It’s time to add “curation” and “badging” to the list of words and phrases that marketers have coined or converted in recent years. That list includes everything from evangelist to long tail, fat head, and socializing.

If you’re into conversion rate optimization you may want to start sprinkling curation and badging into your pitches because it’s definitely going to have a positive impact on conversion rates. Allow me to elaborate.

All That Stuff

In the context of digital content, curation seems to have started out as the idea that we should do something to preserve the growing mass of words, images, and video generated by social media and content sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube.

But what to do with all that stuff, like the massive stream of content emerging as tweets and Facebook status updates and comments, or the volumes of criticism being penned as customer reviews on places like Amazon.com or at online stores using services like Bazaarvoice?

Clearly some of this material is worth keeping. The rest? Not so much.

The Smithsonian and other major museums around the world face a similar problem: they have way more art and artifacts to show off than space to show them. The answer? Curation. Someone chooses which stuff is worthy to display and should be showcased.

But how do you do that with all this digital stuff? One approach is to use metrics and input from the source of the content itself. In terms of social media, that means tweets which are retweeted the most or tagged as favorites are deemed more worthy of attention. Reviews rated as most helpful are more deserving of attention.

This is where curation starts to rub up against conversion.

For example, pointing out helpful reviews serves a practical purpose for consumers. I recently shopped for a cordless electric kettle on Amazon.com and there were over 150 to choose from. One that caught my eye had 185 reviews. I only had time to read one review, so I read the one ranked “Most Helpful.” It got curated as that because 173 of 178 people said they found it helpful and so did I (I bought that kettle, and so far I’m very happy with it).

The Benefits of Badging

Online marketers are now using curation to increase conversion rates at online stores and other digital emporiums like travel sites.

Consider Freshpair, where a shopper looking for sleepwear has been shown a fairly typical grid of product shots, enhanced by curation. One item is highlighted as Oprah’s Pick. We are told another item is a Limited Edition.

We can think of these messages calling attention to specific items within a group as badges, a visual shorthand, like getting a gold star, literally so in the case of the Limited Edition camisole.

You can also see curation at work at Sheplers, a site that carries a dizzying array of Western boots. While some shoppers who go to Sheplers.com know exactly what they want, others are at risk of getting lost in the digital aisles. After all, there are 10 categories of Work Boots and 60 choices in the “Pull-on” sub-category alone.

So when a shopper gets to a page with 60 choices, it helps to know which items are new, which are best sellers, and so on. Fortunately, technology makes that easy.

In the case of Sheplers, they don’t have to create new product shots every time the curation changes. They simply program the web pages to automatically overlay the badges on the product images based on simple business rules. For example, if the product SKU is in a list called “new” then the “new” badge is floated over the product image whenever it’s displayed.

The bestseller badge is a little smarter. Like any good retailer, Sheplers is running analytics all the time. The company knows which items sell best and feeds those SKUs to a list that triggers the badge display.

Sheplers has seen sales increase since they began badging products like this, but they’re understandably reluctant to reveal by just how much. And although they’ve been around for over 100 years, you can bet they are testing and monitoring all their online marketing strategies in real time to make sure they are maximizing conversion rates.

As a returning sponsor of the Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference, Monetate, the leading independent provider of testing, targeting, and personalization for websites, is hosting a roundtable titled “Failing Fast: Use High Velocity Testing and Targeting to Make Online Retailing More Creative and Rewarding.”

The conference, known as INNOVATE 2011, takes place March 8 through March 10 at the Concourse Exhibition center in San Francisco and is a joint effort of the National Retail Federation (NRF), Shop.org, and the Retail Advertising Marketing Association (RAMA).

“Failing fast can indeed be very rewarding for retailers who are able to rapidly test and target alternative content and features on their retail websites,” says David Brussin, Founder and CEO of Philadelphia-based Monetate (www.monetate.com).

According to Brussin, “While some marketers worry that a data-driven approach to retail website design and merchandising may hamper creativity, our clients are finding that the ability to quickly test new ideas and zero in on the ones that win actually enables greater creativity, not to mention improved conversion rates and increases in incremental revenue.”

Brussin will be joined at the roundtable by Alex Miller, QVC’s VP of eCommerce & eMarketing. QVC has been using Monetate for several years for a wide range of testing and targeting projects.

According to Monetate Chairman David Bookspan: ”What we are keen to communicate to retail marketers is that, when you have the ability to test content quickly and easily, you create greater scope for creative thinking, trying out your ideas, finding out what fails, then going forward with what works.” Adds Bookspan,

“From the thousands of tests we run every week for high traffic consumer websites we know this strategy works.”

