The big Hadoop news of the week is that Oracle has partnered with Cloudera to bring their Hadoop expertise to Oracle’s Big Data Appliance. As Computer World notes the prevailing wisdom had been that Oracle would put together their own distribution, and it may seem surprising that the world’s largest database vendor would use someone else’s database software. The next year will certainly be interesting – is this a try before you buy move for Oracle? Or is it rinse and repeat of what they did with RedHat; partner first, then try to take them out?
Anyway, the net of all of this for Quest and Toad for Cloud Databases is positive. Quest users want to be assured that Toad has them covered whatever the database landscape looks like and however it changes. We brought our product to market early, and have broad support for the Hadoop ecosystem with HBase and Hive support, as well as having partnered with Cloudera in 2010 on the Quest Data Connector for Oracle and Hadoop , a high-speed data connector to move data between Oracle and Hadoop that unlike Oracle’s Hadoop loader enables you to move data in both directions. We also have support for other systems – Cassandra, MongoDB, Amazon, and Microsoft SQL Azure and Azure Table Services. In 2012 we’ll be adding support for Oracle’s noSQL database and a couple of others that I’ll write about as our roadmap gets firmed up.

It’s been a fast, furious and fascinating year since we first launched Toad for Cloud Databases just over a year ago. The noSQL landscape continues to evolve, with Hadoop already finding its place in the enterprise. In the development and start-up community 10Gen’s MongoDB continues its rapid adoption – its document-oriented approach designed with development agility in mind. We’re proud to now offer SQL support in Toad for Cloud databases for MongoDB. Download it, give it a whirl, and post feedback and questions to the forums.

This vblog (above) helps to describe the difference between ‘branding’ and ‘positioning’…they’re the same thing right? Nope.

Sometimes when they begin an engagement with a customer, they initially want us want to dive straight into the branding of their business. More often than not when beginning these discussions, we and our customers find that the positioning of their business is muddying the branding exercise. When this happens we almost always find ourselves analyzing and tightening up their business positioning (and occasionally we even start from square one). This is always a valuable lesson for our customers as they quickly understand that you cannot identify your brand until you understand your positioning.

So…what’s the difference between positioning and branding? Well, we can start by briefly describing positioning and then branding. Positioning is how your business clearly articulates to your target market the unique value that your products or services bring to solve their pains. Branding is how to get your potential customers to view your business as the only thing that can uniquely address their pains.

If you haven’t already, check out our vblog above where we cover this topic as well as offer a visual example of the difference between positioning and branding. And to learn more about positioning, check out our entry on…what else? positioning!

Thanks!

Hello! We’re going to be posting short video blog posts that describe the service offerings that we provide. First up, as the title indicates, is ‘positioning’. I don’t think we can overstate how important clarity in your positioning is for the success of your business. Whether already established or starting up, a thorough positioning exercise is invaluable as it will either confirm the way you see your business provides value – or – help define it.

The best part of this video? You get to see 2 Blokes in it!

We’re in the midst of a website upgrade for 2BlokesMarketing. Now we have real customers we need a real website and our generic wordpress site isn’t cutting it any longer (if ever it did). Andy and I have been discussing usability, navigability, layout and design. About three months ago we worked with a SQL Server training and consulting firm called SQLskills. The first thing we did was to look at the website, and it was really tough going, finding content, learning about their offerings, and really understanding what their differentiators were. We thought that they would need a new website for sure.

As we worked with Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal, the husband and wife dynamic duo that power the company, on their positioning, solution offerings, and differentiators, it became apparent that what they needed wasn’t a new website. After all a new website would simply recreate the current site with a new backend, design and branding. No, what they needed was a simplified website.

Some tips to remember when laying out your website:

1.) You are a user of websites – how do you navigate? This is a valid data point – granted you’ll want to solicit more opinions than just your own, but it is a good starting point.

2.) Don’t provide too many options to users or they’ll get confused. Help your users find where to go next.

3.) What kind of a company are you? A user should be able to visit your site and within a couple of seconds know whether or not they are on the right site.

