The Challenge of Sending Email Simply

You need to send email. Usually, that’s a pretty simple task, so it’s not uncommon to find users who think that sending a monthly newsletter is more or less the same task as sending a quick note to a friend about going to see a movie. In fact, those two email use-cases are completely different animals. With all of the nuances inherent in sending and managing large volumes of email, a plethora of email marketing services are positioned to help users better navigate the email marketing waters. It’s tough to differentiate which features you might need and which features are just there to be a “Check” in a comparison checklist. ActiveCampaign set out to make the decision-making process simpler … We knew that we needed the standard features like auto-responder campaigns, metrics reports and email templates, but we also knew we had to differentiate our service in a meaningful way. So we focused on automation.

Too often, the “automation” provided by a platform can be very cumbersome to set up (if it’s available at all), and when it’s actually working, there’s little confirmation that actions are being performed as expected. In response, we were intentional about ActiveCampaign’s automation features being easy to set up and manage … If automation saves time and money, it shouldn’t be intimidatingly difficult to incorporate into your campaigns. Here is a screenshot of what it takes to incorporate automation in your email campaigns with ActiveCampaign:

No complicated logic. No unnecessary options. With a only a few clicks, you can select an action to spark a meaningful response in your system. If a subscriber in your Newsletter list clicks on a link, you might want to move that subscriber to a different list. Because you might want to send a different campaign to that user as well, we provide the ability to add multiple automated actions for each subscriber action, and it’s all very clear.

One of the subscriber actions that might stand out to you if you’ve used other email service providers (or ESPs) is the “When subscriber replies to a campaign” bullet. ActiveCampaign is the first ESP (that we’re aware of) to provide users the option to send a series of follow-up campaigns (or to restrict the sending of future campaigns) to subscribers who reply to a campaign email. Replies are tracked in your campaign reports, and you have deep visibility into how many people replied, who replied, and how many times they replied. With that information, you can segment those subscribers and create automated actions for them, and the end result is that you’re connecting with your subscriber base much more effectively because you’re able to target them better … And you don’t have to break your back to do it.

SoftLayer customers know how valuable automation can be in terms of infrastructure, so it should be no surprise that email marketing campaigns can benefit so much from automation as well. Lots of ESPs provide stats, and it’s up to you to figure out meaningful ways to use that information. ActiveCampaign goes a step beyond those other providers by helping you very simply engage your subscribers with relevant and intentional actions. If you’re interested in learning more, check us out at http://www.activecampaign.com.

-Peter Evans, ActiveCampaign

The Three Most Common PCI Compliance Myths

As a hosting provider that specializes in Oracle ATG Commerce, Spark::red has extensive experience and expertise when it comes to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). If you’re not familiar with PCI DSS, they are standards imposed on companies that process payment data, and they are designed to protect the company and its customers.

We’ve been helping online businesses maintain PCI Compliance for several years now, and in that time, we’ve encountered a great deal of confusion and misinformation when it comes to compliance. Despite numerous documents and articles available on this topic, we’ve found that three myths seem to persist when it comes to PCI DSS compliance. Consider us the PCI DSS compliance mythbusters.

Myth 1: Only large enterprise-level businesses are required to be PCI Compliant.

According to PCI DSS, every company involved in payment card processing online or offline should be PCI Compliant. The list of those companies includes e-commerce businesses of all sizes, banks and web hosting providers. It’s important to note that I said, “should be PCI Compliant” here. There is no federal law that makes PCI compliance a legal requirement. However, a business IS required to be PCI compliant technically in order to take and process Visa or MasterCard payments. Failure to operate in with PCI compliance could mean huge fees if you’re found in violation after a breach.

Payment card data security is the most significant concern for cardholders, and it should be a priority for your business, whether you have two hundred customers or two million customers. If you’re processing ANY credit card payments, you should make sure you are PCI-compliant.

There are four levels of PCI compliance based on the number of credit card transactions your business processes a year, so the PCI compliance process is going to look different for small, medium-sized and large businesses. Visit the PCI Security Standards Council website to check which level of PCI compliance your business needs.

Myth 1: Busted.

Myth 2: A business that uses a PCI-compliant managed hosting provider automatically becomes PCI-compliant.

Multiple parties are involved in processing payment data, and each of them needs to meet certain standards to guarantee cardholders’ data security. From a managed hosting provider perspective, we’re responsible for things like proper firewall installation and maintenance, updating anti-virus programs of our servers, providing a unique ID for each person with computer access to restrict access to the most sensitive data, regular system scanning for vulnerabilities. Our customer — an online retailer, for example — would need to develop its software applications in accordance with PCI DSS, keep cardholders data storage to a minimum, and perform application-layer penetration tests that are out of their hosting provider’s control.

