By Hailley Griffis
This week’s article round-up starts off with more great pieces about entrepreneurship and startups. First, we have a post from Entrepreneur that talks about why right now is the perfect time to be an entrepreneur and a post in the Huffington Post’s Small Business section all about startup hiring and more specifically, the kind of people that you do not want working at a startup. We picked up some great marketing stories this week as well. In the Social Media Explorer, we found an article that talks about the incredible fragmentation of the online marketing world, why that is a problem, and how to fix it so that your online media is gaining as much traction as possible. Finally, in Small Business Trends, we read a great piece all about how to make sure your marketing efforts don’t come across as a sales pitch. Hope you enjoy our weekly roundup, let us know what you think in the comments.
3 reasons it’s the perfect time to be an entrepreneur
Just today, Jim Joseph published an article talking about why right now is the perfect time to be an entrepreneur. And it’s true, never before has there been so much collective support in favour of startups and entrepreneurs. This is beneficial for everyone because startups are the backbone of the economy, and with so much support, startups are much more likely to succeed. The last point that Joseph makes adresses social media as an important and accessible tool for startups to use in order to propel their marketing efforts
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By Hailley Griffis
Last month’s lineup featured dueling posts from Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette about Ottawa’s future innovation complex and how the thing just needs to get done. And as always, we had excellent content from our associates and contributors on effective and engaging presentations, getting an app to market, entrepreneurship, and marketing and customer service lessons that are universal.
In case you missed any of it, here is a handy recap of our posts, as ranked by the enthusiasm of our readers:
August 14: Ottawa’s new innovation complex needs lots of parking. And maybe a few other things, too, by Francis Moran
August 08: Ottawa’s proposed innovation complex suffers Ottawa’s familiar inferiority complex, by Francis Moran
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By Hailley Griffis 
We found no shortage of amazing startup articles to share this week. One challenge that startups often face is getting media coverage and one of the posts in our lineup today addresses this issue for startups, even if they are from small towns. Next, we have advice from investors like Mark Cuban on how to pitch, as well as startup tips from the founder of ScaleOut and comments from Y Combinator’s Paul Graham. This week’s posts come from TechVibes, The Washington Post, The Telegraph and Ventureburn.
How to make the media care about your startup — no matter which city it’s from
This subject is relevant, even in a city like Ottawa. Despite the fact that Ottawa does not suffer the same disadvantage as startups in Atlantic Canada, startups in Ottawa often talk about being overlooked in favour of those from Toronto, Waterloo or Montreal. Shaun Markey makes a great point about the need to reach out to individual editors and reporters if you want media coverage for your startup, because they will not come to you.
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By Leo Valiquette
In this socially enabled age, it could be argued that “try before you buy” has become as anachronistic as a laptop case with pockets for floppy disks.
As a consumer, why bother to waste the time when you can simply turn to product review sites and customer review ratings?
Because opinion is seldom objective, that’s why.
Many negative reviews say more about the reviewer than they do about the quality or performance of the product. It’s impossible to appreciate and factor in all the variables that could be influencing another buyer’s reaction. They may have had unrealistic expectations, their needs may not have not have been an appropriate match, or they could have been looking for features and functionality that were not present and are not relevant to you.
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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 2011. We welcome your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
It’s fitting that we follow up last week’s post on the strategic value of marketing in its purest sense as a process for enabling customer validation and iterative product development with a definition of this thing called lean startup.
Strategic marketing is a fundamental aspect of the lean startup methodology, a methodology first defined by Eric Ries almost three years ago. And lean startup itself as a process for bringing technology to market warrants careful consideration by any entrepreneur in the socially enabled age of Web 2.0.
It’s fitting because just this month, Ries updated his definition of lean startup based on how the concept has evolved since it was first coined.
Ries defines lean “in the sense of low burn. Of course, many startups are capital efficient and generally frugal. But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste.”
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By Hailley Griffis 
