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As a leading SaaS content, community, and SEO management system, eCrowds incorporates tons of social media tools for creating the most effective B2B Web site and Web community possible. Because we operate in the B2B space and our solution incorporates social tools, we often discuss and evaluate the role social media is playing in the world of B2B Web communication and how it differs from the B2C realm.

Over the past few years, we've all seen the immense increase in use of social media on B2C web sites like Amazon.com, and its success in use of features like personal ratings and testimonials in developing a trustworthy community around the site. But B2C sites are targeting a different crowd. Selling t-shirts to an individual is very different from selling enterprise software, for example, to an established technology corporation.

While the use of social media on B2B and B2C sites is often intended to serve similar purposes, the audiences and respective approaches to target these audiences in the B2B and B2C Web marketing worlds differ in several key ways:

• B2B Web communities and their use of social media should be aimed, first and foremost, at specific and well-defined business objectives, not increasing site traffic.

• B2B Web communities are used to educate site users, customers, and prospects and to facilitate the continual growth of relevant content/resources that serve this educational purpose. While the same is true in some ways for B2C web communities, the aim with use of social media on sites like Amazon.com is less on providing a central realm for product education, and more for the inclusion of inline product reviews that will help persuade the consumer to make an immediate purchase.
  

• Employees of B2B companies are encouraged to participate in their organization's community, whereas individuals at B2C corporations rarely utilize social media tools to communicate with community members directly.

• B2B Web communities will include product and company feedback, ideas, discussions, wikis, and forums, all aimed at expanding resources around a product, service, or company, whereas B2C communities will advertise, discuss, and feature a plethora of items for sale.

• B2B communities will make much of their site's content viewable to the public, but will also include product or service information specific to customers that is only viewable and editable by selected authenticated site users. Depending on how and with what solution the B2B Web community is powered, there are often sections of these communities that are permission-enabled and can only be collaborated on by relevant members (usually existing customers or users of a product/service), adding further value and insight to the community.

• B2B community members expect to find useful resources within their community, whereas B2C site users know and expect they're being marketed to.
  

• Use of social media on B2B sites provide a mechanism for sustainable (and later searchable) communications. I.e. - most B2B community sites feature interactions back and forth between companies, users, and community members. However, because the communities in the B2B realm are more often used for growing broad resources and site content, there is a need for area-specific search functionality, such as the ability to search a user forum, or look for a specific word in comments across the site. (Chances are if you run a search for "Troubleshooting" on Amazon.com, you're going to find books for sale with Troubleshooting in the title). If you search a B2B community for the same, and you'll find forum posts, ideas, discussions, and comments all aimed at this topic.

There are clear differences in the needs, goals, and participants of B2B vs. B2C Web communities. When embarking on the process of building your organization's B2B community and deciding how it's managed and configured, consider the specific business objectives your community will seek to address before deciding what solution and features to incorporate.

If you've read some of the content on our site, you've likely noticed that we describe eCrowds as the hosted one-stop-shop for social content, community, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) management. After debuting just 7 months ago, eCrowds.com (powered by eCrowds), garnered a Google PageRank of 6. As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding. So perhaps you should call eCrowds instant pudding.

While there have been countless articles attempting to define Google's algorithm for PageRank, there are a few forces that have consistently played a role in the PageRank calculations. There are also those that will continue to be ever-changing, fairly ambiguous, and undefined. What we do know for certain, is that linkbacks from other sites, which Google looks at as "votes" for the site to which they're linking, have always been a predominant factor in affecting a site's PageRank.

However, your site's architecture, layout, and design all have an affect on PageRank, and this is where eCrowds has proven to be profoundly powerful. The eCrowds taxonomy system allows you to set up a visual hierarchy of your site's structure. Doing so results in an increased concentration of pages linked from your homepage (since that's where the content stems from). Concentrating links in this manner typically results in a higher homepage (main site) PageRank.

As an example, let's say an external site is linking to your site's Company page, and your Company page is linking to your homepage. The PageRank of your Company page is increased by the external site's link to it, and in turn, your homepage PageRank is increased based on the increase in PageRank of your Company page. In essence, a portion of PageRanks can be inherited up your site's hierarchical ladder.