If you’re pursuing PCI compliance, you have a significant advantage if you start with a PCI-compliant managed hosting provider. Many security questions are already answered by your PCI-compliant host, so there is a shorter list of things for you to be worry about. You save money, time and effort in the process of completing PCI certification.

Myth 2: Busted.

Myth 3: A business that uses SSL certificates is PCI compliant.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates allow secure data transmission to and from the server through data encryption that significantly decreases the network vulnerabilities from IP spoofing, IP source rooting, DNS spoofing, man-in-the-middle attacks and other threats from hackers. However, SSL cannot protect cardholder data from attacks using cross-site scripting or SQL injection, and they don’t provide secure audit trails or event monitoring. SSL certificates are an important part of secure transactions, but they’re only part of PCI DSS compliance.

Myth 3: Busted.

If you have questions about PCI compliance or you’re interested in Oracle ATG Hosting, visit Spark::red, give us a call or send us an email, and we’ll do what we can to help. When PCI compliance doesn’t seem like a scary monster in your closet, it’s easier to start the process and get it done quickly.

-Elena Rybalchenko, Spark::red

A Multi-Cloud Strategy – The Key to Expansion and Conversion

Web and mobile applications have collapsed geographic barriers to business, bringing brand and commerce experiences ever-closer to increasingly far-flung customers. While web-based business models are powerful enablers for global expansion, they also create new a new challenge in managing availability and performance across diverse and distributed markets: How do you ensure consistent web performance across all markets without investing in physical infrastructure in all of those markets?

Once a business gets its core business on a consistent and reliable provider like SoftLayer, we typically recommend that they consider a multi-cloud strategy that will spread availability and performance risk across a global infrastructure of public and private data centers, delivery networks and cloud providers. Regardless of how fantastic your core SoftLayer hosting is, the reality is that single-source dependency introduces significant business risk. Fortunately, much of that business risk can be mitigated by adding a layer of multi-cloud architecture to support the application.

Recent high-profile outages speak to the problem that multi-sourcing solves, but many web-based operations remain precariously dependent on individual hosting, CDN and cloud providers. It’s a lot like having server backups: If you never need a backup that you have, that backup probably isn’t worth much to you, but if you need a backup that you don’t have, you’d probably pay anything to have it.

A multi-cloud strategy drives revenue and other conversions. Why? Because revenue and conversions online correlate closely with a site’s availability and performance. High Scalability posted several big-name real-world examples in the article, “Latency is Everywhere and it Costs You Sales.” When an alternative vendor is just one click away, performance often makes a difference measured in dollars.

How Cedexis Can Help

Cedexis was founded to help businesses see and take advantage of a multi-cloud strategy when that strategy can provide better uptime, faster page loads, reliable transactions, and the ability to optimize cost across a diverse network of platforms and providers. We built the Cedexis Radar to measure the comparative performance of major cloud and delivery network providers (demo), and with that data, we created Openmix to provide adaptive automation for cloud infrastructure based on local user demand.

In order to do that effectively, Cedexis was built to be provider-agnostic, community-driven, actionable and adaptive. We support over 100 public cloud providers. We collect performance data based on crowd-sourced user requests (which represent over 900 million measurements per day from 32,000 individual networks). We allow organizations to write custom scripts that automate traffic routing based on fine-grained policies and thresholds. And we go beyond rules-driven traffic routing, dynamically matching actual user requests with the most optimal cloud at a specific moment in time.

Getting Started with Cedexis

1. Join the Community
   Get real-time visibility into your users’ performance.
2. Compare the Performance of Your Clouds and Devliery Network
   Make informed decisions to optimize your site performance with Radar
3. Leverage Openmix to optimize global web performance
   Optimize web and mobile performance to serve global markets

The more you can learn about your site, the more you can make it better. We want to help our customers drive revenue, enter new markets, avoid outages and reduce costs. As a SoftLayer customer, you’ve already found a fantastic hosting provider, and if Openmix won’t provide a provable significant change, we won’t sell you something you don’t need. Our simple goal is to make your life better, whether you’re a geek or a suit.

