By Linda Forrest
Now that those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer are drawing to a close, many marketers will be looking at the fall as a time to make plans for the year ahead. We’re big advocates of maintaining PR activity all thoughout the summer, especially in the modern era where media increasingly consists of bits and bytes that occur in real time as opposed to ink on dead trees. Unfortunately, not everyone takes our advice and so the fall is jam packed with PR activity, some of which won’t bear fruit until many months from now.
With memories of the summer sun still fresh in your mind, it’s a good time to consider what your marketing plan for the year ahead will look like. The corporate world emerges from summer with a renewed vigor, ready to make plans for their upcoming fiscal year. With this comes the need to conduct a forensic analysis of your previous activities to determine what worked and what didn’t and why, explore what tactics you’re not currently using but could, budget for activities new and old and source resources whether they’re internal or external.
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This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from September 2009. We welcome your feedback.
By Leo Valiquette
It’s been a while since I have expounded on the subject of reference customers. (OK, it’s been a while since I’ve expounded on any subject on this blog, but here I am, back in form.)
In our work at inmedia, where we strive to engage with the editors of specific trade and industry titles to sell them on the merits of a client’s story, enthusiastic reference customers who can articulate the pain points that were addressed by our clients’ products will, more often than not, make the editor sit up and take notice.
Customers who have actually opened their wallets for a vendor’s product or service provide validation and demonstrate uptake in the market. They can speak in dollars-and-cents terms about why they adopted a particular product and the benefits and return on investment they have derived from it.
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By Alexandra Reid
It’s still the summer and the New Year seems a long way off, but while we’ve all been enjoying these nice manageable months, strenuous September has crept up and now lurks around the corner. This may be your best time to start thinking ahead about how to realign your social media strategy to stay competitive in the coming year.
It’s prep time, and for us social media professionals, that means looking at research and trends to predict where the social media engine will go and ensure we all stay on board. To make the most accurate predictions, I have taken into account projections made in the past as well as the most recent information I can find on the subject, adding my own interpretations based, in some cases, on my own experiences.
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This is the next contribution to this blog by Associate Bob Bailly, a Calgary-based neuro-marketing practitioner.
By Bob Bailly
There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.
— Winston Churchill
Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts
— Clare Luce Booth
While not an exclusively human characteristic, the ability to lie is certainly a characteristic of humans. Philosophers such as Augustine, Aquinas and Kant condemned the use of misinformation and deception inherent in human communication, referring to false statements made with the intent to install false beliefs a perversion that undermines trust in society.
Yet the capacity to lie is undoubtedly a universal human development, and our language is full of nuanced descriptors of this behaviour – from barefaced lies to bluffing, from exaggeration to fabrication, or from perjury to puffery. So it is not surprising that in this age of neuroscientific breakthroughs, a most intriguing area of investigation concerns the impact that modern technology is having on the human tendency to “stretch the truth.”
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This is the 30th article in a continuing series that examines the state of the ecosystem necessary to successfully bring technology to market. Based on dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers, this series looks at what is working and what can be improved in the go-to-market ecosystem in the United States, Canada and Britain. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
Six months ago we launched this “12-part” series to put forth ideas, yield practical insights and provoke thoughtful discussion about what it takes to get technology to market. Thanks in no small part to the enthusiastic response of our readers, we let the series evolve and grow as it would.
More than 50 posts later, including 30 we wrote plus another score of contributed articles, it is reasonable to say that we have cast at least a passing spotlight on just about every issue pertinent to such a broad subject. Dozens of individuals have shared their time and expertise with us as interviewees, subject matter experts and guest bloggers, and we thank them all.
But all good things must come to an end. While there will no doubt be the occasional post that will still bear the header, The Commercialization Ecosystem, we will be moving on to new series in a few weeks. But first, what have we learned about what it takes to get technology to market? In a three-part wrap-up, we will recap what we have learned that every entrepreneur and tech executive needs to know.
We begin today with that watershed moment.
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