By Alexandra Reid
Social media has become an integral part of the marketing mix for new companies. Startups are employing these valuable channels to promote themselves, receive market feedback, interact with key industry players, and offer relatively inexpensive customer support to beta testers and other early adopters of their technologies.
Yet despite these benefits, many startups aren’t allocating the resources necessary to support social media initiatives until after the product is released, their first customers are established, and they begin seeing revenue. As with all marketing activities, social media should be regarded as an investment that will generate profit. And just like launching a new product, social media requires a runway to set up the strategy and channels and develop the audience and content to succeed.
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By Alexandra Reid
As a regular weekly feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are the Guardian, Information Age, MarketingSherpa, Social Media Examiner and Fast Company.
UK’s technology, design and startup blogs ranked by influence
Eloqua has published its latest U.K. edition of Blog Tree, designed by the specialists at JESS3, where blogs covering topics including technology, design and startups are ranked according to their influence.
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By Alexandra Reid
As co-founder of Startup Canada, the country’s first-ever entrepreneur-led national movement celebrating Canadian entrepreneurship, Victoria Lennox is a bona fide startup champion.
At her core, Victoria is a social entrepreneur, and you could say her relationship with the startup ecosystem approaches the romantic. She is excited about the opportunities that come from starting new businesses, not only from an economic standpoint, but for their potential to empower individuals with the motivation to think bigger, rediscover their dreams and be creative.
“Entrepreneurship is a mindset, a lifestyle, a way of thinking. That’s why I’m part of this movement in Canada,” said Victoria. “It isn’t just about creating entrepreneurs, but inspiring Canadians to think in entrepreneurial ways. I’ve seen entrepreneurship transform people. It’s about a personal experience, and if that leads to healthier communities, that’s a great byproduct.”
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By Alexandra Reid
As a regular weekly feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are TechCrunch, Fast Company, Forbes, ReadWriteWeb and MarketingProfs.
Why startups should pay attention to skyrocketing patent prices
As large companies increasingly look to protect their revenue streams through IP risk mitigation, startups with strong patent holdings will become increasingly valuable because they provide an opportunity to remove dual potential threats to the potential acquirer’s revenue stream — as a competitor and as a patent threat. Author Leonid Kravets explains that startups that are able to position themselves as part of an acquirer’s IP risk-mitigation strategy make themselves more attractive targets for acquisition.
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By Alexandra Reid
I’m a huge advocate of social media and how it helps bridge new relationships and strengthen existing ones, but I think it’s bad practice to rely on it as a sole means of communicating with others.
I’m a community manager today, but my background is in journalism. One of the first lessons I learned from the veteran journalists who were my mentors was the importance of meeting my sources face-to-face. This is because the human face and body reveal huge amounts of information that can’t be received over the telephone or email (social media wasn’t such a hot topic back then). Some information could be subtle, such as false confidence, while other cues could be blatantly obvious, such as a facial tick, shifting eyes or a bouncing knee that could reveal discomfort or even dishonesty. Even the layout of an office, clothing, personal hygiene and other such visual signals could bring more valuable information to a story.
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