We’re excited to announce that we’re teaming up with Conviva to offer our joint customers a custom version of Conviva’s Embedded Insight service. Why is this cool? Conviva monitors the individual player for every one of our customers’ video viewers and then shares real-time metrics on each viewer’s video quality and engagement with our customers and Operations team. This means that both our customers and our Operations team can immediately be aware of congestion or server/POP performance issues and address these issues immediately to ensure consistent, high quality viewing experiences.

Roberts Communication Network is already testing this new integrated offering so that they can proactively prevent performance issues and ultimately improve view engagement with their videos. Armed with up-to-the second data on each viewer’s experience, Roberts can make more profitable business decisions and better target their audience – pretty cool stuff!

The custom version of Conviva’s Embedded Insights service gives content owners a look into their viewer engagement and video delivery performance that isn’t available anywhere else in the industry. The solution provides the kind of information people need to make the most profitable business decisions for their online video business.

We at Limelight Networks make it a priority to listen to our customers, identify their business challenges, and bring them best of breed solutions to solve these challenges. Our open approach to network management and available APIs allow us to work with companies like Conviva to continually provide new services that enable our customers to brilliantly orchestrate their digital presence. To learn more, check out our press release.

In our recent webinar, Marketers as Publishers, there were a number of questions we didn’t have time to answer in the Q&A session. The specifics of the questions differed, but three prevailing themes emerged. Attendees wanted more information on how to create targeted content for different audiences, how to deliver that content by using website personalization, and how to distribute it across multiple platforms easily. In response, here are a few concrete tips to consider. For more information, check out our white paper, How to Master the Art of Content Marketing, and learn online about the Limelight Dynamic Site Platform.

How to Create Targeted Content

Content targeting is both an art and a science, but the better you know your audience, the better chance you have of providing contextually relevant material. On the art side, spend time in external dialog with the types of people you want to reach. See what they’re reading and saying online, and engage in active conversation to understand what they want that you can offer. On the science side of the equation, divide your audience into different target groups based on the information you can collect about them. Use IP addresses to help pinpoint geographic location, SEO to learn what keywords resonate best, anonymous tracking to categorize common behavioral patterns, and site registrations to understand personal preferences. Then develop content based on that data.

How to Deliver Targeted Content Using Site Personalization

The Limelight Networks Dynamic Site Platform includes website marketing acceleration tools. Once you’ve created targeted content, our technology helps you deliver it to the right people, as they browse your website, using several different techniques. These include anonymous visitor identification, progressive profiling based on information captured over multiple visits, lead scoring with the use of behavioral data, automated pushing of content based on any data collected, ongoing reporting of content marketing results, and integration with major marketing automation software products including Salesforce, Eloqua and Marketo.

How to Distribute Content across Multiple Platforms Easily

Content distribution has gotten a lot trickier with the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, but luckily there are tools to simplify the process. The easiest way to manage delivery to multiple platforms is work from a single content repository and then feed that content to different templates based on the platforms you need to reach. Once again, the Limelight Dynamic Site Platform can enable this workflow for you. Our template-based web content management system is easy to use and comes with multi-lingual and multi-site management, advanced publisher tools, social media integration and more.

Just how important is the mobile shopping experience? Consider this: the mobile channel’s contribution to retail sales rose from 3.4% to 6.5% between October 2010 and April 2011, according to studies by Coremetrics cited by eMarketer. And, even though mobile purchases are still a fraction of overall sales, consumers increasingly use their mobile devices to research purchases before buying elsewhere. That means the importance of retail mobile websites is only growing.

With that in mind, here’s a look at some of our own numbers. Limelight Networks recently surveyed 520 consumers who self-identified as owning a smartphone or tablet and using that mobile device to research and/or purchase products online. In that group, a full 80% said they typically abandon a mobile site if the shopping experience isn’t up to par. Roughly three quarters of those who abandon ship said they are likely to return to the site later on a computer. However, about one quarter said they prefer to seek out a different site to continue shopping. In addition, roughly 20% of total respondents said they aren’t likely to abandon a mobile site in the middle of shopping, but that they are likely to avoid a poor-performing mobile site in the future.

