Mac Slocum, O’Reilly’s Online Managing Editor, recently interviewed Tami Dalley, director of user experience at ROI Labs, about her upcoming workshop at Web 2.0 Expo. The interview below has been cross posted from O’Reilly Radar.

Business-to-business (B2B) marketing overlaps with the business-to-consumer (B2C) world in a basic sense: Marketers targeting either realm are focused — at their core — on converting a customer base.

But that’s pretty much it for the similarities. B2B marketers can’t treat business customers like consumers, and they can’t (and shouldn’t) use consumer metrics to define online success.

Tami Dalley, director of user experience at ROI Labs, will dig into B2B marketing and its associated analytics in a workshop at next month’s Web 2.0 Expo in New York. Dalley discusses the best and worst online B2B metrics in the interview below.

Here’s a few of her conclusions:

– Dalley says it’s hard — sometimes impossible — to draw a straight line between online efforts and offline sales. That’s why B2B metrics should focus on engagement; things like lead generation forms, video views, and white paper downloads.

– The top movers metric is one of Dalley’s favorites because it reveals “trends even when they’re occurring outside of your normal focus area.” And “mover” goes both ways: pages and topics that drop precipitously offer important data points.

– Which metric should be ignored altogether? Total visits. Dalley says workplace distractions often stop users in their tracks. If a “time out” window expires, that same visitor gets counted twice. (No, that’s not a good thing.)

The full interview follows.

What are the most important online metrics for B2B?

Tami Dalley: If you’re struggling to get insight into your offline sales — or have pretty small online sales — then I’d suggest taking a looking at your “soft” conversion points. Submission of a lead generation form, video views, white paper downloads, engagement with click-to-chat features. Really, anything on your site that’s a measure of engagement. Continue Reading »

What happens when our products start talking back? Andrew Zolty of BREAKFAST will sit with Garrick Schmitt (Razorfish), Usman Haque (Pachube.com & Haque Design + Research),  Shiv Singh (PepsiCo Beverages), and Allison Mooney (MobileBehavior) at their Web 2.0 Expo session to discuss this somewhat recent phenomenon we’re  experiencing with things we own.

By using radio frequency identification (RFID), near field communications (NFC), electronic product codes (EPC) and Twitter and its API, developers and product designers are creating new interactions and relationships between people and objects. For example, there’s  BakerTweet, a system Zolty worked on, which allows bakers to dynamically send out tweets to customers alerting them when a fresh batch of buns have emerged from the oven. And another project of his, Precious - the bike with a brain, has given a new dimension to cycling.

Zolty recently answered some questions we had about his session, Web 3.0 (the Internet of Things), and the future of how we interact with talking lifeless objects. (Come see his session by registering now with 25% discount code webny10scm4 today.)

Kaitlin: The first thing I noticed in your session’s description was the phrase “Web 3.0,” mainly because I’m the Web 2.0 Expo community manager, and I’m concerned whether I should upgrade my title. How do you define Web 3.0 and have we fully advanced to that stage yet?

Zolty: I’ve spent a lot of time recently speaking to people about trying to de-techify tech in hope of allowing a wider audience to understand the nuances of what we talk about. With this in mind allow me to try to explain the Web via chapters rather than versions.

Chapter 1 – Knowledge In the beginning, our world was changed when we were given access to massive amounts of information that was not even close to being available just a few years prior. Continue Reading »

Why’d you need to tell the world about your perfectly cooked waffles? And does anyone want to know that your taxes were filed “just in time”? Most of us post a self-indulgent tweet or status update from time to time (or make fun of our friends for doing so). But “Share This!” author and Web 2.0 Expo New York speaker Deanna Zandt disagrees that the postings lack value.

“All of us sharing these little tidbits of our lives… is a really radical shift from what we’ve experienced before,” she said in a recent interview with us. “We’re able to infuse our values into those conversations and from there you start to create empathy and empathy is a very fundamental building block for any kind of social change.”

