By Danny Sullivan
Today, over on SearchEngineWatch, Marty Weintraub posted an interesting comment warning marketing chiefs against creating “an IT marketing fiefdom”.
His point is that just because your IT guys do the techie stuff, doesn’t mean they should be the ones in charge of search engine marketing.
“In too many cases, you’re wasting loads of money on elaborate systems with no vision; well-installed machines absent timeless marketing principles; and fiefdoms of executive elves who need some basic training in SEO 101.”
Marty’s advice can be applied even more broadly in certain cases. I’m thinking of those entrepreneurial gear heads who start technology companies and feel they can do it all themselves, including marketing. In most cases, a very bad idea.
By Linda Forrest
I’ll be turning 30 years old later this week and it has me reflecting on the technological advancements that have been made in the last three decades. It sure seems like we’ve come a long way, just in my lifetime.
I don’t remember a time before computers. We had a TRS80 from about the time I was born and cassette tapes containing the data were strewn throughout the den. Apparently we were ahead of the technology curve at my house. Dad had a Zenith laptop in the 1980s. It weighed a tonne and I’m pretty sure it had a whopping 640K of RAM.
I vaguely remember renting a VCR when I was a kid. Later, we got our own VCR – a top loader with a “remote control” that was actually attached to the VCR making it less “remote” than the name suggests. Entertainment mediums changed from vinyl LPs to cassettes to CDs to MiniDiscs to MP3s; from VHS or Beta to LaserDiscs to DVDs to Blue-Ray or HD-DVDs.
You could cook things really fast in this new fangled device called a microwave. It seems to work well for heating things up but doesn’t cook as well as a stove.
Some of my friends had the Atari or ColecoVision to meet their videogaming needs, but I got a Nintendo Entertainment System from Consumers Distributing in 1986. Hours and hours of fun.
Phones went from rotary dial to push button, from pulse to tone, from fixed to portable and to cellular and beyond.
It’s easy to feel nostalgic for one’s youth and I fall prey to that as well – remembering summers spent outside, reading on the swing set, biking to a friend’s house, summer camp where roasting marshmallows was the most technically advanced activity, snowmen made, forts erected and toppled… Despite all of the technological advancements taking place while I was growing up, it really felt that technology was a minor part of my daily existence.
Now, as I sit in front of a computer all day, talking on the telephone, emailing, reading online, technology is a huge part of my life. With younger people, technology is even more pervasive in their lives and advancements continue to be made every single day. One can only ponder where will we be 30 years from now. I’m willing to bet Alvin Toffler has some ideas…
By Peter Kemball
For a quarter of a century, the Canadian government has operated a popular program that puts cash in the pockets of innovative firms and reduces taxes for others, the Scientific Research and Experimental Development program, popularly called “SHRED.” It’s now time for a tune-up and recently the feds invited submissions from any and all interested parties on how to improve the program.
For this they deserve praise, do they not? Well, yes and no.
Yes, if they are fortunate enough to receive thoughtful commentary and perhaps even innovative suggestions to make the product of greater value to customers, small innovative firms. No, if their follow though is inept. Expectations have been raised that suggestions will come to the attention of open minds. Now that we’re past the submission deadline of November 30, how are officials and politicians going to demonstrate respect for the time and effort invested by those submitting commentary? One step they can take is to post to a web site the submissions for which they received permission to do so. Here speed is of great value and a week or two after receipt, the postings should be up for all to review. Better yet, the comments of those officials reading the submissions should be publicly posted to seek further feedback.
We at Acorn Partners submitted our thoughts to the review process and in subsequent posts, I’ll share some of our thinking with you.
Peter Kemball is CEO and founder at Acorn Partners, an innovative firm that helps B2B SMEs finance their success.
By Danny Sullivan
I just read an article about the growing demand for VoIP in Canada, and thought I’d pitch in on the topic.
As a technology flack working out of a home office in the UK, I have been a customer of one of the VoIP industry’s market leaders for over two years now. There are several good reasons why a VoIP phone system suits me:
1. Cheap international and free long distance calls. Sure, there are all kinds of plans out there from the incumbent telephony providers, but I have yet to see the kind of rates applied across the board that I get as standard using VoIP. As probably over 50% of my contact with media and clients is international, this is a compelling benefit.
2. The ability to have virtual numbers in any location. inmedia is headquartered in Canada, so there is obviously a significant amount of regular contact with my colleagues and clients over there. At a nominal fixed cost per month, I am able to have a local number in Ottawa that rings here in the UK. There is no limit on the amount of numbers and it would take a matter of moments to establish a local number in any region, say for a new client in another country. Even if the overall benefit to a client is relatively small, it’s still an inexpensive way to provide a good customer service component.
3. Online access. The Internet dashboard that comes with my VoIP system is invaluable. When I’m on the road I can access all my phone details via the web, allowing me to check call logs, listen to voicemail, set up call forwarding and all kinds of other features.
Now, although my experience with the technology has been overwhelmingly positive, I probably shouldn’t mention VoIP without making it clear that it’s not perfect.
“Danny, you’ve gone all robotic on us,” was the concerned response from one of my colleagues on a recent conference call.
VoIP, as an internet-based service, is dependent on a certain level bandwidth for it to operate effectively. It doesn’t need much, but it can mean that you occasionally experience degradation of voice quality, either inbound or outbound. Hence my sudden transformation into a Dalek last week.
But to be honest, these issues, while a bit unnerving for those on the other end of the line, are few and far between, and the benefits of VoIP by far outweigh them. For people who work from home, VoIP is definitely worth a look.
By Danny Sullivan
My colleague, Jill, recently wrote an introductory post on analyst relations, and I felt compelled to augment this with some additional thoughts on the topic.
“Technology analyst firms, there’s no point in talking to them unless you’re prepared to pay them, right?”
Wrong. But it’s not an uncommon perspective among technology companies that have yet to engage with the analyst community.
It is certainly true that analyst firms do very well out of the consulting side of their business, and it is fair to assume that companies who pay their consulting dues probably experience a good level of mind-share with the analysts as a result. But it is a mistake to say that there is no value in speaking with analysts unless you pay them.
Technology analysts are viewed as independent experts in the fields they choose to cover. As such, they have a reputation to uphold. (Granted, some have more of a reputation to uphold than others, but we don’t need to go into that here!) This reputation depends entirely on the analyst being firmly plugged into the industry in which he or she is an expert. And this means they need to know about everything that is going on in that sector – from market leaders right down to emerging players.
As a result, those introductory briefings Jill describes in her post are highly important to analysts, ensuring that they maintain that position of all-knowing expertise that their clients expect.
Of course, the degree to which unpaid briefings with analysts are immediately useful to a company depends very much on the individual analyst. Briefings can be effective testing grounds for messaging around new products and services, but feedback is often at a premium and there will always come a point in the conversation where you are recommended to “have a conversation with our account manager.” How early this point comes in the conversation varies greatly between firms and analysts.
But none of this means you should not be talking to analysts. They are a direct conduit to your market. If they don’t know about your company, they can’t recommend you to end-users or include your products in reports. Ultimately, analysts will give coverage to companies that deserve it, typically through demonstrated, quantifiable success in the marketplace. In most cases, spending money with them will give you access to their expertise, but it does not equate to coverage in industry reports.
In the weeks ahead, I’ll continue to write about analyst relations and explore some of the differences between the big analyst companies and smaller, boutique firms.
