How does a corporation go public?

Most of the times it happens through a wide spread campaign with a lot of variables. 
Starting from figuring out which demographics and localities you’re facing and – upon figuring that out – developing a marketing plan, the press release and who to send it to, etc. 
Along with that may go an initial publicity campaign in the social media world, getting you attention from that specific group of people you are facing. 

What is the importance of Web Analytics for Social Networking and Etailing Sites?

The importance lies in the determination of the visitors perception of the project and how – and into which direction – the network or etailing site needs to develop if a certain site/section or piece of content is percieved as uninteresting or even neglected. 
The problem the personal profiling though. While the social networks have a pretty easy time because they hold tons of information about a person etc., the etailing platforms can only rely upon the information given by the customer in the past. And let’s be honest: while we spend hours and hours detailing our profile on social networking platforms we get sceptical when a commercial platform asks us for a our date of birth or associated, “intimate” information. 
The metrics used are a combination of those in every above standard web analytics software plus the data a platform holds about it’s users. 
Hope I was able to help and feel free to call me if you need any more information.

Pricing information on the cost to redesign large corporate websites?

It is premature to say that it would cost a buffalo nickel or a fortune because there are too many dependencies involved. 
Some of them will include:
Whether or not the platform can be open source which will determine a tremendous amount of the projects costs. 
Is there really a need for a content management system involved at all or is the content static? Minor changes can be done to a website for a rediculous amount of money and if this specific company has a change every half a year and the implementation of an enterprise level CMS (regardless if open source or not) can really lead to some sleepless nights. 
You probably get my point. You really have to work down a pretty individual catalogue before you even go to stage two of the project. 
If you need my help please feel free to call me.

What’s the optimal number of posts to have on your blog’s home page?

There are about 10 kazillion dependencies. Things you have to consider in that context are: 
1. HOW LOAD INTENSIVE IS THE BLOG; meaning how many images are involved in every post and how long is it going to take a modem user (yes, we still have them out there so don’t forget) to load the site completely if there are more then 10 posts on the homepage
2. WHAT FREQUECY does the blog receive new posts in? Which is necssary to determine because some people wanting to share a specific post (and are inexperience blog users) will not send the dedicated link to that specific post but to the blog its self. Now, if you publish 10 articles daily, the friend who received the recommendation email and reads it a day later because he’s a bit lazy on email too, will not find that article but the 10 new ones that have been published since the email was sent to him. 
And those are just two of them. But the most important ones. 
You’ll have probably set up a few blogs in your life. And software packages like WordPress draw from a long time of experience. So if their standard settings is 10, I’d say it all boils down to that, I suppose. 
If you need more help please feel free to contact me. 

Person Branding: what is the best way to build your platform?

Interesting to find your question here today since I just started a project with a friend of mine, branding him as a niche engineer in the automotive industry. 
One (but “only” ONE) aspect would probably be online reputation assesment through a well syndicated blog, utilizing social media, third party validation through guest blogging and being written about by other bloggers etc. etc. 
The internet is a great platform to gain visibility, especially on an international basis. It has granted me the oportunity to generate a lot of business around the globe. Business, I would have hardly gotten my hands on if I hadn’t had this grand platform available. 
Hope I was able to help you and feel free to call me if you have further questions.

What file format should I sell my e-Book in?

PDF is definitly the way to go and offers a wide variety in terms of security. Yet please have a look at issues that go along with that. DRM is definitly an issue that needs to be considered. Otherwise you’ll find your work spread around the globe and have officially sold two-and-a-half copies. 
Most books or articles I read are at the airport or in my backyard on my handheld. And PDF really sucks for that. Another issue in that context is that I don’t want to be having my notebook around with me everywhere. Making the book available as a combination of both mobipocket and PDF (whilst compressing it into a ZIP for download) would probably give you a big gain on and impress mobile users. 
I hope I was able to help you out. If you have further questions please feel free to contact me. 

What would people say is the top CRM system?

