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 January 2008. We welcome your feedback.
By Francis Moran
Francis’s favourite fictions is a continuing series of posts on common myths surrounding the practice of public relations. When I give this as a presentation, I subtitle it, “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives.” Today’s fiction comes courtesy of a chief financial officer at such a venture who nixed her marketing vice president’s intention to hire us, saying, “I can’t measure marketing so I won’t fund it.”
Too bad; the company she used to work for is now out of business, taking a genuinely valuable technology advance and more than $30-million in investors’ money with it. Maybe now, she at least has a yardstick with which to measure the cost of not marketing.
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As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, David French, a senior Canadian patent attorney with 35 years of experience, now provides the fifth of his commentaries on the importance to a company of protecting its Intellectual Property.
By David French
I began this series by talking about the importance of having an IP Co-ordinator on the team and how this role fits into an organization. Then I addressed what it means to obtain meaningful patents. We identified the three principles that apply if the objective is to obtain meaningful patents:
1. Right invention
2. Right market circumstances
3. Right patenting opportunity
In my last post I addressed the concept of “right market circumstances.” This time I will address the concept of the “right patenting opportunity.”
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By Alexandra Reid
This is part two of my three-part series on tactical methods companies can use to carry out rebranding across multiple social media accounts. Last week, I discussed common pitfalls companies face during the process of changing their names on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and how to overcome them. Today, I’ll focus on the steps required to change your company’s image across these social media channels, as well as YouTube and blogs.
It should be noted that rebranding is far more than just a change in visual identity and must be regarded as part of an overall strategy. If a brand has lost its relevance, changing its image will not fix its problems. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it won’t hide the fact that it’s still a pig. If this is the case, the company must reevaluate its answers to those core marketing questions about relevance, uniqueness, value, positioning and why people should care.
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This is the 27th article in a continuing series that examines the state of the ecosystem necessary to successfully bring technology to market. Based on dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers, this series looks at what is working and what can be improved in the go-to-market ecosystem in the United States, Canada and Britain. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
The Canadian university system costs about $25 billion a year. The total income for all Canadian universities from licensing their intellectual property is around $50 million. Subtract the cost of managing that IP and you’re left with a net income of only $15 million. Getting technology to market is clearly not a big income stream for the typical Canadian university.
Those numbers come from The Way Ahead, Meeting Canada’s Productivity Challenge, by Tom Brzustowski, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management. While the book is a few years old, the overall trend illustrated by those numbers hasn’t changed. However, Brzustowski also quotes one of our past contributors, Doyletech’s Denzil Doyle, who puts these numbers in their proper context. According to Doyle, the IP income to universities represents only 2.5 percent of the new sales generated by products based on it. Do that math and you arrive at $2 billion — $2 billion in annual sales for the Canadian economy. That isn’t an insignificant sum.
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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 January 2008. We welcome your feedback.
By Francis Moran
My colleague Danny Sullivan made the strong case earlier this week in favour of negotiating embargos with trusted journalists that gives them advance access to your announcement and executives so they can do a better job with the story. In return, they promise not to publish or broadcast anything until an agreed upon time and date, usually the point at which you release the news to the rest of the world. The benefit to the company making the announcement is that the journalist has more time and flexibility to deal with the story and, guess what, so does the company. It’s a tidy win-win situation, and something we do whenever practical.
Something Danny didn’t get into, though, is the frequent situation where clients confuse embargos and exclusives, an understandable mixup given that both usually entail giving select journalists advance access to the story. But whereas embargos still treat all media outlets equally in terms of when they can run with the story, an exclusive entails favouring one, or a small handful of, outlets, giving them advance and exclusive access to the story and permission to run with it prior your making a more general announcement.
Journalists love exclusives. Some clients swear by them. We point blank refuse to do them, and here’s why.
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Reference customers add credibility to your PR program
July 29, 2011 by Linda Forrest
On this blog, we’ve written quite a bit about the PR value of reference customers and how to groom them. What we haven’t yet explored is how your PR team works with the balance of your team to cultivate that reference and ultimately exploit it to the highest degree within your PR program. This post aims to do just that. […]
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Fiction: It’s all about relationships
July 28, 2011 by Francis Moran
We heard this one again last week. Generating effective coverage of a client’s story is not all about the relationship I have with reporters; it’s all about the value of the story I have to tell. This has long been the top-ranked of Francis’s Favourite Fictions […]
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New companies need to export or die
July 27, 2011 by John Craig
As the co-founders of Purple Forge, Brian Hurley and I placed a significant amount of emphasis on exporting to the U.S. and around the world to get our business started. For those of you who don’t know Purple Forge, we develop and sell mobile applications as a service for politicians, event organizers, governments and interactive marketing firms […]
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Best practices for rebranding using social media: Company name changes
July 26, 2011 by Alexandra Reid
Rebranding through social media is a new and fascinating subject. Part of my job is to keep on top of the latest social media best practices and, after an extensive amount of research, I’ve found that there is very little quality content offered on the subject of social media rebranding […]
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Championship: A rising tide floats all ships
July 25, 2011 by Francis Moran
When we spoke back in June with Jon Bradford of Springboard, he made the valid point that the vision and drive of a few dedicated people is more important to the success of a startup accelerator than its location. Ottawa entrepreneur and community champion Scott Annan lives and breathes this philosophy. The founder of Mercury Grove […]
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Championing marketing to the C-suite
July 22, 2011 by Linda Forrest
There’s an old adage about the cobbler’s kids having no shoes, which means that the shoemaker is too busy making shoes for his customers to ensure that his own children have shoes on their feet. There’s an unfortunate parallel in marketing: marketers are often spending all of their time marketing to prospective buyers that the marketers themselves fall […]
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Fiction: Bloggers are different from other journalists
July 21, 2011 by Francis Moran
When I started this little tech PR agency, the world of online media outlets was still very much in its infancy. And an early fiction we had to deal with was a widely held belief that online media were some kind of a different beast from their print or broadcast brethren, and that only a PR agency that specialized in online media could reach these brave new e-journalists […]
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Marketing … get involved early!
July 20, 2011 by Peter Hanschke
The engineering team and product management decide on what the next revision of the product needs to be or, in a new product introduction case, what the new product will be. The development team goes through its process to define how to build the features […]
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By Francis Moran 
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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...) [...]