A new way to generate sales leads!
Company Channel
Company Channel Overview
Through a global semantic network of experts, information and collaborative content, Azouk Company Channel provides an innovative and smart way to reach the right groups of customers and decision makers within your market segment. The Company Channel is a premium service that allows you benefit from collecting sales leads and market intelligence in a highly efficient way.
The Company Channel service allows enterprises and industry organizations to achieve more precise market positioning in their segments. By exposing your product descriptions, case studies, white papers, news as well as profiles of your key experts, customers and partners to Azouk, you can quickly drive potential customers directly to your information and market offering.
By creating your Company Channel:
- Your potential customers can ‘discover’ your company while searching for specific types of technologies, products, solutions and services.
- Azouk can automatically detect and index the content published by or related to your company and tag it by your company’s name.
- The information published on your Channel can be pushed to social media services such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg or LinkedIn.
- Azouk can establish the expert rating for your company by analyzing the choices and recommendations of industry experts.
Documents and all other content items published on your Channel are protected, i.e. only you have the right to edit their attributes like titles, topics, etc. Also any attempt to view or download your documents requires user registration, which is vital for your sales leads generation.
Select Company Channel Service
The Company Channel service is currently available in three different versions:
- Basic – providing most of the Company Channel functions and features
- Standard – enabling content download control through your website
- Pro – supporting automatic content publishing on your Channel
For most enterprises and organizations the Standard version of the Company Channel service is recommended. It provides the best value for money. The Basic version offers a cost-efficient alternative for startups and smaller organizations.
The Pro version is recommended for industry organizations, market analysts, event organizers and all other companies that intend to publish a significant number of premium content items, such as market reports, conference programs, papers, standards, etc.
Create Company Channel
To start, simply click on Create Company Channel button and then follow a simple process consisting of a few steps:
- Step 1 - Create Your Enterprise Account
First you need to create your enterprise account. In this step you will be asked to provide your company’s legal name and the web site address (URL) as well as your name, email address and password. To provide a correct URL is very important as it is used as a unique enterprise user ID of your company and the login name. If your company already has a public profile on Azouk you will have to approve the usage of existing data on your new Company Channel.
- Step 2 - Validate Your Contact Information
You will now receive a confirmation email containing a link to you account. By clicking on the link you will confirm your identity and finalize the creation of your enterprise account.
- Step 3 - Select Service and Pay
In this step you will be able to select the type of your Company Channel service (Basic, Standard or Pro) and a subscription period (6 or 12 months). After this, you will be directed to secure payment handled on behalf of Azouk by PayPal. If you have chosen to pay by invoice, you will have to provide a valid invoice number. Now your Company Channel is activated you are ready to create your company’s profile.
- Step 4 - Create Company Profile
In this step you should define the business profile of your company. This information is very important to make your company “searchable” for specific keywords, tags, product names, etc. If your company had already a public profile on Azouk (see Step 1) this profile will be now removed and substituted by your channel profile. Azouk will also analyze your web site to establish initial profile information.
Publish on Company Channel
Publishing, editing, inspecting and removing content and information on your Company Channel is handled through MyZouk. MyZouk is a special page on Azouk, available only to authorized users to manage your Company Channel. To access the MyZouk page you have to be logged in on your enterprise account.
Publishing content and information on your Company Channel is very simple.
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Publishing Documents – Uploading Files
To publish documents on your Channel please select Upload File option on your MyZouk page. You may upload more than one file at the same time. Azouk analyses and indexes every uploaded file to detect tags, topics, authors and extract a title. Once uploading is completed you can manually edit these attributes and specify the exact content type (e.g. “White Paper” or “Case Study”). You may upload files in different formats, however, PDF is recommended.
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Publishing Bookmarks – Adding Links to Web Pages
Azouk allows you add bookmarks to news releases, product descriptions and other web content published on your company’s website and other sites. Web content is treated in the same way as uploaded files. To add a bookmark please select Add Bookmark option on your MyZouk page. Azouk analyses and indexes every bookmarked page in order to auto-detect tags, and topics and extract a title. You can always edit these attributes.