-Julien Coulon, Cedexis

5 Things You Need to Know to Control Variable Infrastructure Costs

If you have on premise equipment, then your costs are fixed — you paid your money and now you own a fixed amount of hardware and software. The cloud, on the other hand, has variable costs due to two important features — you only pay for the services you use and it’s scalable, providing the resources you need at any given time. By using a cloud infrastructure, you end up with what we call Variable Infrastructure Costs (VICs).

Most of SoftLayer’s services meet the criteria for a VIC. You need an extra cloud server for a few hours? No problem. More disk? Done.

With great power, comes great responsibility, and the biggest problem with VICs is that they are just like a faucet: Leave it running, and the water bill can add up fast … Not to mention all that waste! Unless you keep a close eye on VICs, you could find yourself in front of your CFO, pleading for your budget’s life.

Cloudability was created to keep those costs under control, and in the course of working with our customers, we’ve come up with a simple five-point checklist of best practices:

1. Collation

Make sure you have insight to all your costs, create a single contract database, and review it regularly. Don’t forget to include total cloud spending alongside your fixed contracts. Talk to your finance department, then drill your employees and tech teams to make sure you REALLY know the whole truth. There can be — and usually is — a disconnect in the organization about how much cloud is really being used.

2. Analysis

Get into the weeds to see why each project is spending what they are spending. Try to calculate some tangible metrics like cost per thousand web pages served or cost per new customer, and benchmark these against public data and common sense.

3. Organization and Rebalancing

Put each of your projects into one of four quadrants:

1. High Spend/Low Efficiency
2. High Spend/High Efficiency
3. Low Spend/Low Efficiency
4. Low Spend/High Efficiency.

Focus on the High Spend/Low Efficiency quadrant first. That’s where you will find the easiest wins. Then, move onto the High Spend/High Efficiency quadrant where you’ll find best practices to use for other projects. Then, if you have the time/resources, focus on the low spend projects and repeat.

4. Renegotiation

Contact your colleagues outside your department and compare unit prices, especially for things like bandwidth, co-lo and staff costs. Make sure you’re in the top quartile for value (i.e. lowest costs). Renegotiate with vendors if you aren’t, and plan to change vendors and staff when you can’t the best value with your current resources.

5. Alignment

Understand your business objectives and get your roadmap tightly aligned. If you need some CAPEX to reduce operational expenses, then ask for it as part of the planning. You’ve got to spend money to make money right?

VICs can be easily manage once you understand where they’re all coming from. After applying these five best practices into the way your business approaches cloud spending, you’ll be well on your way. Cloudability’s business was built to make the process a little easier and more automated for you, so if you want to use our tool to help you “cover your *aas,” we’d love for you to try it out for free: https://app.cloudability.com/signup

-Mat Ellis, Cloudability

When people talk about company culture, you usually hear buzzwords like “collaborative environment,” “team-oriented,” “transparency” and “progressive thinking.” To a certain extent, they all sound a little forced and cliche, and it almost kills me that they’re exactly the words I’d use to honestly describe my SoftLayer experience. Why? Because every day, I see people collaborating on news ways to innovate, execute code more efficiently and improve our systems … And not only do I see that happening, I feel involved in those conversations as well.

In a day and age where it seems most companies do business like they are herding sheep, it’s pretty phenomenal to work in an environment where employees are encouraged to speak, and when they speak, they are heard.

A surprisingly large part of SoftLayer’s company culture involves getting employees out of the office. Yes … I said out of the office! From baseball games to barbeque contests to dragon boat races, the SoftLayer team actually becomes more of a “team” when we leave the office. In my previous jobs, the last thing I’d want to do at 5:00pm on a Friday would be to spend a couple more hours with my work desk’s neighbor. These days, I look forward to the chances to hang out with my coworkers outside the office. I know it sounds cheesy, but it’s the truth.

Just look at the Pink Soles in Motion fundraiser to raise money and support the Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Did it make a difference that the event was on a Saturday? Absolutely not. You could see SLayers in their SoftLayer gear everywhere you looked.

I am always impressed by the sheer number of people who love what they do and love being a part of SoftLayer. If you subscribe to the “SoftLayer Culture” RSS feed, you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about … That category is filled with posts from employees who can’t help but share their love for SoftLayer with the world. When you get so many passionate and enthusiastic people under one roof, you get a with contagious excitement and the shared purpose of providing the best possible products and services to our customers.

When I walk through the office and see happy people talking about their work, I know I’m in the right place.

Thanks for the one-year anniversary, SoftLayer! It’s been a great year.