In our survey, we also looked at some of the criteria that are important for defining a positive mobile shopping experience. Here’s what respondents had to say:

Content marketing has been on the rise for several years, yet many companies still struggle with implementing their own programs, and – even more commonly – with sustaining those programs in the face of ongoing content development and distribution challenges. Join us for a webinar today with AdAge to discuss the underlying platforms that make content marketing successful. Topics to be covered include:

• Keys to successful content marketing, including content development, reuse, and targeting models.
• How to develop an efficient and effective website engagement model.
• Technologies ensuring a high quality experience on the web with every content type – including video – even under high-traffic conditions.

The webinar runs today at 2:00 PM Eastern. Register here for “Marketers as Publishers – Content Marketing Strategies from Development through Distribution.”

Limelight today announced the new Limelight Dynamic Site Platform for Mobile, an extension of our web content management platform focused on mobile site publishing. Coming on the heels of our August software update, the mobile offering marks a significant step forward for the Dynamic Site Platform.  It lets users create mobile-specific sites, and provides tools for re-purposing content for multichannel delivery.

Features include:

• Device detection — Analyzes incoming browser requests and automatically displays desktop, mobile or tablet formatted content
• Shared content repository — Content is created once, and repurposed across multiple devices, regardless of format, design, look and feel
• Flexible templates — Template logic can be rendered in any text format, with full control over the presentation layer (HTML, CSS, Javascript)
• XML-based publishing — XML is the native content format of Dynamic Site Platform, allowing for fast and simple syndication of mobile content
• Device-specific image re-size — Device detection and template-based re-sizing ensure optimal image weights, regardless of device
• Single domain — Publish web and mobile sites at one URL that adapts to any device

Our partner Imavex is working closely this week with The Spirit International to stream live coverage of the biennial amateur golf tournament. What’s new this year? The live stream is available to viewers not just on computers and mobile devices, but also on the living room screen with a connected Roku box. Limelight powers the delivery, so we thought we’d ask Imavex a few questions about this week’s event.

Q&A
What is the Spirit golf event and what kind of audience does it attract?
The Spirit International Amateur Golf Championship is a world class golf event. It features the world’s best amateur men and amateur women golfers as they represent their respective country in team and individual competitions. The 80 participants enjoy an Olympic like experience from the Opening/Closing Ceremonies, international village and competing for gold medals.The Spirit International Golf Association and Texas Golf Association invite 20 countries from six continents to participate. Established in 2001, The Spirit is a biennial event that alternates tournament years with the World Amateur Team Championships.

The Spirit International attracts a golf audience as well as an International Audience. With over 20 countries represented in the event, it’s a worldwide event. It also attracts individuals that enjoy watching competitive golf, whether it’s professional, amateur, International or National.

When did Spirit start streaming the annual tournament live on the Internet, and how is this year different from previous ones?
The Spirit International began streaming the live event in 2009. The differences in 2011 and 2009 are multiple. The first difference is the marketing efforts around the Live Event. The Spirit International is doing an online SEM (pay-per-click marketing) campaign, display ads that are running on www.pga.com & www.pgatour.com, and a full social media campaign with a live blog, Facebook and Twitter updates. With regards to delivering the webcast, there are more platforms being used this year than in the past. The LIVE stream is being pushed to mobile devices, notebooks, and Roku.

Offering the event via a Roku channel is a pretty big deal. What added challenges does that bring?
Educating the end user that it’s available. Roku is a phenomenal product and covers a large audience, but educating our market is a big piece and why we think Limelight Networks and Social Media can assist us in growing the brand of The Spirit International.

Are you starting to see more interest from your customers in reaching audiences over connected TVs and streaming devices like the Roku?
Yes! It gives us the ability to deliver the webcast, interviews, highlights and so much more to our target market in their living rooms. We have not been able to offer that in the past, which in turn grows the audience of The Spirit International. Especially with an International audience, it gives us more opportunity to grow our market outside of the United States of America.

