Last week I had the privilege of speaking with KnowledgeStorm’s Jeff Ramminger. Jeff is KnowledgeStorm’s Executive Vice President, Products, Technology & Marketing and has been working their since April 2000. Jeff’s immense insight in the area of B2B Tech made for a very interesting interview. So here it is…
Manoj – Could you talk about how you got started at KnowledgeStorm and little bit about your past professional experiences?
Jeff – I have been in technology now for about 25 years, I spent the first 19 with IBM. The important part of that was the last 8 years which were very focused on interactive application development and multimedia oriented things initially: interactive television, CD roms, and kiosks. Starting in ’95 I started running a consulting group at IBM that was building websites for people and we started to do a lot high profile web projects. In particular I had responsibility for the communications sector e-business services team which was focused on all of the cable companies, entertainment companies, media/sports companies. So we ended up doing a lot of development for people who were doing very high traffic/Splash sorts of events and websites. A lot of work for the NHL, NBA, I did the Super Bowl site in ’98, all the grand slams in tennis (Wimbledon, French Open, Australian Open, US Open).
Manoj – WOW! That’s awesome
Jeff – Yeah it was fun, on the entertainment side we did the Grammys, we did the Tony’s, we did sections of West 54th (a music site of Sony’s). We did a lot of very progressive things from an application standpoint and a lot of aggressive things, back then, from a search marketing/analytics standpoint.
Manoj – Were there any perks with this job, did you guys get to go to any of these events?
Jeff – Yeah for me personally there were a lot (laughing), because for something like US Open Tennis my team would be at the venue for 3.5-4 weeks. We’d usually going in a week before to setup sophisticated production systems which included video and still image capture (on automated basis). I personally, since I ran the group and was the interface to the executives/clients, pretty much got to go to everything.
Manoj – Oh my God, That’s like every sports enthusiast’s dream!
Jeff – It was, the first event I did was the Stanley Cup Final in ’96, it was game 6 and the NHL invited me and I brought my 7 year old son where we sat in the press box and watched the whole game. I like perks as much as anybody, but the most interesting thing to me was what you got to learn in the process of doing that in terms of scaling web properties and what things affected performance.
Manoj – Who is KnowledgeStorm’s target market and how do KnowledgeStorm’s services solve users’ pains?
Jeff – Ok, Our target market is B2B Technology vendors. Our job in our minds is to help create awareness and visibility for a given B2B Technology vendor and to generate web leads as a result. This summer we launched some advertising and sponsorships offerings as well. So we have a variety of things we offer to the vendor and almost all of it is focused around creating more awareness and creating actionable lists or actionable sets of web leads that they can deal with. The way we do that is we are not actually a content creator, we are content aggregator so we’ve built a fairly sophisticated online directory of all the content that vendors have. This includes solutions information about their products, white papers, webcasts, and podcasts anything like that which is a content asset they already possess. In essence what we’re doing is organizing that content so that users that are coming to do research for information technology solutions can find highly relevant content and try to understand how to solve their business problem with a particular technology solution.
Manoj – What are KnowledgeStorm’s goals and what does the future hold for the company?
Jeff – That’s a very interesting question, I think from a goal standpoint we’ve always set out to be the place that the users, whether they are IT people or business technology people, would come to find interesting information when they are researching a technology buy they want to make. I think as well as we’ve done in that regard I always feel there is a long way to go in terms of what the potential is for us to create interesting aggregation content that will help users solve a problem. In the process of doing that, we want to try to grow both the volume and the quality of the web leads we’re delivering to the IT vendors. In particular, one of the things we’ve had a lot of interest in and have worked very hard on from a product set is something that we call content intelligence. This is trying not to take what you would think of as traditional Web Analytics but it is trying to take the data that is thrown off as part of an experience that someone has online (what did they search on, where did they click, what documents did they look at) and we try to amass that information into demographic groupings (without exposing individual data because that would be a violation of privacy). We roll-up this demographic information and provide it to IT vendors so that they can be smarter when they market to those people and in particular leverage their content for more opportunity for awareness and lead generation.
Manoj – The next set of questions will be focused towards B2B Tech (in terms of Search Marketing), are these types of companies looking for consultation or help in implementation, are they doing this in-house or are they looking to outsource SEM?
Jeff – It’s all over the board, I think there are a quite a few SEOs/SEMs that have done quite well in the Tech industry because Tech is spending a lot of money online from a marketing standpoint. I think you’ll find that big vendors probably have in-house team or want to have an in-house team if they don’t already. The beauty of the web is the long tail B2B tech market gives you a lot of potential for people who need consulted incisive services on the PPC/SEO/SEM kind of side. We see people left and right spending thousands of dollars on Google. We see a lot of people confused with Google Organic clicks and Google paid clicks on the analytics side. They look at Google in their analytics and they don’t make the distinction between whether they paid for it or not. For a guy like you or a company like Enquiro it’s probably a fertile market.
Manoj – So there’s definitely a need for an SEM vendor in B2B Tech?
Jeff – Absolutely, depending on different levels of markets some are going to need you worse than others. I am guessing Enquiro doesn’t touch anything for less than $20,000/year for consulting but there is probably a good sized medium-large segment of the market you can do very well in.
Manoj – How heavily do B2B Tech companies rely on their websites for things like Lead Generation, Reputation Management or Customer Care?
Jeff – Hard for me to answer the Customer Care one because it’s not really my sweet spot, but on the Lead Gen side there has been a lot movement over the last 3 years where people are having a deeper interest
in what their sites look like and what content is available on the site. I can tell you confidently that unlike B2C, there aren’t a whole of people in B2B looking at content for recreation (very few if any). They are trying to solve a business problem. On B2B sites you’ll notice registration barriers (to collect information about the user) and we have noticed from our experience, B2B users are willing to give up their information if they are serious about a business product. We have actually surveyed this as well: users are actually happy to hear from the vendors if they are truly downloading the vendor’s content. Where B2C users don’t like people to intrude or advertising necessarily, in B2B it’s very different because people are on a mission to solve a problem.
Manoj – What are the hottest developments you are seeing in terms of software solutions in B2B Tech?
Jeff – One sort of area that I think is very hot is: SalesForce.com sparked a lot of interest in software as a service. They were really the ones to prove you can do enterprise level applications, software as a service reliably across a lot of clients. Given the bandwidth available on the web, people are very interested in rentable applications. There’s little companies doing interesting things along those lines, people like 37 Signals who are doing 20% of what Microsoft Project can do but you can do it online. The other one that is constantly sort of hot is security; we’ve seen tremendous amounts of focus on security from a standpoint of firewalls. There’s even a new category of security called Extrusion Prevention, the idea of preventing data from leaving your enterprise if you don’t want it to. CRM seems to be perennially hot as well.
Manoj – What do you enjoy most working at KnowledgeStorm?
Jeff – For me the most fun is when you know always that things are coming. I like strategy and looking into the future trying to see what the potential is. What I enjoy is driven by two things. We are in a really fun industry and I have great people that work for me, so my team makes this a lot of fun. And the industry is great because of the pace and the change that is always occurring. I feel somewhat bold about the fact that not only in KnowledgeStorm going things that are very interesting and valuable but, the B2B technology industry, generally speaking, is always the lead or one of the leaders in B2B and a lot of other industries follow behind what technology is doing. So I think it is fun to be in that industry to start with.
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