We Bring Technology to Market.

Top five B2B social media marketing trends from 2011

• Posted by Alexandra Reid
• December 20, 2011
• Leave a comment

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 towards social media in 2011. Looking ahead, Forrester Research reported that B2B companies will spend $54 million on social media marketing in 2014, up from just $11 million in 2009.

B2B marketers used social media in a number of ways in the past year to connect, collaborate and share more directly and effectively with their communities of stakeholders, customers, prospects, fans and other influencers in their respective industries. As B2B marketers became better at listening and engaging with their communities online, many have managed to harness the full potential of social media to improve business functions internally, provide their communities with immediate service and information and boost visibility and reputation for their businesses across multiple channels.

While this list represents only a handful of the B2B social media marketing trends in 2011, I felt, through my own research over the course of the year, that these were paramount.

Read More

Alexandra Reid

Posted in:

• Marketing strategy
• Social media

When selling yourself as faster and cheaper is no longer enough: Part 1

• Posted by Francis Moran
• December 19, 2011
• Leave a comment

This is the fourth article in a continuing series that will feature case studies and anecdotal stories from entrepreneurs, consultants and veteran marketers about their efforts to develop, implement and measure marketing programs to bring technology to market and grow market share. We invite your feedback.

By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette

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? An established enterprise technology vendor is buying a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor to broaden its own product portfolio and bolster sagging sales.

Read More

Francis Moran

Posted in:

• Marketing strategy
• Technology marketing
• Technology Marketing 101

New OCRI CEO shares his vision: Conclusion

• Posted by Francis Moran
• December 16, 2011
• Leave a comment

By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette

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 a mayor whose election platform focused heavily on boosting economic development throughout the region.

Lazenby acknowledged how OCRI has fallen short in terms of serving the needs of young entrepreneurs, the need to better work with this group, and how it must engage with the broader community. We spoke about a new culture of collaboration with other stakeholders across the city, such as the universities and privately run business incubators, and the long overdue launch of Ottawa’s first accelerator centre.

Read More

Francis Moran

Posted in:

• Financing and fundraising
• Technology marketing

New OCRI CEO shares his vision: Part 1

• Posted by Francis Moran
• December 15, 2011
• Leave a comment

By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette

It’s fairly safe to say that I struck a loud chord with my post of a few weeks ago that took Ottawa’s major economic development agency to task for preferring cheerleading from the sidelines to playmaking that would actually move the ball down the field. It wasn’t quite the best-read post of all time; it ran on American Thanksgiving, a day that saw our blog lose most of our south-of-the-border readers who typically account for about one-third of our daily visitors. But it did garner one of the highest PostRank scores of all time, a yardstick that measures levels of engagement — comments, tweets and the like — around posts. With the exception of comments from the new OCRI CEO and from the head of OCRI’s marketing agency of record — neither of whom is exactly what you might call a dispassionate observer — every comment, tweet and other reaction I received applauded my characterisation and concurred with it. Some went even further with my analogy, with, for example, one widely involved local angel investor telling me yesterday that far from simply standing on the sidelines cheering, OCRI has often stepped onto the field to take the ball away and out of play from entrepreneurs and others who are trying to score real goals for the technology sector in this community.

In a long telephone chat the day after my post ran, new OCRI CEO Bruce Lazenby didn’t argue with much of what I had written. Indeed, he told me, in the two weeks between the time he knew he was taking on the job and the time it was publicly announced, he conducted what he called some “mystery shopping,” asking people far and wide in the community what they thought of OCRI. “You must have been just appalled by what you heard,” I said, and he didn’t disagree. Nor did he disagree with my statement that OCRI was “a terribly tarnished brand.”

Read More

Francis Moran

Posted in:

• Startups
• Technology marketing

The Canadian response to PRSA’s #PRDefined initiative

• Posted by Linda Forrest
• December 14, 2011
• Leave a comment

By Linda Forrest

In my post on the subject of the PRSA initiative to create a new definition for PR, I likened the task to that of herding cats – ultimately futile.

But others closer to home have engaged in this exercise in the past, ending up with what they consider to be a successful outcome. Back in 2007, driven by the Canadian national PR association, the Canadian Public Relations Society (CPRS), a committee of PR experts endeavoured to develop a new north-of-the-49th-parallel definition. This was a collaborative research project that resulted in the adoption of their proposed definition by the CPRS:

Read More

Linda Forrest

Posted in:

• inmedia Public Relations
• Public and media relations