By Alexandra Reid
Francis Moran and Associates now has a branded page on Facebook. As the community manager here and a social media professional, I’m delighted. But I think it’s important to explain why we took so long to decide that this was a good idea, in case any of you are also humming and hawing about allocating resources to support activity on this platform.
The value of Facebook to B2B businesses has been debated for some time. While the platform was launched in 2004, it didn’t gain major traction among businesses until 2009, and even then it was considered to be primarily a B2C channel. Only until recently has it become more or less conclusive among social media professionals that Facebook can also be an extremely powerful B2B channel.
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This is the fourth article in a continuing monthly series chronicling the growth path of Screenreach Interactive, a startup based in Newcastle upon Tyne in England’s North East. Screenreach’s flagship product, Screach, is an interactive digital media platform that allows users to create real-time, two-way interactive experiences between a smart device (through the Screach app) and any content, on any screen or just within the mobile device itself. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
In our last post, we looked at Screenreach Interactive’s recent inroads in the radio and television industries, including its appearance on Popular U.K. television program The Gadget Show at Radio Festival, Europe’s top radio industry event, and its new “experience” for long-running U.K. current affairs program Dispatches.
But making a splash at major industry events and with high profile clients demands one thing – a compelling product. But a compelling product can’t be developed in a vacuum; it must address a clear market demand. As we have emphasized time and again on this blog, marketing and product development must work together from the get go. To quote guest commentator Ronald Weissman, “Great companies constantly test the market, for validation and feedback.”
The team at Screenreach has taken this to heart. With a new version of the Screach app expected to launch in February, every effort is being made to solicit input from beta testers and prospective users. In this post, we’ll look at how Screenreach approaches the beta testing process, what third-party tools it has found to make life easier and the lessons it continues to learn along the way.
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This is the latest contribution to this blog by Associate Bob Bailly, a Calgary-based neuro-marketing practitioner.
By Bob Bailly
My recent posts have looked at what we can learn about our business behaviour from a neuroscientific point of view. We’ve looked at how our brains have evolved and how this affects the way we behave and act. Neuroscience teaches us that the cerebral brain – the part of our brain that thinks and that differentiates humans from all other species – is a relatively recent evolutionary development, and that we are largely influenced by the living vestiges of more primitive brains within us. The decision-making part of our brain is reptilian, which allows for some useful predictive modeling.
My work, however, is not just about brain science. I believe that modern business has much to learn from all of the evolutionary sciences. Despite the drive to incorporate more and more new technology into our daily lives, we are creatures of our evolutionary past in in other ways.
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By Linda Forrest 
It can’t all be good news, sadly.
The trick is knowing how to share your bad news using PR so that you come out the other side of it as upright as you possibly can. It’s not just “spin” that needs to be considered here; trying to convince the marketplace of your silk purse when you’re clearly holding a sow’s ear does nobody any favours, but there are proven tactics that can be employed to dampen the impact of your bad news, whether its personal peccadillos of your executive team, bad sales figures, lost deals, lawsuits, or any other myriad pieces of information that your marketplace needs to know about, whether you really want them to or not.
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By Francis Moran
It is an article of faith that startups need funding.
For most, that means chasing external investors, whether they be friends and fools, angels or venture capitalists. Any CEO who has gone this route knows it can be an almost all-consuming task that gobbles up an inordinate share of that most restricted of resources, time. The biggest risk, besides failing to secure the necessary dollars, is that focus on the most critical objective of a new startup, developing and bringing to market an actual product, can take a back seat whilst the funding search is so fully engaged.
Too many startups fail to realise that there could well be another horse in the race to secure the money necessary to fund a new venture, a horse that is often running neck and neck with potential investors and that could, with a little judicious jockeying, beat the field to be the first past the funding post.
That horse is called your first customers and I am always amazed that so little attention is paid to this option.
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The big and bold social media issues raised by Noah Kravitz vs Phonedog.com
January 04, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As a technology journalist and editor, Noah Kravitz is used to being on the perceiving side of the media lens. But for the last week, he has become the media’s focus as a dispute lasting more than a year between he and former employer Phonedog.com escalated into […]
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When selling yourself as faster and cheaper is no longer enough: Part 2
January 03, 2012 by Francis Moran
In Part 1, we introduced Host Analytics, an enterprise software vendor which delivers a suite of corporate performance management (CPM) tools through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. We discussed how the company initially positioned itself as a “faster and cheaper” alternative to established competitors such as Hyperion […]
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Happy holidays
December 23, 2011 by Francis Moran
As is usually the case at this time of year, we will be taking a well-earned rest between Christmas and New Year’s Day. We’d like to take this opportunity to wish happy holidays and the very best for 2012 to all of our readers, our clients and […]
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‘Tis the season to make PR predictions
December 22, 2011 by Linda Forrest
Ah, the end of the year. A time when PR practitioners far and wide dust off their crystal balls and prognosticate about what lies ahead in our industry for the year ahead […]
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Merry Christmas, and best wishes for 2012
December 21, 2011 by Francis Moran
As is often the case at this time of year, I am reminded of the tiny mission church pictured here. It is located in Roma, a rural village in Lesotho, a tiny country in southern Africa. Besides being the gateway to Lesotho’s majestic mountainous highlands, Roma is also […]
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Top five B2B social media marketing trends from 2011
December 20, 2011 by Alexandra Reid
It has been another hot year for social media in the B2B space. While B2B companies are known for being relatively slow in adopting new trends, 86 percent of them are using social media today, and 69 percent of B2B marketers planned to shift more of their budgets […]
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When selling yourself as faster and cheaper is no longer enough: Part 1
December 19, 2011 by Francis Moran
In the past two months, Oracle has agreed to purchase RightNow Technologies for $1.4 billion, SAP has taken SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion, and IBM is buying DemandTec for $440 million. What do all three of these deals have in common? […]
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New OCRI CEO shares his vision: Conclusion
December 16, 2011 by Francis Moran
In Part 1 we spoke with Bruce Lazenby, who is less than three months into his new job as president and CEO of OCRI. These days, the only constant is change as the organization works to remake a tarnished image under new leadership, with the support of […]
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The Future of A&R – Walabe : [...] http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/top-10-questions-every-strategic-communicator-should-ask... [...]
Traditional Marketing is Dead – Long Live Bikini Waxer Marketing | Scalexl : [...] pointed out by Alexandra Reid on the Francis Moran website content marketing is becoming more and more like journalism. So, it is not just about the content, [...]
It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]