- Quick Bookmarking – Using ‘Post to Azouk’ Bookmarklet
If you want to add your bookmarks quickly you should use the Azouk bookmarklet. You just click on the ‘Post to Azouk’ button installed on your browser and a bookmark to the current web page is immediately added to your MyZouk. This is a recommended way of publishing bookmarks on your Channel. To install bookmarklet please select Add Bookmark option on your MyZouk or click on Bookmarklet link in the footer menu and follow the instruction.
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Adding Expert Profiles – Your Management and Experts
Another smart way to promote your company is to publish profiles of your executives, management and experts on your Company Channel. Every person you wish to add to your Channel must first set up his/her profile on Azouk. You then select their profile by searching on Azouk for their name and add it to the Channel by clicking Follow button on the user profile page or user banner in search results.
- Adding Company Profiles – Your Customers and Partners
You may also publish profiles of your customers, business partners and suppliers on your Company Channel. To add you have to select a profile by searching on Azouk for this company’s name and add it to the Channel by clicking Follow button on the company profile page or banner in search results. If a company you want to add to your Channel does yet have a profile on Azouk, you can easily create such a public profile clicking on Company Profile link in the footer menu.
Company Channel Features
Company Channel Page
The Company Channel service allows a company to benefit from viral marketing, but at the same time control the information published about the company on Azouk. Every subscriber to this service gets an enterprise user account that has exclusive rights to edit the company’s profile the company’s content items posted on the Company Channel.
A Company Channel is a dedicated Azouk page where the company can publish selected content and information including:
- company profile presenting the company and its business;
- company content, e.g. product descriptions, papers, news, etc.
- company experts including management, experts, consultants, etc.
- company partners including customers, distributors, suppliers, etc.
Publishing content on a Company Channel is done through the enterprise user’s Myzouk page which plays the role of a backend interface to the Azouk Content Management System. Access to a company’s Myzouk page is login and password protected. Information and content can be also extracted by Azouk from the enterprise customer’s website, Content Management System or Twitter account and published automatically on the Company Channel.
Company Channel Profile
The Company Channel profile is published on your Company Channel page. The Profile helps you to build an accurate and desired online business profile of your company. The Profile includes:
- Legal Company Name – already provided during account creation. Please check that it is the correct legal name or your company, e.g. “Azouk Network Ltd.”
- Company Web Site – already provided during account creation. This field is read only. To change, please contact us.
- Company Type – defines the business character of your company, e.g. “System Integrator”, “Solution Provider”, “Mobile Network Operator”, “Event Organizer”, etc. You can select several categories.
- Business Areas – specifies technologies, solutions, or services offered by your company, e.g. “SOA”, “Mobile Applications”, “B2B Gateway”, “Management Consulting”, etc. These tags determine the terms and keywords that Azouk experts can use to find your company.
- Company Trade Names – specify your company name aliases commonly used in your market communications, e.g. “Azouk”. These names are very important for automatic tagging and search.
- Company Business Profiles – short “elevator pitch” of your company. This information will be published on your Channel page.
- Other Information – includes company, logo, address, contact (already specified), etc.
Readership Tracking
One of the key features of the Company Channel service is to enable an enterprise customer to track Azouk users who have shown interest in the company and its offering. Similar services are offered by syndicated websites where companies pay for publishing their white papers and receive details of the individuals who downloaded these papers.
Azouk tracks the following user actions:
- Visits to the Company Channel page
- Searching the company’s content (on the Company Channel page)
- Visiting the company’s web page (redirected from Azouk)
- Becoming the company’s follower (adding a company to Myzouk)
- Visiting the company’s content item description pages
- Saving the company’s content items to Myzouk
- Opening the company’s documents (downloading files)
- Viewing the company’s bookmarks (web pages)
The statistics and details of such user actions are reported on a special Azouk page and delivered to the enterprise user in a form of a periodic newsletter.
