The Power of Online Communities for Consumer Brands

Online communities are increasing becoming a powerful source of word-of-mouth marketing and building long-lasting awareness for consumer brands. The following questions were posed to Maria Sipka, an expert on the subject and CEO/Founder of Linqia – a startup connecting brands, agencies and consumers.
Q: Why should brands engage online communities as part of their marketing efforts?
The simple answer is to get closer to their customers. Close to 1 billion people are engaging in online communities globally and spending a considerable amount of time connecting, sharing, discussing and learning. Mark Zukerberg recently said that “Communities already exist. Think about how you can help that community do what it wants to do”.
Q: What types of approaches do you think work best?
The first approach is to understand clearly what the objectives the brand wants to achieve. Does the brand want to create awareness around a new product? Conduct market research? Increase their sales? The [...]

What is an API and Why You Might Need One

There is a lot of buzz and innovation stemming from the rise of APIs these days so I wanted to dig in deeper to learn more.  The following is a guest post by Steven Willmot, an expert in the API arena and CEO of 3scale – a company that provides API management services.

I asked Steven if he could shed some light on what is an API and why you might need one. Here’s what he had to say…
Today’s web is 95% about web pages of one sort or another – content sites, ecommerce site or web apps which allow you to get things done. Running a great sight or service means getting people to your site and keeping them there (SEO ninjas wanted here!). However, what about this other 5%? It turns out there is another kind of web emerging which is pretty different – one which is driven by [...]