This relatively new way of community and relationship building has, as Deanna writes in her new book, shifted our cultural consciousness as to how we connect with others, including those outside our usual social circles. It’s also something she’ll be talking about at Web 2.0 Expo New York this September in her session The Free-for-All Web and the Secret Tyrants We All Are. (Come see it by registering now with 25% discount code webny10scm4 today.)

Deanna recently talked to us about her book, her session, and how the relationship between social media and social change has evolved. Listen to the full audio interview now.

Online Versus Offline Relationships

The importance of these online interactions shouldn’t be underestimated, Deanna said, just because they don’t take place face to face.

“I stopped a number of years ago saying ‘in real life’ to represent my offline life because I realized that – for me anyway – that my online life and my offline life are probably equally important to me at this point and have different but pretty equal value,” she said. “I value the networks that I belong to. I think we have to start thinking about it less as something that’s real versus not real and more as something that is just happening in difference spaces. And I think that we’re in this giant transitional moment where we don’t necessarily understand or can comprehend how we need to accomplish things…

“Certainly these tools shouldn’t be a replacement for any other kind of interaction or organizing if you’re political or anything else, but they can complement it; they can facilitate it… We’ve seen the power of Meetup, that’s always trotted out as the example, but I don’t think it can be underestimated the real drive that people have to connect with one another and to translate that into offline relationships.”

Continue Reading »

Today we’re announcing the list of participating companies in our first ever Startup Showcase at Web 2.0 Expo New York. These startups beat out submissions from a very, very large list of proposals. Thanks to everyone who applied!

If you’d like to see these companies demo at Startup Showcase, be sure to register today with discount code webny10scm4. All conference pass holders will have access to the Showcase, including those with our $175 Web 2.0 Expo Lite pass (which is even less expensive if you use the discount code). Without further ado, here’s the list:

• Aprizi
• Beebuzz
• CiviGuard, Inc.
• Credit Coach, Inc
• Diaspora
• Entrustet
• food52
• Glympse
• Honestly Inc.
• hour.ly
• HowAboutWe
• Itizen
• Lifesta
• MindSnacks
• Naama Networks

• NabeWise
• Ninite
• Outlier
• Parsely
• Roadify Inc.
• SaneBox
• SocialFlow
• Son of Zade
• Starling
• StorageByMail
• Tactical Information Systems
• Taskforce
• The Comet
• The Social Bicycle System

About Startup Showcase: Highlighting the startup ecosystem’s creativity and variety, the Showcase will give you a chance to see the newest Web 2.0 companies entering the market.

On Wednesday night, September 29, we’re going to have approximately 30 startups demoing in one large room. You’ll have 50 minutes to check them all out and vote for your favorites (we’ll sound a chime every five minutes, letting people know it’s time to circulate). At the end of the hour, Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media Inc.) and Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) will each announce their top pick along with the audience favorite. These three startups will then each give a pitch and have an on-stage conversation with Tim and Fred.

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

Register here with code webny10scm4 to save 25% on Web 2.0 Expo conference passes.

Mac Slocum, O’Reilly’s Online Managing Editor, recently interviewed CrowdFlower CEO Lukas Biewald about his upcoming keynote presentation at Web 2.0 Expo. The interview below has been cross posted from O’Reilly Radar.

Labor isn’t what it used to be. Where in past years the expectation was that jobs were done at a certain place and time, now there are entire swaths of work that can be accomplished by anyone, anywhere.

Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower and a speaker at next month’s Web 2.0 Expo in New York, is at the center of the labor shift. His company has found an interesting way to tap Internet-connected groups to get work done — think Mechanical Turk, but with additional tech and quality-assurance layers added on. What’s really surprising is that many of the groups CrowdFlower turns to would never define themselves as formal workforces.

Biewald covers a variety of topics in the full interview, including:

• He sees similarities between “labor on demand” and cloud computing: both keep costs down and reduce the risks associated with scale.
• “It’s hard to explain my business to my mother,” Biewald says. In the interview, he digs into CrowdFlower’s unusual — and somewhat complicated — business model.
• He provides further proof that virtual currency is a big deal: Around half of CrowdFlower’s work involves it in some fashion.
• He acknowledges that distributed work has a disruptive and negative affect on many businesses. However, Biewald believes it’s a “rising tide” that will “increase the GDP of the world.”