What about video in general? Do you see companies using online video more in their marketing efforts?
Video is more engaging to the end user than any other type of content product available to us. It’s the only way for our audience to truly engage with our event and continue to grow our event. The Spirit International goes to great links to increase our video traffic and continually find new ways to deliver our product. One way that we’ve been able to use video this year is through the players. Leading up to the event, we sent every player a flip video camera and asked them to make some videos about their golf accomplishments, information about them, and anything they feel entertaining. The response was great and has given us the ability to showcase these players as they are in real life. Essentially, it gives more personality to the players and gives us more content to push through the social media channels leading up to the event to assist in driving traffic to the tournament and LIVE webcast. The video program was a success and we are anticipating a significant increase in LIVE stream traffic from 2009.

The Limelight Mobility team has been hard at work with a new software update, and a new website dedicated to all things Limelight REACH. The latest software version is Release 4.11, and it focuses on access to REACH through a number of new APIs. New API functions include the ability to:

• create, read, update and delete content collections in a REACH account
• create, read, update and delete videos in a content collection
• check the status of all video jobs associated with a video being processed by REACH

Limelight announced a new partnership with Demandbase yesterday to help B2B marketers deliver targeted, personalized website experiences. The deal brings Demandbase’s Real-Time ID technology to the Limelight Dynamic Site Platform, and lets companies take advantage of real-time data to target customers and prospects.

According to a recent national study conducted by Demandbase, corporate websites are second only to personal connections and referrals in generating new sales leads. Given that reality, it’s critical for organizations to make the most of their websites in the sales process, and that means using available data to tailor the site experience for different audiences. A static website can present a company’s basic information, but a dynamic one delivers content in a context that makes it valuable.

Yesterday’s announcement coincided with the start of the Eloqua Experience event in San Francisco, where Limelight and Demandbase showed off data-driven targeting with a product demo. Here’s a look at how a website might appear to four different visitors. In the fictitious example above, the four personalities are as follows: Minnie has provided some generic information about herself, Anon’s presumed location is known because of his IP address, Bill is self-identified as a CEO and fits one of the company’s target audiences, and Pierre is an existing buyer, and a repeat site visitor.

The CDN industry is defined by the problem it tries to solve, namely the need to deliver content more efficiently and effectively. But traditionally, CDN services have referred to content acceleration on the web, and that definition no longer tells the whole story.

Over the last year, the cable industry has begun to talk with great enthusiasm about its own CDN models. Because there is simultaneous interest from cable operators in delivering content over the Internet, the definition of CDN for cable has been a bit muddled. However, when cable companies talk about CDNs in the near term, one of the problems they’re most interested in solving is how to improve delivery of video-on-demand content. Where VOD is concerned, the problem is not about how to optimize IP delivery, but how to optimize delivery of traditional cable (or QAM-based) video content.

Many of the same lessons apply to VOD CDNs that we’ve learned in the Internet world. Cable companies are looking to create VOD CDNs in order to distribute content more effectively by storing popular video at the edge of the network. Comcast so far has been most active on this front, building out a national CDN, and increasing its VOD library to roughly 25,000 video titles.

Beyond the VOD problem, operators are venturing into CDN territory with IP content, but solely for video delivered within their own cable footprints – so-called on-network CDNs. For off-net delivery services, operators are still offloading content to traditional CDN providers. Broadband Technology Report has an excellent article examining the difference between on-net and off-net CDNs, and how cable operators are looking at the future of video delivery. There is still a lot for the industry to figure out on the technical front, but a large part of the CDN solution will ultimately come down to the relationships operators can build with other delivery partners. Cable won’t go it alone, and, increasingly, we’ll see a greater intertwining of networks and network technologies to support content delivery from a large range of video providers.

Content marketing has been on the rise for years, but many companies are still feeling their way around publishing on the web. Here are three quick tips for creating a successful content publishing program.

1. Aggregate and Syndicate - Aggregation can do three things: reinforce a message, help fill the content pipeline, and introduce third-party insights. Syndication feeds your content across multiple channels, and makes the most of any assets you develop.

2. Use Video – A video might get fewer hits that an article or a blog post, but the visitors that do click are more engaged, and therefore of greater value. Video also gives you access to new distribution channels (think iTunes), and helps with search engine optimization.

3. Deliver Performance – Your content is only as good as the end-user experience you can provide. Don’t get bogged down with content that won’t load, or video that won’t play. Plan for online traffic peaks and scale for audience and content growth.