In addition to hosting the roundtable, Monetate will be demonstrating a wide range of testing and targeting strategies in the Innovation Zone at Booth 51.

Exinda to Share Drivers Behind Its 70% Revenue Growth in 2010 and Strategic Direction for 2011 and Beyond

ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS–(Marketwire – March 1, 2011) – Exinda, a global provider of WAN optimization solutions, today announced that Michael Sharma, Chief Executive Officer of Exinda, will participate in the 2011 Montgomery Technology Conference at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, California, on March 8 and 9, 2011.

Research Sheds Light on the Miscommunication Between Sales and Marketing

Boston, MA – Last week, Boston venture capital firm OpenView Venture Partners released its latest research report, showcasing its recent partnership with The Bridge Group and Vorsight. The research conducted by The Bridge Group and Vorsight focused on clarifying sales team’s opinions of marketing’s leads that are being presented to them. For this one-page report, OpenView Partners narrowed The Bridge Group and Vorsight’s findings to gather the survey results of sales reps with average deals less than $50,000 selling into SMB or Enterprise companies.

According to the research, the discrepancy over the definition of a quality lead boils down to misalignment between the two teams, and a more statistics and data collected from the survey will be released in eBook form from the Bridge Group and Vorsigh in the upcoming weeks.

The report analyzes 361 responses from the 1,500 sales reps that were surveyed in order to reveal how significant miscommunication between the sales and marketing departments can be for startup or expansion stage technology companies. OpenView focused on comparing the definition of a quality lead and the accuracy of lead data.

“At the expansion stage, companies are figuring out their ideal customer profile over time. It doesn’t happen overnight. But if marketing and sales aren’t collaborating to define it, the gap in perceived lead quality won’t improve,” stated Brian Zimmerman, Managing Director, OpenView Venture Partners.

The research revealed the following:

• 51% of sales reps surveyed feel that less than 25% of marketing leads are quality leads, while only 6% of sales reps feel that greater than 75% of marketing leads are quality
• A total of 44% of sales reps feel that less than 25% of leads are actual decision makers or key influencers

“Quite honestly, that inaccuracy and inefficiency is the byproduct of a miscommunication between marketing and sales departments on what exactly constitutes a ‘quality lead,’” said Trish Bertuzzi, founder of The Bridge Group.

Be sure to visit OpenView Partners for the one-page report.

About OpenView Venture Partners
OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion stage venture capital fund with a focus on high-growth software, Internet and technology-enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, who collectively bring several decades of technology and management experience to the firm, OpenView is able to help portfolio companies with quickly ramping up Product, Go-To-Market, and Organizational and Operational functions to best practice levels. Founded in 2006, the firm has a total of $240 million under management. OpenView Venture Partners is based in Boston and invests on a worldwide basis. OpenView recently released OpenView Labs, an idea site for senior managers at expansion stage technology companies. For more information, please visit OpenView Labs directly.

About The Bridge Group and Vorsight
The Bridge Group works with smart B2B technology companies to build, expand and optimize inside sales strategies, focusing specifically on helping sales and marketing leaders improve strategy, performance, process, technology and tools. Vorsight is a specialized sales training firm based in the Washington DC area. Vorsight specializes in helping sales teams identify qualified prospects, get more meetings, and shorten sales cycles.

While smaller companies may adopt virtual machines in greater numbers in 2011, they may not necessarily adapt their backup plans to match the changes in their environments.

That’s a problem, says backup and recovery vendor Acronis, which recently took a deeper dive into the data from its January study on small and midsize business (SMB) disaster preparedness. The report found that SMBs will increase their deployments of virtual servers in 2011, with adoption jumping from 22% to 33%.

“We realized that these SMB customers for the longest time have been putting their [disaster recovery] plans in place and backing up their data through their physical servers, and that’s where they focused,” said Seth Goodling, virtualization practice manager at Acronis, in an interview. “When the virtualization trend kicked off, and the server consolidation trend kicked off, all of a sudden they’re faced with another set of challenges. It’s not necessarily the best way to back up your virtual environments, the way you’ve backed up your physical environments in the past.”

Goodling points to higher confidence in the ability to recover from an IT disaster among SMBs that treat their virtualized environments with the same degree of importance as they do their physical systems. “It was the companies that didn’t put quite as much weight in their virtual environments that lacked confidence,” he said.