4.) Use sidebar to highlight extra information that is useful for your site visitors – in this case, Paul and Kimberly’s blogs contain a ton of information, and are the most visited aspects of the site.

So before you contract with a new web designer to build you the prettiest site around ask yourself – do I need a new site, or do I need to make my current site more appealing and easier to use?

A “call to action” is the crucial element of any promotion you may be running, whether it’s an email blast, landing page, site element, etc. You’re probably wondering “oh my gosh Andy, why, why why??? Well, it’s the single most important action that you want your end user to take, so you really need to make sure that your call to action elicits just that – ACTION!

You're compelled to click him!

Whether your conversion goal is to a get a trial download, contact, sign up, buy, or whatever – you need to ask for it and your path to action needs to be very clear. In this post we’ll specifically discuss the topic of a call to action on a web page.

A common issue with placing calls to action is losing track of the following mantra “less is more, but less than one is dumb” – I’m like Yoda! What I mean is:
1) don’t clutter up your page with a bunch of buttons or links because it’s confusing, probably ugly and users will lose interest.
2) make sure you actually have a call to action, otherwise you’re doing yourself no good and if it’s on a web page your bounce rate/exit rate will probably be pretty high, no bueno.
3) I’m small and green and wise.

Some best practices for setting up a call to action is:
1) to make sure that it is placed in the more valuable part of your web page. The top left area of the page is prime, otherwise, place your call directly in the middle of the page.
2) make sure users understand why they should click. Describe the value (in brief) of what the user will receive if they comply with your call to action like “Get a free copy of our ebook when you register now” or “Free beer when you click to sign up for our mailing list”.

I’d like to take a second to expand (read: pontificate) on the importance of having a clear call to action and offer a metaphor. A clear call to action reminds me so much of my previous life in sales. The difference between a short-term sales person and a long-term sales person is the long-term sales persons ability to ask for business, their call to action if you will. Both should know the messaging of what they’re trying to sell, but the one that can clearly and simply ask for the business is the one that will succeed. Your call to action is your way of asking for business. A user that clicks your call to action is putting themselves through your qualification funnel and gets you that much closer to a sale, or whatever your success metric is – but you have to ask for it.

Hope this is useful, and as always feel free to comment.

Cheers!

Traditionally dairy products such as milk, cheese, yoghurt were not part of Thai culture and cuisine. The ‘milk’ role being primarily fulfilled through coconut milk. Now however, dairy products are enjoying unprecedented growth in the country, and can be found on street vendor carts, in supermarkets, restaurants, and specialty milk bars.

The graph below shows the rapid pace of dairy imports/exports since first introduced in 1971:

I think of this example every time we consider entering a new market with a new product. There are a couple of key takeaways:

1.) Entering a new market is very possible even when the marketing challenge involves changing an entire culture.

2.) It can take a while to do it right. Slow yields stickier results than fast.

We’re preparing to take a new personal BI product to market in the crowded but growing Business Intelligence space. In this market our target audience is the business user, a very different persona than the IT professional that we know well. So how do we go about achieving success? By the way, it’s not like we’ve been given a blank check for our marketing efforts; we’re compiling a guerrilla marketing plan.

- Product positioning is fundamental to this endeavor; who you are targeting, what your unique differentiators are, and what story you tell. Know your competition – what do they do well, where are their weaknesses, what do you do differently. If you can be mentioned alongside a major competitor in a new space then half the battle is won.

- Slow and steady wins the race. Don’t blow your budget in one fling, or if you don’t have budget don’t make an initial splash and fail to build on it. If you have some credibility already going slowly and steadily allows you to build upon it. If you don’t have any credibility in the space then you need to build it from scratch and that can only happen slowly and steadily.

It’s an ongoing mystery for our employer – “How do we convert users of our freeware products to paying customers???”. Any business that offers a free product is hoping to get these folks that use the freebie to see the value in the pay for product and do just that – pay for it (“the first one’s free”, remember?). The pay for, or commercial, product has two critical differences between it and the freeware version:

• it has more capabilities/functionality
• it costs money

So…the variables that dissuade a freeware user from being a customer are whether the freeware does what the user needs and/or the commercial version is too expensive. (If you see similarities between this freeware scenario and a “freemium” model, congratulations, they’re very similar.)