Sales Lead Generation
With this feature, Azouk allows you to contact registered Azouk users who visited a Company Channel and downloaded, bookmarked, or viewed content. An unregistered Azouk user who is trying to open or download company content for the first time is asked to register. In addition, any registered user trying to open the company’s content for the first time can opt-in to allow the company to contact him/her directly via e-mail.
Registered Azouk users can be contacted by the company’s marketing and sales staff to potentially establish direct business relationship. The users who have opted-out can be contacted through the Azouk messaging service, without exposing their e-mail address to the company. For the users who opt-in, a company may directly use their e-mail addresses.
The lead generation data provided by Azouk can be filtered by the category of the user’s action and by the time period. The information provided by Azouk includes:
- The user’s action
- The user’s action date
- The user’s email address (optional)
- The user’s full name (if registered)
- The user’s job position (if registered)
- The user’s country (optional)
- A link to a document, bookmark or a search phrase
Company Content Security
Documents and bookmarks published on Azouk by individual users are subject to collaborative editing. A registered Azouk user may improve the description of any document publicly available on Azouk by editing the document’s title, adding the authors and list of topics, etc. Of course this process can also lead to undesired and incorrect modifications. Azouk tacks such changes to detect misuse as well as simple mistakes.
To protect enterprise users from potential negative effects of collaborative editing, Azouk protects the ownership of all the documents, bookmarks and other content published on their Company Channel. An enterprise user who owns this content gains exclusive rights to edit them. Other Azouk users can only tag such documents but cannot modify their descriptions and other important attributes.
Exclusive content is clearly marked by the company name and security symbol (a padlock) to distinguish them from other items published on Azouk.
Content Download Control
This feature allows an enterprise customer to control downloads of their content published on Azouk. Public content (documents) published on Azouk can be freely downloaded by both registered and unregistered users. In some cases, an enterprise customer may wish to publish documents on Azouk, but at the same time restrict the rights for downloading to specific groups of users, e.g. organization members.
For documents published on a Company Channel it is possible to define an alternative download URL. This means that users may find, explore and preview the documents on Azouk, but when they wish to download them they are redirected the company’s website or another place where additional authorization procedure can be performed. For instance, the user has to log in or register before downloading the actual document.
This feature has a major advantage for Azouk customers from a marketing and branding perspective as the web traffic is redirected from Azouk site to their own websites or portals. In this way additional interest for the company’s products and services can be created.
Automatic Content Publishing
This feature simplifies operation of a Company Channel by allowing for automatic publishing of documents. This is achieved through automatic synchronization between Azouk CMS (Content Management System) and the customer’s website or portal content repository. Azouk automatically retrieves the customer’s content items, analyzes and tags them and publishes to the customer’s Company Channel.
To enable this, the customer has to expose an XML file containing the description of its content items (files and bookmarks). It is similar to commonly used “sitemap” files that help Google to properly index web sites. The XML file is periodically analyzed by Azouk to detect new or modified content items that should be uploaded to the Company Channel. The access to the file is protected by a login and password that are provisioned on Azouk by the customer. The XML file should be automatically generated and updated by the customer.
The XML file includes the signatures of documents (content items). For each document the following information should be provided:
- The document’s title*
- The document’s type* (e.g. white paper)
- The document’s authors and companies
- The document’s topics and keywords
- The document’s summary
- The document’s ID*
- The document’s download URL
* These are the only obligatory parameters.
Automatic Content Indexing
This feature automatically catalogs and classifies the content uploaded on a Company Channel. To enable this, Azouk always performs the semantic analysis and indexing of every uploaded file or bookmarked web page. Azouk leverages the domain-specific terminology and knowledge to optimize search and to discover semantic relationships between content, areas of expertise, experts and companies. Therefore, the XML content description files (see above) may provide only basic information whereas 90% of the data can be generated automatically. The same applies to manually uploaded files.
Azouk performs also automatic tagging of uploaded documents. Azouk tags are not simple sequences of words. Azouk utilizes semantic tags that denote various categories of concepts and terms used in your domain including terminology and jargon, topics and keywords, standards and product names, expert and company names, etc. In addition, Azouk generates previews and thumbnails that facilitate visual identification of the uploaded documents.
Company Channel