In some cases, it could a matter of process: More than 40% of U.S. respondents in the study said they don’t back up their virtual machines as often as their physical ones. That could be the result of tight resources or a lack of executive buy-in — or both — but whatever the reason, it makes good sense to have consistent backup policies across all environments. (And if you don’t have any recovery plan, there’s no time like the present.) Acronis advises SMBs to give equal importance to virtual machines in their backup plans, applying — and enforcing — the same policies that govern the company’s physical machines.

Awareness doesn’t seem to be the problem: 73% of the companies surveyed agreed that virtualization “has either completely or partially changed the way the business manages its backup and disaster recovery.” Rather, when costs and other factors motivate virtualization deployments, backup plans might take a backseat.

“All of a sudden, their SQL databases and their Exchange databases are being virtualized — that’s tier-one, mission-critical data for them,” Goodling said. “Going to a tape-based system might not be the quickest, fastest, and most accurate way to recover that data.”

So what’s an IT pro at a smaller company to do when stretched thin across a complex infrastructure?

“The first thing would be that single pane of glass — or a single solution that can manage and handle hybrid environments,” Goodling said. Acronis’ January survey found that the typical SMB had more than two backup systems when they were operating a mix of physical, virtual, and cloud systems. Some companies in the study had as many as five separate backup schemes, according to Goodling. Goodling’s second piece of advice for SMBs: Your backup plan should plan for growth.

“It has to be scalable. Small businesses are not virtualizing everything from day one,” Goodling said, noting that not planning for growth can add unnecessary backup and recovery costs down the line.

Acronis also recommends independent backups and frequent refreshes for each virtual machine, image-based backups, and agentless software for virtual servers that only requires a single agent per physical host.

Goodling believes that smaller companies sometimes move faster into new technologies without the extensive planning and testing that’s often ingrained in large enterprise rollouts, which can lead to insufficient disaster readiness.

“SMBs may tend to jump into some of these things a little quicker without as much research, without looking at all the steps that need to be done,” Goodling said. “They may be quickly virtualizing their environments, but they might not be as concerned about backing up those environments at the end of the day.”

Company to Demonstrate Support for Virtualization and Private Cloud Initiatives

ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS– Exinda, a global provider of WAN optimization solutions, today announced it will participate at Interop Las Vegas 2011, happening May 8-12, 2011 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. Exinda will provide insights based on real-world deployments of its WAN Optimization solutions at a full-day workshop entitled “Virtualization Management: The Road to Private Cloud“. The Company will also deliver live, real-time demonstrations of its latest WAN Optimization solutions at booth #1005.

“As one of the world’s fastest growing WAN Optimization providers, Exinda has helped thousands of companies around the world to improve the performance of applications on their networks and deliver a superior user experience,” said Kevin Suitor, VP of Marketing at Exinda. “Exinda’s full suite of WAN Optimization solutions addresses many of the challenges facing network managers, including increasing bandwidth usage, complex business applications, and the growing use of cloud computing and hosted virtual desktops by an increasingly mobile workforce. With our Unified Performance Management (UPM) strategy, Exinda gives our customers the visibility, control and optimization they need ensure that they can support emerging virtualization and unified communications technologies, all within a single solution.”

At Interop Las Vegas 2011, Exinda will announce the newest edition of its ExOS 6.x series of software for its WAN Optimization appliances, which today offer enhanced management capabilities, including Application Performance Scores (APS), which allows network managers to set minimum performance thresholds for each application and receive real-time alerts if the levels are breached. Each also provides detailed reporting on TCP efficiency, allowing network managers to identify the least-efficient applications in the network, as well as TCP health, which assists in troubleshooting application performance issues. Exinda also provides VOIP Mean Opinion Score (MOS) measurements, which provides network managers the ability to monitor and measure the user experience for voice applications. The new edition will also include support video caching, support for IPv6 and other features that network managers need to optimize their network performance.

The “Virtualization Management: The Road to Private Cloud” workshop will take place on Sunday, May 8, 2011 from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. For more information or to register for the workshop, visit http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/conference/virtualization-management.php or go to www.exinda.com.

About Interop®

Interop® drives the adoption of technology, providing knowledge and insight to help IT and corporate decision-makers achieve business success. Part of UBM TechWeb’s family of global brands, Interop is the leading business technology event series. Through in-depth educational programs, workshops, real-world demonstrations and live technology implementations in its unique InteropNet program, Interop provides the forum for the most powerful innovations and solutions the industry has to offer. For more information about these events visit, www.interop.com.

