This is the first 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
Last month, BlueArc Corp., a 13-year-old maker of network storage systems based in California, was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems for a reported $600 million.
BlueArc’s business was networked attached storage (NAS), the kind of high-end storage system for managing unstructured data — files, spreadsheets, digital content and images — in high-performance computing applications. However, the company struggled for years to achieve profitability despite periods of strong revenue growth.
“BlueArc, while it had received funding somewhere north of $200 million, couldn’t dominate the NAS market on its own. It needed a partner. With the acquisition by Hitachi and its intellectual property girth, it has nailed that market down,” InformationWeek’s Deni Connor wrote shortly after the deal was announced.
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By Francis Moran
My valued colleague, and an associate here at Francis Moran and Associates, Caroline Kealey, drew my attention yesterday morning to a Twitter disagreement she is having with McMaster University’s Dr. Terry Flynn, an assistant professor and interim director of the Master of Communications degree program in the Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia. Flynn and a colleague have developed what they say is the first Canadian definition of Public relations. According to them:
Strategic public relations is the strategic management of relationships between an organization and its diverse publics, through the use of communication, to achieve mutual understanding, realize organizational goals, and serve the public interest.
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By Linda Forrest
This one goes out to R.E.M., a band whose breakup last week reminded me of their full discography, including New Adventures in Hi-Fi, hence the focus of this post.
Wikipedia describes high fidelity as follows:
high fidelity—or hi-fi—reproduction is a term used by home stereo listeners and home audio enthusiasts (audiophiles) to refer to high-quality reproduction of sound or images, to distinguish it from the poorer quality sound produced by inexpensive audio equipment. Ideally, high-fidelity equipment has minimal amounts of noise and distortion and an accurate frequency response.
The best PR is high-fidelity PR. PR practitioners act as the conduit through which the marketplace receives our clients’ messages. In order to achieve the most accurate, worthwhile coverage that supports our clients’ overall communications objectives, the process itself needs to be as friction free as possible. But, in some cases, that’s easier said than done.
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As part of our series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we asked veteran technology executive and investor Ron Weissman to share his thoughts on how startups can achieve success. This is the next of his commentaries and we welcome your comments.
By Ronald Weissman
The setting: A buffet line at a Silicon Valley VC pitching event. An entrepreneur, not on the program, recognized me as a VC who had heard his pitch before.
The action: The entrepreneur drags me out of line, insists that I see his demo NOW! and corrals me into a corner, balancing his laptop on a stack of cartons.
“Ok, you’ve got my attention,” I sigh, with more than a hint of annoyance.
He launches into a demo of a complex app doing who knows what on screen. “See,” he says, “it all works, just like I told you it would!”
“Uh…,” I sputter, “what exactly am I looking at?”
“My app,” he says, “the one I told you would revolutionize multi-application business collaboration!”
In his mind, simply witnessing his demo will instantly convert me from a skeptic into an investor. In my mind, I can fake an urgent call (the surest way to flee a tedious demo) or be polite and suffer in silence. Holding a lunch tray, I can’t readily grab my phone, so, once again, I resign myself to the latter course – death by demo.
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By Alexandra Reid
Mark Zuckerberg rocked the Facebook boat again last week when he introduced a handful of new features that received mixed reactions from the site’s 750 million users.
From expressions of excitement to confusion to outright hatred on blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, as well as mainstream media such as the BBC, it’s clear that Facebook users have become increasingly more vocal with their opinions of the free site. This PCWorld article reveals a number of immediate user reactions to Facebook’s new features, from the blunt and judgmental, “Sucks,” to the pessimistically speculative, “Wonder what is going to replace Facebook,” which suggests that these new features may be just the provocation Google Plus needed to transition users to its platform. But then again, who’s to say Google won’t turn the product in radical new directions in another year, as The Guardian’s Dan Gillmor asked in his intriguing post. It isn’t all bad though, as one individual, who was featured on MacWorld, tweeted “It’s the ‘Facebook cycle’ – things change, people complain, they get over it and carry on.”
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Meet CommentAir Technologies
September 26, 2011 by Francis Moran
Siblings Katie and Luke Hrycak are in that category of entrepreneurs who could be called reluctant innovators. They found themselves in the midst of a problem they felt compelled to solve […]
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Former PostRank CEO Carol Leaman inspires at this week’s Girl Geek Dinner in Waterloo, with tales from her experiences with technology startups
September 23, 2011 by Linda Forrest
It’s been a busy week, with Francis Moran and me visiting Waterloo and region for a number of events, client and business development meetings. We kicked off our trip by attending the Girl Geek Dinner, which took place Tuesday evening at Waterloo restaurant […]
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Are trade shows the zombies of marketing?
September 22, 2011 by Francis Moran
Following so soon after a recent post that declared, “Your customers aren’t werewolves; stop looking for a marketing silver bullet,” today’s title might suggest that I am stranded in a double feature at the marketing equivalent of a b-movie drive-in […]
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Push selling is over … it’s a buyer’s game, deal with it
September 21, 2011 by Andrew Penny
Since the first acts of commerce, the seller has always had the upper hand with respect to product knowledge, performance, service, costs, and all the other factors that a buyer wants to know. Today, your buyer has access to all that information, before they even […]
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The role of empowerment in social media success
September 20, 2011 by Alexandra Reid
Not a day goes by that I don’t learn something new which furthers my understanding of social media and the role of the community manager. I seek out new information and it finds its way to me. It’s a necessary and unavoidable part of the job description […]
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Meet Screenreach Interactive
September 19, 2011 by Francis Moran
We first encountered Screenreach Interactive and its founder, Paul Rawlings, several months ago when we featured Jon Bradford, the man behind U.K. startup accelerators The Difference Engine and Springboard […]
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‘My PR agency can’t write’
September 16, 2011 by Francis Moran
“I’ve just come to expect that my (public relations) agency can’t write,” was the astonishing admission I heard a few weeks back from a vice president at one of Ottawa’s larger technology companies who called us to see if we’d be interested in participating in an agency […]
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There is such a thing as bad publicity
September 15, 2011 by Linda Forrest
There’s a famous adage in our industry that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. I beg to differ. Your PR resources are doing you a disservice if they fall into any of the following five categories.[…]
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By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
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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...) [...]