March was an exciting month, full of changes and new developments.
In the commercialization ecosystem, all eyes were on the federal and Ontario budgets, which shook up government investment and spending in Canadian business and innovation. In social media, the Stop Kony 2012 campaign went viral, spurring fervent debates between its supporters and critics all around the globe. Facebook also unveiled its new brand pages, leaving many businesses scrambling to update their pages and understand the new format on deadline. We covered all of these subjects and more last month on this blog. If you missed any of our posts, here is a handy roundup.
March 22: What an IP co-ordinator should know, confidentially speaking By David French
March 14: Looking for that sweet spot to get market traction by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
March 01: Yikes … we forgot the demo! by Peter Hanschke
And on a related note…
Read More
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 Telegraph, On Startups, eMarketer, Guardian, Inc., and Startup North.
The difference between a failed business and a successful one, in five key numbers
As author Alexis Dormandy explains, KPIs are supposed to measure the most important things in a business. They are useful for getting a whole business focused on delivering the really important things. However, KPIs have now become horrendously misused to include just about any number anyone in senior management cares about, someone in finance can measure, or someone in the middle just finds interesting. This post cuts through the noise and shares five vital KPIs that every business should understand, measure, and manage.
Read More
By John Craig
My firm, Purple Forge, has developed a meaningful relationship as a supplier of mobile applications to governments at the municipal and federal level over the past two years. Given the integration of social and location-based information into our applications, we have been the defacto leader in implementing what is termed SoLoMo (or Social, Mobile, Local) with these institutions and borne witness to their trials and successes in leveraging mobile technology to engage with their constituents.
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
Outsourcing community management is a cost-effective way for companies to run successful social media programs even if they don’t have the internal social media resources to support such activities on their own.
Sometimes a company’s marketing department is in the midst of developing internal resources and engages with a third-party community manager to provide strategic and practical guidance to help them get their footing before taking over social media activities later on.
Other times, a company is too small or new to have its own marketing department, but realizes the benefits of social media as a relatively inexpensive marketing program. It hires an experienced, external community manager to run its program, saving the cost-heavy training and trial-and-error activities required to learn the platforms on its own.
Here at Francis Moran and Associates, I am responsible for developing social media strategies and also, if clients require, carrying out those strategies on their behalf. I’ve done this for large enterprises based right here in Ottawa as well as tiny startups located as far away as the U.K. Regardless of how much space there is between agency and client, the processes required to carry out successful outsourced social media activities are the same.
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
Facebook has announced that it will roll out new brand pages on March 30. However, businesses and organizations already active on Facebook can take the tour and publish their new pages now. This presents an opportunity for social media marketers to prepare content for new pages according to new features and specifications prior to the mandatory upgrade.
The layout of Facebook’s new pages is different from the current one in a number of ways and page users who have not prepared their content for the new format may see their once beautiful pages butchered. Please do yourself a favour and take the necessary steps outlined in this post to ensure your page and content strategy are perfect before the deadline. If you need a kick in the butt to get you moving, turn on your preview for the new page design by clicking the green button at the top of your page to see the horror of what an ill-prepared page looks like.
Read More
March was an exciting month, full of changes and new developments.