About Exinda

Exinda is a proven global supplier of WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration products. The Exinda Unified Performance Management (UPM) solution encompasses application visibility, control, optimization and intelligent acceleration – all within a single network appliance that is affordable and easy to manage. Founded in 2002, Exinda is headquartered in Andover, MA and has established regional offices in Canada and the United Kingdom to support the growing global demand for its products and services. Exinda is a 100% channel business with products being distributed by a worldwide network of solution partners who offer local support and services. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

Intronis announces that Ted Roller has been named a Channel Chief by the Everything Channel’s CRN

Intronis today announced that Ted Roller has been named a Channel Chief by the Everything Channel’s CRN. Channel Chiefs are leaders in creating effective channel programs for solution providers. They consistently defend, promote and execute effective channel partner programs and strategies.

Over the last year Roller has been working with the channel and our MSP partners to craft a channel program at Intronis that is second to none in the industry, and the work has only just begun. In 2011, Intronis will launch new products, programs and departments all focused on strengthening the value for the IT channel. Stay tuned for PSA and RMM integration announcements within 2011 that will push the envelope and redefine time savings, efficiency and value in the marketplace.

This year’s Channel Chiefs were chosen based by Everything Channel editorial on criteria including policy and program innovations made during the past year, the amount of revenue their company generates through partners, their willingness to speak out publicly on behalf of the channel, and the number of years they have dedicated to channel activities.

“Being able to work closely with someone who spent the first twenty years of his career as a reseller / MSP is one of the keys to our success”, commented Kent Plunkett, CEO at Intronis. “Roller knows the channel from both the reseller and the vendor perspective intuitively – we have our customer’s voice in the room every time we make a product or marketing decision. It makes a huge difference.”

“Being named a Channel Chief is one of the most prestigious honors in the IT industry. This year’s Channel Chiefs offer tremendous insight into the who’s who of the Channel,” said Kelley Damore, VP, Editorial Director, Everything Channel. “Top channel executives consistently ensure that the Channel’s voice is heard when strategic decisions are being made and continually nurture mutually profitable relationships. We applaud this year’s Channel Chiefs for their successful partner programs and strategies.”

For additional information on the CRN Channel Chief list, visit http://www.crn.com. The Channel Chief list was published in the February 21, 2011 issue.

About Intronis

Intronis is a cloud provider of backup and disaster recovery services for managed service providers. Intronis utilizes 256-bit AES security and multiple data centers located on opposite coasts to ensure data protection and availability. Intronis offers IT service providers a secure data solution combined with a robust partner program, the convenience of online account management, and an industry leading technical support team.
http://www.intronis.com

About Everything Channel

Everything Channel is the premier provider of IT channel-focused events, media, research, consulting, and sales and marketing services. With over 30 years of experience and engagement, Everything Channel has the unmatched channel expertise to execute integrated solutions for technology executives managing partner recruitment, enablement and go-to-market strategy in order to accelerate technology sales. Everything Channel is a UBM company. To learn more about Everything Channel, visit us at http://www.everythingchannel.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/everythingchnl.

About United Business Media Limited

UBM focuses on two principal activities: worldwide information distribution, targeting and monitoring; and, the development and monetization of B2B communities and markets. UBM’s businesses inform markets and serve professional commercial communities — from doctors to game developers, from journalists to jewelry traders, from farmers to pharmacists — with integrated events, online, print and business information products. Our 6,500 staff in more than 30 countries are organized into specialist teams that serve these communities, bringing buyers and sellers together, helping them to do business and their markets to work effectively and efficiently. For more information, go to http://www.ubm.com.

Usually setting up a hybrid cloud is a complex, time-consuming, pricey exercise

Skytap, the self-service cloud peddler, claims its users can now provision a self-service hybrid cloud in less than 10 minutes using a secure, two-way connection between their data center and Skytap’s virtual public infrastructure.

Usually setting up a hybrid cloud is a complex, time-consuming, pricey exercise, requiring days of coding, altogether a barrier to adoption.

Skytap says it’s reduced the hocus-pocus to a point-and-click GUI used to set up, test and configure IPSec connections between Skytap and the private data center.

Administrators can use it to set security perimeters including or excluding specific remote subnets and configurations. Configuration reportedly takes an hour plus testing and verification.

Authorized users, usually dev and test guys, since that’s Skytap shtick, can then connect Skytap cloud environments to their in-house systems.

Hybrid cloud environments usually don’t persist connectivity parameters without complex programming. In this case, Skytap says it provides persistent connections across its templates, configurations and snapshots. Users can create multiple parallel environments with secure IPSec VPN connections using a template-driven set-up process and persist those connections across suspend/resume operations.

The network connections can also be switched dynamically. Cloud machines don’t have to stop.

Figure $1,000 a month to start for 20-25 users and 20-25 VMs.

Skytap supports VMware and Xen.