If you want to put the SoftLayer culture to the test, check out the available Careers at SoftLayer to find an opportunity that can bring you onto the team. You won’t be disappointed.

-Sarah

When Google’s “Panda” Algorithm Collides with Duplicate Content

If you’re a Webmaster, it’s likely you’ve heard about the Google latest search algorithm — “Panda” — and all the benefits and implications of this update. Today, we wanted highlight what happens when Google Panda collides online with duplicate content. There have been plenty of opinions written about Google Panda and duplicate content, but we want to provide some background and examples to help you better understand how Panda and duplicate content might affect you.

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is a term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one web page, within the same web site. When multiple pages within a web site contain essentially the same content, search engines such as Google can penalize/not display that site in any relevant search results.

Should you be Concerned?

When Google released Panda, there was a significant outcry from legitimate business and publishers who were either downgraded overnight in their search engine page rank or dropped all together. For many of the businesses, the Panda algorithm reduced SEO rank and decreased visitors, site revenue and online market awareness. Some websites even experienced damage to their brand, as their customers and prospects questioned whether they were still in business.

We’ve spoken with Cult of Mac, Digital Trends and several Fortune 1000 businesses, and they’ve all said the same thing: They were penalized and downgraded as a result of the Panda release as a result of unauthorized duplication of their content. They had done everything to comply with Google in optimizing their SEO configurations, but the third-party websites scraping and duplicating their content (outside of their control) caused their page ranks to fall.

Google’s Official Stance on Duplicate Content:

“We do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.”

“In rare situations, our algorithm may select a URL from an external site that is hosting your content without your permission. If you believe that another site is duplicating your content in violation of copyright law, you may contact the site’s host to request removal. In addition, you can request that Google remove the infringing page from our search results by filing a request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

Where is This “External” Duplicate Content Coming From?

Sometimes, it’s not clear how third-party sites obtain copies of legitimate work. Typically, they either steal it by manually or automatically scraping the content. The scraped content is then republished onto their sites, providing no credit or link to the original work.

What does that look like? It’s not difficult to find examples, but I tracked one down that seemed particularly ironic. Here’s an original article by PC World on Google’s War Against Scraper Sites:

Here’s a duplicate copy of the same story that doesn’t give any credit to the original PC World article:

It’s clear that we’re not looking at a coincidence here. The title, article content and images are all identical. The scraping site didn’t even attempt to mask their plagiarism with synonym changes. Why would they do that? Just take a look at the ads on the scraper site … They want to profit from the keywords and traffic driven by PC World’s content.

What Can You Do About It?

• Listen to Google
  Google provides a list of tips for using rel=”nofollow” and canonicalization to ensure they are able to identify you as the original author of content and avoid penalizing or downgrading your business’s search ranking results.
• Learn About DMCA and Use It
  If your content has already been duplicated by unauthorized publishers, you should learn more about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and how it can help get help remove your content from infringing websites. Two helpful resources to start learning the law and your rights are Google’s official DMCA policy page and the United States Copyright Office.
• Be Proactive About Stopping Scrapers
  We believe the best solution is to implement practices and or services to proactively prevent people or web scrapers from harvesting or scraping your content in the first place. Although web scrapers can be difficult to detect, there are tactics and/or services that can be implemented to limit certain behaviors on your website(s). Some of the quickest ways to make strides in the right direction are to implement rate limiting rules, to block traffic from blacklisted IP addresses and to use Captcha to help reduce automated web scrapers.

While none of these tactics are fool-proof ways to completely prevent your content from being duplicated, the more barriers to entry you have, the more difficult it will be for web scrapers to repeatedly duplicate your content. Distil built an enterprise-ready platform to monitor and prevent site scraping, so if you want some help in the protecting your content, try our our service. Whatever route you take, the key is to make sure that whatever tactics or services you implement, you don’t forget about your legitimate traffic … You don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Be proactive, but make sure you keep your priorities on the user-experience and quality of your site(s).

-Sean Harmer, Distil

SEO Goals and Key Indicators

Google’s Feb 2012 Update

Between February 25-28th Google rolled out another big set of changes to their algorithm. These changes knocked down a lot of short cuts that SEO companies were using, including blog networks. The red flags have been there for a long time. Blog networks are easy to uncover simply because of the complexity of trying to setup a truly diverse hosting environment. It is not just separate C-class IP addresses it is also registrars, DNS, admin login IP addresses, plug-in profiles, etc. There are so many easy ways to group sites as being related or identical that it is not worth the effort of trying to take short cuts with your linking. Instead focus on what is going to have a lasting impact on your SEO:

• Page Speed – Improve your code, increase your hardware, etc.
• Better Onsite Content
• Usability

These three factors will have a lasting impact on your SEO during 2012 and beyond.

