The last thing VARs, especially smaller shops like Lighthouse Computer Services, want to spend time on is updating information and listings of hundreds, even thousands, of vendor products on their Web sites.
So when
"We were one of the first partners to get on board with this, because our challenge was always how to keep current information on what
Shaun Jones, vice president of worldwide channel and general business marketing for IBM’s software group, says partners like Sylvestre wanted a way to get accurate, repeatable ‘content blocks’ that describe products and functionality without having to rewrite, rephrase or rekey all the product information.
Considering the sheer number of product lines, products and cross-brand solutions
One alternative was to redirect customers to the
From a user’s point of view, the syndication material makes it look like users are on the Lighthouse web site, Sylvestre says. From there, potential and current customers can find out anything and everything they ever wanted to know about
Currently, Sylvestre says Lighthouse includes nine different
"They just came out with a few new ones we’ll add in the next week, like content management and a channel devoted to
"It’s phenomenal stuff. If we’d had to create all that content by ourselves it would have been impossible; we only have two marketing people at our company," he says.
And yes, adding these channels led directly to increased sales, Sylvestre adds.
"We track traffic and activity daily on our sites, and we’re getting hundreds of daily visitors to our site, of which a significant number end up being our customers," he says. "We can’t necessarily say the syndication channels are the reason [a visitor becomes a] customer, but it’s definitely one more tool we can add into our arsenal to help us sell and close deals," he says.