John Ryan

Having used both sites for about two weeks, there is still a great deal I am learning to do with both Ulitzer and Ning, but a reader asked if I would do a quick comparison, so I will. The obvious point for me is that the sites have two different objectives for the writers.  For Ning, the writer is trying to be involved in a niche social network from scratch.  For example, I have built my own social network for marketers and salespeople called BuyerSteps.  I created BuyerSteps as a way for other professionals to join in a conversation around the 21st century buyer.  So, Ning represents a way to build a community. In the case of Ulitzer, as a writer I am focused on getting readers from within an existing audience.  There are already thousands of readers coming to the Ulitzer site, so if they are interested in my topics such as marketing, they will find my articles as ... (more)

An A to Z of the Social Media Landscape: H to P

This is part 2 of 3 of a continuing series on Social Media Companies. You can go to Part 1 here. As with the A-G list, if you see any problems with the data or you believe a company should be on this list, please let me know. john@buyersteps.com H Hi5 +Social Glue Award Launched in 2003, hi5 is now one of the world's largest social networks and a top 20 website globally — with over 60 million monthly unique visitors. Compete reports 3.2 million U.S. unique visitors every month. Quantcast reports 49.9 million worldwide visitors, high indexes for male, 12-34, Hispanic and Asian, has ... (more)

Gartner Sales Force Automation Ranking Is Out - The 2009 Report

The importance of automating the sales processes and capturing buyer data has perhaps never been more important.  Many organizations are finally waking up to the fact that having thousands of leads isn't as important as doing better with the leads you have.  From Gartner... What You Need to Know Despite slow sales due to the economy, organizations continue to invest in sales force automation (SFA). Gartner has not seen a drop-off in customer requests for help with vendor evaluations related to SFA. We have seen slightly more emphasis on software as a service (SaaS) due to tight ca... (more)

Business Martial Arts Lesson – There Are No Short Cuts

This is Lesson No. 3 of a Continuing Series on How Martial Arts Skills can be Applied to Business There are no short cuts – a Hapkido master told me this and thank goodness there are people in the world who still believe this. Stop trying to be clever and instead focus on earning real capabilities. In Hapkido, you either know it or you don’t and it shows in the practice of the art. The business lesson – There are business people in prison because they forgot this. Building a strong business that has great capabilities requires study and hard work. When people take short cuts, bad t... (more)

Research on Blogging Business Results from Hubspot

More proof that blogging is smart business.  Just make sure that whoever is blogging is a good writer and is committed to being consistent. Otherwise, it will be a waste of time.  You can either have your developers include a blog in your web experience or use free tools like Wordpress to link to your website. From Hubspot: If you blog, you know that it's good for your business. But how -- and how much? To answer to those questions, I looked at data from 1,531 HubSpot customers (mostly small- and medium-sized businesses). 795 of the businesses in my sample blogged, 736 didn't. ... (more)