Anyway, what does this have to do with landing pages? Well, we’re going to try to crack the mystery of what will get freeware users to become paying customers via a landing page experiment. Our freeware products, when launched, contain a browser window that displays a web page that is currently a site homepage (www.ToadWorld.com). This is absolutely NOT a landing page; and, therefore does not really provide users with action items which will give us any real understanding of their buying behavior…if there is any “buying” to observe.

Our experiment? Create two landing pages and see which one causes more users to convert from freeware to commercial. Hopefully the conversions come fast and furious because that’s how things work right?? Suuuuuuure. (A quick note on landing pages and best practices that we subscribe to, 1) they should be minimal but with targeted messaging, 2) the call to action should be clear and prominent. Remember, the basic goal of a landing page is to direct, or steer a user to the action that you would like for them to take.)

The first landing page will focus on the users who are staying freeware users due to the price barrier. With this landing page we’ll have short messaging, a simple “buy the commercial version” call to action that includes a considerable online discount for the commercial product; and, a “No Thanks” button. The metric we will measure here is sales of the commercial version from the freeware version…our sales funnel will be short.

The second landing page will display rotating product videos that cover some of the most common use cases of our commercial users (using functionality not in freeware, of course) and a call to action to download a trial of the commercial version. The metric here are sales leads, which grows our sales funnel, but in theory should lead to better and more qualified sales. This is an experiment, so theorizing is part of the game.

Alright, so the next step is to get these pages created and let the fun begin. We’re in process with these, so when they’re finished we will post the links up for your viewing pleasure and critique, so stay tuned. Also, if you have any feedback thus far, we’d love to hear.

I know there are a ton of resources out there that cover landing page best practices, but here are a couple that are recent and applicable:

http://www.zingiri.com/5-landing-page-mistakes-that-crush-conversion-rates

http://www.landingpagewebdesign.com/great-landing-page-designs.html

In an effort to turn this blog into a proper website – which we’ve decided to do - had us discussing the branding of this site. (As much as we would like to keep the McKenzie brothers, I’m afraid that MGM might not be on board.) Initially, we thought to contract out the job, but then came across 99designs.com and thought – what a great experiment!

99designs is a site where graphic designers from all over the world compete for customer business (there are others, we just went with 99designs…). How do they do that? Well… prospective customers submit biz information and general specs for a logo and a cash “prize” for a winning design. Then the many designers who watch the site can submit their ideas for your design until you choose a winner. Whew.

One of the submissions we didn't like

We submitted our requirements and within a day started to receive submissions. Those that we liked we kept in the contest and those we didn’t we excluded. A number of designers were competing for the money we put up for the logo and initially we received a range of different looking proposals. When the particiants would see which designs we kept in the contest, then all submissions began to resemble said designs – and this accelerated our path to a winning design. A process that would have taken weeks (or longer) to do with finding, interviewing and selecting designers, then fielding a much more limited pool of options; and, the back and forth until finalizing a logo option, was accomplished in three days. That’s some productivity.

The overall experience was really interesting, fast and ultimately successful. It was great being able to use this method of offering our business and securing our design through many, many more potential “vendors” than we would otherwise have been able to.

Well, the design we wanted needed to be polished, but still convey a restrained playful/fun vibe – which is how we see ourselves. Oh, and we like the color blue. The designs that made it through used the concept of a child’s block and our business name. You can see it below and let us know what you think! Thanks (and our new website is on its way).

Remember when you were a kid and you’d hear yourself recorded on an answer machine or on someone’s old handycam? Remember how cringe-making that was? Errr…that’s how I feel watching this. GigaOm was an interesting show and it was great to get to meet so many new vendors trying to make a difference in the next wave of big data analytics. The next three years are going to be fascinating to watch.

Talking of ‘watch’. Watch videos with the sponsors below. Mine is the first one. Feel free to skip over it.