Get Your Strategy Together

Successful internet marketing campaigns have one thing in common: Comprehensive strategies. Today’s marketplace makes it extremely difficult to compete in one area of internet marketing without complimenting that work in several other areas. For example, why invest in search engine optimization if you don’t have a quality website to convert the traffic to leads or sales? Why invest in a mobile app if you aren’t going to optimize the listing to generate a high volume of downloads? These examples show how a comprehensive strategy to internet marketing is the best approach for future success.

Fruition.net has been successful in this comprehensive approach by staying at the forefront of each individual strategy. At the core of these strategies is a collection of goals and key indicators we use to monitor, adjust, and track performance. Below you will find a few of the most important goals for each area of internet marketing.

Comprehensive Internet Marketing Strategies

Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website with the end goal of improving your ranking on the major search engines. Here are the goals and key indicators you should be tracking to evaluate the success of your SEO campaign:

• Keyword Rankings — This one is easy! Determine which keywords you think will generate more business, write them down, and track your rankings for each of them every month. Side note: Make sure you aren’t logged in to your Google account in order to receive unbiased results.
• Non-Branded Search Traffic — This is the traffic that has come to your website via the search engines, but the visitor did not use your brand name in their search. Your website should already be capturing the branded searches, so the real test is how much non-branded traffic your website is generating and increasing each month.
• Conversions — This is where the rubber meets the road. Increases in rankings and traffic are great, but ultimately these campaigns are all about generating new leads or revenue. We track phone calls, email inquiries, and revenue numbers for our clients to give them instant feedback on their marketing investment. Some clients take it a step further and track the leads via a CRM to produce a tangible return on investment.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is a quick method of generating an increase of traffic to your website. You are literally paying for each click, but watch out because your budget can quickly get away from you if you don’t know what you are doing. Here are the metrics you should be following to ensure a quality PPC campaign:

• Quality Score — When someone clicks on your PPC ad, you can direct them to any page on your website. It might be the home page or a specific landing page, but whichever page is chosen will be given a Quality Score (scale 1-10) by Google. This quality score measures the relevancy of the page as it relates to the PPC ad. The lower the relevancy, the higher the cost per click. Therefore, you want to make your landing page as relevant as possible and don’t advertise unless your landing page Quality Score is 5 or higher.
• Cost Per Conversion — This should be your #1 key indicator for tracking purposes. The cost per conversion measures the total cost it takes to generate a lead or sale. The beauty of this key indicator is that it encapsulates all of the moving parts of a paid search campaign: ad design, ad bidding, quality score, landing page design, landing page quality, landing page calls to action, etc.

Social Media
Social media has been a big buzz word for the past couple of years and for good reason. People are spending A LOT of time on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and the like. If you are going to compete online, then you need to at least have a presence with the major channels. Here are a couple ways to measure your effectiveness:

• Likes/Fans — This is an easy one to track. How many people like your business on Facebook or are following you on Twitter? The larger the number, the better. Search engines like to see a large following because they feel it represents authority and a leader of the industry.
• Shares/Retweets — There are free tools available that can provide you with the number of times your content has been shared or retweeted. Another case of bigger is better because it shows the people who are following you are engaged with your content.
• Google +1 — So far we have not seen a correlation between getting +1s and higher organic rankings. That has to change or it seems +1 will be considered a failure.

Website and Application Development
Building a new website or mobile application is a very detail oriented project that requires a well defined process. The best way to track the success of your campaign is make sure your process is well documented with dates attached to each of your deliverables of the project. The time spent up front in the planning stages will bring clarity to the project for all involved and help the project stay on task. Below is a platform that can be built into a very detailed list of deliverables for a development project:

• Define the Scope of the Project
1. Project Management
2. Calendar of the project
3. Resources needed (human capital, scheduling, technical proficiency, etc)
4. Wireframes for the user interface (mapping the visitor flow)
5. Approvals
• Creative – Design Work
1. Logos and branding
2. Image and video content
3. Clear calls to action
4. Concepts presented to clients
5. Revisions as necessary
6. Client Approvals
• Coding and Development
1. Hosting environment
2. Platform development
3. Installation of all scripts, APIs, tracking, etc
• Testing
1. Cross browser testing
2. Bug fixing
• Optimization
1. Titles
2. Headers
3. Descriptions
4. Alt Tags
5. Content

Internet marketing is a rapidly changing marketplace. Employing several complimentary strategies and monitoring the performance will provide you with the greatest opportunity for success. Good luck in 2012 and may all of your internet marketing strategies come to Fruition!