Mac: What is “labor on demand”?

Lukas: What labor on demand means to us is that you can access tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of people instantly. Truly instantly. You send us a job and we post it online through all of our different channels, and we get lots of people working on your job all at once. Or, we find the specific person that’s best for your job.

It’s exciting for businesses because they can scale up and scale down. Just as cloud computing made it so businesses didn’t have to predict how many servers they were going to need at any given time, labor on demand allows businesses to not have to predict how many people they’re going to need at any given minute.

Continue Reading »

Mac Slocum, O’Reilly’s Online Managing Editor, recently interviewed Fark.com’s Drew Curtis about his upcoming talk at Web 2.0 Expo, Why the Online Ad Model is Currently Broken, and How to Fix It. The interview below has been cross posted from O’Reilly Radar

Opinions about online advertising shift like the stock market. When things are bullish, ad folks are brimming with confidence and new networks pop up like weeds. But then the bears roll in and online advertising is sent to the scrap heap (or the grave yard, depending on your perspective).

Fark.com founder Drew Curtis, a speaker at next month’s Web 2.0 Expo in New York, hasn’t given up on advertising. The model still has juice, he says. It’s the pricing and the sales strategy that need to change.

In the following interview, Curtis outlines specific moves he believes will improve online ad sales. He also weighs in on the most useful online metrics and he explains why paywalls are “the kiss of death” for legacy media websites.

Mac: Why does the traditional print ad sales model not work online?

Drew: A number of reasons:

• Too much inventory.
• Financial desperation among legacy media companies, which brings prices down.

However the two most important reasons are:

• Accurate stats — We know how many impressions get served and how many people act on the ads. That has taught us that advertising is much less effective than previously thought. Some folks like to argue that it’s only Internet advertising that is (relatively) ineffective. Those people sell ads for a living.
• A change in how ads are served — Content on the Net is served a la carte. Legacy media is served in bulk. If no one reads a particular online article, then no ads are served. As opposed to magazines, where anyone who buys a magazine is presumed to have consumed all the ads in it. Or TV where everyone is presumed to never get up during commercials. This changes the overall available inventory numbers.

Continue Reading »

Our vision for Web 2.0 Expo NY looks like this: smart leaders, looking toward the future of the web, gather together in a lively venue to meet, exchange ideas,  and get a serious dose of inspiration. You make connections, you learn a lot, you have fun.

Here’s what Expo NY looked like last year: smart leaders, looking toward the future of the web, gathered in the vast lobby of the Javits Center and had a hard time finding our show at all. The Web 2.0 Expo signs were obscured by the much larger banners of a manufactured chemicals show that was in town the same week–and the conference portion of our show, in line with the Javits layout, was in the basement.

New York hosts not only a burgeoning tech startup scene, but also thousands of people who lead tech adoption in sectors like media, fashion, finance and the arts. Attendees of Web 2.0 Expo have repeatedly told us that they’re part of these groups, and they’re looking to our show to help them connect. So while Javits, like most expo halls, has acres of space designed to show off everything from  new cars to fancy packaged foods, it’s not an ideal place for the Web 2.0 community to meet.

This year, to better align the venue with our vision and our attendees’ needs, we’re moving to the Sheraton Hotel & Towers in midtown. It’s better suited to fostering the kinds of connections we care about and, excitingly, it lets us hold evening program onsite.

We’ve cooked up three great nights. On September 27, we’re bringing back an annual Expo favorite: Ignite, a fast-moving series of entertaining and enlightening presentations (with all-new speakers). On September 28, we’re hosting The Liar Show: four people tell outrageous tech stories–but only three are true. Grill the storytellers and guess which is fiction. On September 29, we’re holding Startup Showcase, in which 30 young companies demo their products, and you help pick three to join Tim O’Reilly and Fred Wilson for onstage pitch sessions. Of course, our evening events all include food and bevvies.

What else would you do with a conference-friendly hotel space?

[Cross-posted to O'Reilly Radar.]