If there are pages that you know belong on your site, but are of less importance than an "About Us" page, for example, placing those pages further down the architectural ladder will ultimately give their designated PageRanks less weight in affecting your site's homepage rank. In essence, using a hierarchical site structure like the system provided with eCrowds allows you to strategically place more "important" pages towards the top of your site's ladder.

Additionally, eCrowds makes it seamless and easy to incorporate links (both external and internal) into your page and site content. Finding a link balance is important in maintaining a strong PageRank. Balancing internal links with external ones helps preserve some of the PageRank influence being passed around your site, rather than letting it all escape to external resources.

Lastly, the sitemap and RSS feed functionality provided by eCrowds is one more treat to sweeten this instant SEO pudding pie. While a sitemap won't directly impact your page rankings, sitemaps make search engines like Google aware of pages on your site that they may have otherwise never known existed. Using a sitemap is a great way to get started with demonstrating to search engines what pages your site contains.

It's no secret that given the current economic climate, many companies are having to cut costs in a variety of ways. While every corporation has its wish list of items to budget and plan for in upcoming fiscal periods, managing and enhancing your organizational web presence may not be at the top of the list. However, with the growing marketing of low cost and completely free SaaS (Software as a Service) CMS products out there, we figured now would be a good time to highlight some of the inherent benefits of going SaaS with your site. Taking on a CMS implementation with a hosted product may not be as difficult as you think, nor nearly as expensive.

With the SaaS model, users know exactly what they're paying for now. Gone are the days of the initial down payment and subsequent unexpected costs coming up. No need for servers, or an extra IT team, expensive implementations, or test instances; with a product like eCrowds, you don't have to download anything, and you can try it for free for the remainder of the year.

With most hosted products, users are able to utilize the system at a flat monthly fee with no down payment and no cumbersome installs. Often times, as is the case with eCrowds, vendors are offering newer SaaS products completely free of charge to gain powerful insight from users and gauge their likes, dislikes, wants and needs in a system.

An additional item to consider when it comes to cost predictability, is the SaaS model's ability to eliminate the need for R&D, consulting, and implementation expenses. Let vendors do the research for you, and take advantage of the ability to get to the point - your web site! As we mentioned above and in a recent blog post, we're offering eCrowds free of charge in 2009. Take advantage of this opportunity to host and manage your site for free this year, and with the added social tools included with eCrowds, begin developing your online community while you do so!

Launched in the Winter of 2008, Hannon Hill's Cascade Server Success Community now serves as the go-to resource for users of Hannon Hill's CMS, Cascade Server. Hannon Hill's CMS users are able to visit the Success Community site, and post new ideas for the product, get support requests answered on the forum, and comment, discuss, and rate the site's Cascade Server resources, all via eCrowds' functionality.

Prior to launching the Success Community, clients of Hannon Hill filed support requests via the JIRA ticketing system.  "JIRA worked/works well for us, and we still use the system," notes Client Advocate at Hannon Hill, Chris Armistead. "The problem with using only JIRA though, was that it limited a lot of our end-user base from contributing their ideas and making our support team aware of issues they were facing. The Cascade Server Success Community, which is powered by eCrowds, has enabled us to facilitate a collaborative community of users around our product. We've found that our users are more and more often visiting the Success Community to provide us with feedback and get their questions answered. The community tools that are used on the site have been an invlaluable resource to our team."

eCrowds has afforded Cascade users and the Hannon Hill team alike valuable insight into the needs, wants, and uses of Cascade Server. Signing up for the Success Community is free to any Cascade user who wants to join and Hannon Hill encourages it's end-users especially to use the Success Community as a place to interact with other users and the Hannon Hill staff. "We look forward to the continued growth of this community," Armistead continues, "since it's launch, we've seen prolific growth in the community's use, and I have believe that a lot of that growth and continued use is due to the ease of use provided by eCrowds. Giving our clients an easy way to vote ideas up and down, share their own, and seek feedback, has proven to help our users help themselves."