-Jonathan Mills, Fruition

Important Mobile App Metrics to Track

At Kontagent, we’ve helped hundreds of social customers win by helping them gain better insights into their users’ behaviors. We’re always improving our already-powerful, best-in-class analytics platform, and we’ve been leveraging our knowledge and experience to help many of our social customers make a successful transition into the mobile space, too.

Whether you’re in the early stages of developing a mobile application, or you’ve already launched it and have a substantial user base, looking to social app developers for a history lesson on how to do it right can give you a huge head-start, and greater chance at success.

Gaia Online has “done it right” with Monster Galaxy — a hit on both Facebook and iOS. In the first installment of our Kontagent Konnect Executive Interview Series, we spoke with CEO Mike Sego on how the company is applying many of the lessons it learned in moving social-to-mobile, including:

• The metrics that are most important to succeeding on mobile
• How to monetize on the F2P model
• How to successfully split-test on iOS (yes, it is possible!)
• Other tactics used to keep players engaged and coming back for more

Q: What are the overarching fundamentals for developers who want to make the social to mobile transition? Do these fundamentals also apply to mobile developers in general?
A: Applying the knowledge you gained on Facebook to developing for mobile is the most effective way we’ve found to succeed in the mobile space.

When it comes to content, the mechanics are almost identical for what motivates user engagement, retention, and monetization between mobile and social. Appointment mechanics, energy mechanics, leaving players wanting more, designing specific goals that are just out of reach until multiple play sessions, etc.—the user experience is consistent.

When it comes to social and mobile game apps, we have found that free-to-play models are the most successful at attracting users. Beyond that, you should focus on a very tight conversion funnel; once a new user has installed your application, analyze every action she takes through the levels or stages of your app. When you start looking at cohorts of users, if there is a spike in drop-offs, you should start asking yourself, ‘What is it about this particular stage that could be turning off users? Did I make the level too difficult? Was it not difficult enough? What are some other incentives I can bake into this particular point of the app to get them to keep going?’

But, as you continue to develop your application, keep in mind that you should develop and release quickly, and test often. The trick is to test, fine-tune and iterate with user data. These insights will help you to improve conversion. Spending a disproportionate amount of time instrumenting and scrutinizing the new user experience will pay dividends down the line. This is true for both social and mobile games.

Q: What are the metrics you pay most attention to?
Just as it was in social, the two biggest levers in mobile are still minimizing customer acquisition costs (CAC), and maximizing lifetime value (LTV). The question boils down to this: How can we acquire as many users as possible, for as little money as possible? And, how can we generate as much revenue as possible from those users? Everything else is an input into those two major metrics because those two metrics are what will ultimately determine if you have a scalable hit or a game that just won’t pay for itself.

The full interview goes on a bit longer, and it has profound responses topics we alluded to earlier in the post. We don’t want to over-stay our generous welcome here on the SoftLayer blog, so if social and mobile application development are of interest to you, register here (for free) to learn more from the complete interview.

-Catherine Mylinh, Kontagent

Discover the People Who Drive Your Business

If you’re involved in marketing, you understand the importance of monitoring your business’s community online. You also probably know that engaging with the “Influencers” who speak to your intended audience can be critical to understanding their needs and spreading your brand’s message. But existing tools are limited in their ability to find these individuals. They don’t allow you to sift through the noise and discover the people who are already impacting your business online.

Spot Influence is a data service that provides granular, actionable information to businesses about their online audience and the people who are influencing them. With this data, business can discover the key influencers they need to be paying attention to and gain valuable insight regarding their existing customers: their online profiles, where they publish and engage with content, and what they care about.

Solving this problem at scale is incredibly challenging. We deal with vast amounts of unstructured data, processing tens of millions of URLs and creating terabytes of data every day. That’s why we’re excited to be a SoftLayer customer and a part of the Technology Partners Marketplace. SoftLayer enables us to cost-effectively scale our machines to meet customer needs.

If you’re interested in learning more about Spot Influence, please check out the following links and sign up for the Beta on our website!

Website: http://spotinfluence.com/
Blog: http://blog.spotinfluence.com/
Twitter: @spotinfluence

-Dave Angulo and Rich Grote, Co-Founders, Spot Influence