I have handled a few projects regarding CRM and must say there are quite a lot of them out there. Yet the “true” CRM which matches the companies needs 1:1 hasn’t been born yet (I’m working on it though ) 
But seriously – CRMs are highly individualized solutions that require a long pre-run analysis of what the organization wants to achieve with it in the first place. The bottom line being that knowing a lot about your customer is worth a hell of a lot of money. But on the other hand maintaining that data in the system with all the follow ups etc. can either cause your typists fingers to bleed on a regular basis or cost you money on the other hand. 
Once that is leveraged you go to stage 2, which is: how the heck do we get that into our existing workflow?.. What you don’t want to happen is to get too far away from what is currently going on inside your organization because it will slow you down dramatically and lead to disturbances you do not want to occur. 
Step 3 is finding the right product that will match your need. Now this is where it gets nifty… there are a few CRMs out there (even open source) that do a good job. Yet the thing I emphisize every time is that you have map your existing processes upon the CRM and not vice versa. A CRM which you can’t individualize/customize is worthless because you’ll end up with a rebellion in your company which will not bring you any benefits what so ever. 
Now, this is just a rough outline of the battleplan I have utilized successfully on a few assignments.  Contact me for further details. 

Blog or Newsletter or Both?

Although the number of newsletter subscribers is globally declining I would still not consider NLs to be obsolete as they are the usual way for the “elderly” to get their information. RSS in blogs is still taken as geek-toy sort of thing and has not yet convinced the general public. 
What you can do is take wordpress, integrate it seemlessly into your corporate presentation on the web and offer the blog articles to be subscribed to via email. I am just on a project where we have utilized that technology and are about to go live. I am keen to see what the result will be. 
With these modules you can either send every post via email as soon as it’s published or you can kick out a digest weekly. This way you will not fill up people’s inboxes with too much stuff. 
Combining the two will really save some time on the publishers end. 
If you need more help please feel free to contact me.

As the web industry continues to push for compliance…who’s listening?

In your question you point out that amazon.com, disney.com, google.com etc. don’t have compliant websites. 
First of all – and to state just one more rumor – compliant websites are to be beneficial for the SEO score / PageRank. And some say they have proven to be more successful because (of course) bots have an easier time crawling them. The good things about the companies you have pointed out is, that they don’t need to be indexed because they have such heavy traffic, so many backlinks on the web, and are just “found” without any complex SEO strategy implied. If you want to visit Disney, you enter their URL; if you want to search something, you enter Google’s. 
Second: let’s face it… if your company would be that successful with a PR8 or higher, would you give a damn if your website was compliant? If your name was branded that good and everyone knew it? Your primary concern would be to have the website appealing so that your billions of visitors come back regularly. 
The focus shifts from SEO to retention of customers as your company reaches a certain size and your efforts for third party validation in associated publications are taken care of because of the media’s interest in your endevour. 
Further more, you point out that we don’t tell Nissan how to build a car. I don’t really concur with you on that because we very well do. It may not be as publically known, yet the automobile industry does heavy market research to determine the people’s request for the spend a considerable amount of time about whom they are going to entrust a huge pile of money they have worked for pretty hard for the last couple of years in order to be able to afford a new vehicle in the first place. 
What you are totally correct about is that the users don’t give a damn about whether the website its self is compliant or not. Just as long as it looks good in their prefered browser on their, exceptionally distinct operating system. 

Is It Possible Build A Social Media Site For 50-60k?

my sole belief in things like this is that yes, you can get it almost for free utilizing the software/frameworks out there. But then again it depends on what you want to achieve with the platform in the future. 

 If you intend to make the platform something out of the ordinary totally, then the budget is going to be tight. Yet if you say that you want to develop a niche social media platform for a certain group of people that is to be appealing but needs to be nothing out of the ordinary than yes, you can definitly calculate about 2/3s of the costs you have depicted in your question.  

See, the problem with the costs for bandwidth can pretty easily be solved (at least for the moment) using external podcasting sites to host your content. This way the bandwidth consumed by the other provider and not by your servers. Same applies for live streaming. Chat, blogging and co. are pretty much bandwidth neutral and hardly use any real traffic. 

 The most important and key feature of every SOCIAL MEDIA plan should however be an ingenious and widespread function to invite new members to contribute. All popular services like Gmail, Y!, Live, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. pp., (and – IMPORTANT – CSV import) have to be available in order for your existing members to easily invite new content contributers.  Further more, make sure that you ascertain as much information about your users as possible because that is what determins the worth and value of a social network. And it also allows you to implement intelligent advertising platforms.