionality. So how can your organization leverage Twitter's obvious power and influence to your advantage?

As a business, you likely provide a good or service to your market. While product and service updates are an important part of keeping constituents and prospects informed, they are not enough. So, in addition to the automatic Twitter tweet functionality provided with the eCrowds system, we've enumerated several ways in which you can add to your existing Twitter presence to further engage your audience:

1. Follow interesting people that are relevant to your industry - not only does this add visibility by having an additional presence in someone's "followers" list, but it also keeps you informed on trends and breaking news in your industry.
2. Have conversations with these interesting people - back and forth interaction had with someone like @jowyang, for example, makes your name visible to his thousands of followers, and at the same time, you are able to gain valuable insight from an industry professional.
3. Tweet information that you think your followers will find interesting or valuable. Chances are if you find it compelling, they will too, and here's yet another opportunity for added visibility if/when they retweet you.
4. Retweet (RT) tidbits of information from those you follow that would benefit your own followers. This ties into the point above-- if you find it interesting, they probably will too.
   
5. Keep tweets as concise as possible - you may think the 140 character limit is concise enough, but if you don't allow character room to be retweeted, your content loses the potential for viewing by anyone other than those already following you. Allow enough room for "RT @yourtwitternamehere" before your content to avoid this issue.
   

This is just the start to a potentially infinite list. Choosing to adopt some of the practices above will allow you to better engage your Twitter audience and will result in more followers and added visibility. Leave us comments to let us know how it goes! Or better yet, contact us on Twitter!

Because we're currently offering eCrowds completely free of charge as part of our beta soft-launch, it is our goal to elicit as much user feedback as possible during this critical phase of shaping the product. There are an endless number of ways our SaaS content, community, and SEO management system can be used by B2B organizations. Many are powering their corporate intranets, success communities, and websites with the eCrowds system. While the uses are broad, there are specific features included in eCrowds that make it the ideal system for managing a corporate community subsite.

We're looking for insight into what you see as the biggest benefit from using eCrowds thus far. Let us know what eCrowds features you use most, what you like and what you don't. We'll be sure to take all of your feedback into account when making future developments to the product.

Please take just a few short minutes of your time and let us know what your organization is accomplishing with eCrowds and what you'd like to accomplish in the future by giving us feedback on eCrowds.

We've read several blogs recently attempting to address the future of Social CMS.  A common theme among them is the thought-provoking question of whether or not CMS vendors will respond to the surge in social networking by "bolting on" social features to existing enterprise CMS products or offer community platforms with CMS features. And, what will be the deciding factor?

As makers of eCrowds, a SaaS content management and community application, we find these questions to be particularly interesting.  eCrowds was initially developed as more of a white-label social networking platform and over time, with help from our users, we realized our product had more to offer as a content management system that incorporated community elements.

However, eCrowds is a product that cannot necessarily be pigeon-holed as one or the other. While many vendors offer products that fit nicely into either the CMS category or the white-label community management category, eCrowds stands out as one that offers the best of both worlds -- the ability to easily create a fully functional website while incorporating community features such as forums, comments, and rating functionality.

And, the deciding factor for which direction vendors will take? As with most trends, the consumers will lead the way and the vendors will follow suit to develop a product that fits user desires. This is something we already have experience with at eCrowds.  We are a company that listens to our users and truly embodies the spirit of community collaboration, and we are interested to see where you will lead us.

When discussing search engine optimization (SEO), external links and PageRank are likely frequently brought up. Not as frequently discussed, but of equal importance for effective SEO, are your sites internal links.

While it's true that linkbacks from external sites to your own are highly valued in the algorithms of search engines, so too are those links from your own site. Search engines such as Google are frequently indexing and crawling web content to improve the relevancy and usefulness of organic search results. During this process, each link to your site is seen as a "vote" for the page to which the link directs. Therefore, if a page on your site has a Google PageRank of 3, when a another site's page with a PageRank higher than your own links back to that page, its PageRank will be boosted by such a link.

However, just as Google counts these inbound external links as votes for your site's pages, your own site's links or "votes" for itself are equally as important. As we discussed in a recent SEO blog post, much of your site's PageRank status can be inherited and dispersed throughout your site's hierarchical ladder. Therefore, if your homepage has a Google PageRank of 7, and important, but less frequently visited pages on your site such as the "About Us" page have a lesser PageRank, you can boost the PageRank of these pages' by linking to and from them from your homepage.

With eCrowds, inserting internal links couldn't be easier. When editing or creating a page, simply highlight the text from which you'd like to link (remember-- link anchor text and it's relevancy to your site and linked content is critical), and click the "insert link" button. After doing so, you are presented with a pop-up screen that will allow you to immediately select which content to link to by giving you filters for module types (page, file, etc.) and object name.

Once you select an object, i.e "5 Benefits of B2B Success Communities" page in the example above, the "Link Location" will be pre-populated for you with a search-engine-friendly URL created from the page title.

Just click insert link, and it's that easy! Adding internal links wherever you desire takes a matter of seconds using eCrowds. Furthermore, you can use eCrowds menus and queries to automatically ensure your site maintains a strong level of internal links. Sign-up for your free eCrowds account today and see for yourself.