Thank you for being with us for the seventh month of our new blog. In case you missed any, here is a recap of our posts from August, beginning with, in chronological order, the latest installments in our series, The Commercialization Ecosystem.
August 2: Getting university IP to market: How Canada falls short by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
August 4: Is your invention novel enough to warrant a patent? by David French
August 10: Getting university IP to market: Who needs to step up? by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
August 15: Getting university IP to market: Levering youthful ambition by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
August 22: 30 considerations for getting tech to market: Part 1 by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
August 29: 30 considerations for getting tech to market: Part 2 by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
August 31: File early, file often to accommodate changes in U.S. patent law by David French
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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 February 2008. We welcome your feedback.
By Francis Moran
As part of my continuing series of Francis’s favourite PR fictions, subtitled “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives,” I have written a couple of posts on PR measurement addressing the common myth that straight lines can’t be drawn between a company’s PR efforts and any kind of real evaluative yardstick. I return to the topic today because I am getting some interesting comments on the subject. Clearly, it’s something that people are keen to explore.
Our approach here at inmedia is to measure outputs, outcomes and impact. In my first post, I described what we mean by outputs, which are little more than the critical path, or a list of how much PR stuff the client is buying. While most PR agencies and practitioners will set clear parameters for their outputs, too few are prepared to go any further than that.
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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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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 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 April 2008. We welcome your feedback.
By Linda Forrest
Today, I’m doing a lot of work that’s invisible to the client’s naked eye. Having previously posted on database maintenance, a “behind the scenes” task that is incredibly important to the integrity of the PR campaign, I thought I would post a few other tasks that your agency is regularly undertaking on your behalf, invisibly.
As we’re nearing the end of launch campaigns for some new clients, I’m starting to get a feel for the full range of opportunities that exist in the mid- and long-term for these clients. This means I’m researching the published opportunities available in editorial calendars for target publications for these clients, establishing a list of relevant tradeshows and conferences where company executives could be spokespeople or where there might be value in attending for business development purposes (let’s hope they bear no resemblance to the cautionary tales mentioned yesterday), and generally getting a feel for the PR opportunity outside of the Tier 1, or most influential, media with whom we had in-depth conversations on our clients’ behalf during the launch phase and within which we have a firm handle on the opportunities forthcoming.
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