Case Study: MapSherpa
"We have been fortunate enough to have worked over the past nine months with Francis Moran and Associates to deliver virtual CMO services for our company, and so far it has been highly effective. With this relationship, we get access to a level of experience and expertise which would be unaffordable to us if we were to hire a full-time equivalent." Dave McIlhagga, Founder and CEO
Case Study: Singletouch
"When I hired Francis Moran to lead our marketing efforts in 2011, I had very high expectations. We needed to completely rebuild our marketing from the ground up. Francis and his team not only met those high expectations but exceeded them. He brought a very high level of strategic thinking, professionalism and creativity to our organization that will be felt for many years to come in our quest to build a successful IT company." Marty Hilsenteger, Founder and CEO
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.
How does your PR team know which customers to approach to be a reference?
This the next 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 November 2007. We welcome your feedback.
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, and for two good reasons. First, it’s incredibly widely held, believed in by clients and actively promoted by agencies. Second, it is so demonstrably untrue that after 30 years practice as both a journalist and PR guy, I remain utterly gobsmacked that it retains such unassailable currency.
Having worked the trenches of daily, weekly and monthly journalism, for both print and broadcast outlets, on both a local and national level and for both general news media and trade publications, some of my strongest and truest professional and personal relationships are with journalists. And I couldn’t lean on the best of those relationships to get a client of mine even a column inch of coverage that the client’s story didn’t merit. More to the point, I wouldn’t risk my own credibility by even trying.
As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we asked John Craig, a veteran of commercializing mobile technologies, to share his thoughts on how startups can achieve market validation to drive revenues. This is the first of his commentaries and we welcome your feedback.
By John Craig
The importance to emerging Canadian companies of being focused on winning deals outside of Canada.
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. We are headquartered in Ottawa, Canada with offices in the U.S. and resellers around the world.
In 2009, we had a very simple idea — developing mobile applications for community engagement. The idea was to allow organizations to reach out to their key constituents to broadcast their news, events, social networking feeds and other information. These constituents would then share this information using their own Facebook and Twitter accounts, and then the organizations would ask these people to perform activities to the benefit of those organizations.
Cool, right? We thought so – and we wanted to prove it. So where to start? Well there was always the Government of Canada, which was in our own backyard. We knew the sales cycles are 18 months or more, and it was very conservative about adopting new technologies that hadn’t been proven elsewhere. We needed to find a customer who was willing to take a risk. Better yet, was willing to take a risk and would pay us to do it. That way, we could prove the value of the idea.
By Alexandra Reid
Rebranding using social media is a new and fascinating subject. Part of my job is to keep on top of the latest social media best practices, but after an extensive amount of research, I’ve found that there is very little comprehensive and applicable content offered on the subject of social media rebranding.
To help our clients and others currently going through this process, I’ve decided to share all of the information I have gathered on the subject, which includes how to change a company’s name, image and “voice” across accounts and how to spread the word of the change using the “big three,” Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This is part one of a three-part series and will cover company name changes. Over the next two weeks, I will explain how to reflect and support your rebranding by changing your image and voice through social media.
This is the 26th 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
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 and Network Hippo has set out to prove that, while location doesn’t matter, Ottawa nonetheless has significant advantages that can be levered to its advantage.
Last week, we spoke with Scott about his efforts to launch in Ottawa this fall a startup accelerator with a number of other private and public sector stakeholders. He talked about what this program hopes to achieve, the unique strengths of the Ottawa market and how the accelerator’s “hyper-local” approach makes it unique. Today we conclude with his thoughts on how this kind of initiative benefits everyone involved, what else it needs to be successful, and the roles its various stakeholders must play.
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 […]
Read more... -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 […]
Read more... -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 […]
Read more... -July 19, 2011 by Alexandra Reid
I watched a mesmerizing documentary night before last called Future Intelligence that examines how smart technology will eventually be embedded everywhere, including our clothing, furniture, cars and even our contact lenses […]
Read more... -July 18, 2011 by Francis Moran
Scott Annan is no stranger to the Ottawa startup community. The founder of software development and web consultancy Mercury Grove and social utility Network Hippo fits the mould of what we describe as a champion. In addition to his regular involvement with various organizations and events around town that help nascent entrepreneurs get their technology to market […]
Read more... -July 15, 2011 by Linda Forrest
Does everyone remember the game broken telephone? There’s a brilliant example of it from the Simpsons that added the phrase “Purple monkey dishwasher” to the lexicon of some circles […]
Read more... -July 14, 2011 by Alexandra Reid
Google Plus is all the rave, but will it eventually experience the same outcome as Wave? Bloggers and social media enthusiasts are clearly excited about the new platform, dissecting, praising and criticizing its features and debating […]
Read more... -July 13, 2011 by Andrew Penny
Global warming, Greek debt crisis, Chinese labour issues, U.S. unemployment, Royal visits… life is tough and running a business with all this change and uncertainty is even tougher … or is it? I say when life gives you lemons, open a lemonade stand! […]
Read more... -
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