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.
What does this have to do with B2B marketing? When it comes to the media, quite a bit, as it turns out.
As Francis wrote last week, while media coverage is more credible than paid advertising, the message is hard to control:
Media relations practitioners have no say over how much space their story will get, where or when it will run, or what other messages — even opposing messages — might also run in the same story. You can mitigate this lack of control and vastly increase your chances of achieving your desired outcome, however, through the effective and strategic planning of your media relations efforts along with a sharp tactical understanding of how newsrooms operate.
In today’s age of media aggregation, it becomes even more challenging to control the message as media coverage that could be incorrect, misleading, or otherwise wrong can mutate and propagate well beyond the initial piece.
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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 whether it will ever seek to compete with Facebook or if it will flounder like Google’s other attempts to penetrate the social media marketplace.
It is estimated that Google Plus will grow to 20 million users by the end of the weekend and that the current user base has already surpassed the 10 million mark. It has also grown at an astonishing rate, with a 350-percent increase in users in just six days.
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This is the next contribution to this blog by Associate Andrew Penny, an Ottawa-based business development and market strategist for B2B companies, and president of Kingsford Consulting Ltd. Andrew’s post is part of our continuing series about the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market. We welcome your comments.
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!
I regularly ask our clients from a wide variety of sectors how their businesses are going. With few exceptions, it appears to be business as usual. (One of our strategic marketing plan clients, selling software to the retail industry, is having one of their strongest months ever. Another has received an unsolicited acquisition offer – a good one!) Look around you, people are still putting gas in their cars (despite the cost), they are buying groceries, going to school, buying houses, making holiday plans, building bridges, sewers and railways and so on – all things that keep the economy working.
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By Alexandra Reid
Engaging content is integral to the success of your overall social media effort. It has the potential to be the lifeblood of your business’s digital persona, which motivates your audience to engage with you. It can embody your mission, positioning and approach and humanize your business by giving it a voice.
But so many businesses screw it up. Every day, I view the endless churn of useless, spammy and lifeless content, panning, as if looking for gold, through the trickles of mindless blabbering for content worth mentioning. LinkedIn is full of this rubbish now, as is Twitter, and it seems this mass of tired words continues to grow and congeal into an enormous mound of wasted time and energy.
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This is the 24th 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
A couple of moons ago, we talked about how “entrepreneur” is often a four-letter word on the university campus. Too many schools fail to appreciate how Web 2.0 has democratized innovation for the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world and make the mistake of assuming it’s only engineers or physics students who can come up with the next billion-dollar idea.
These outdated perspectives are further aggravated by student and faculty cultures that take a dim view of capitalism, scorn profit as a motive, and emphasize formal theory over practical, hands-on projects.
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Champions in the media and analyst communities
July 08, 2011 by Linda Forrest
My colleagues have been writing about the role of champions in bringing technology to market, examining what role internal and external champions play in determining the market success of your product. I’d like to examine a subset of the external group […]
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Fiction: Media relations is “free advertising”
July 07, 2011 by Francis Moran
At the time my PR agency, inmedia Public Relations, was founded, I worked out of a large integrated agency in the city and some of the account executives there loved to push my buttons by declaring that media relations was free advertising […]
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Measuring social media: A step-by-step guide for newbies
July 06, 2011 by Alexandra Reid
Over the last two weeks, I have taught our readers how to grasp the basic concepts required for monitoring and managing social media so they can be more effective in marketing their businesses on these channels […]
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Championship: Making the most of the juicy leftovers
July 05, 2011 by Francis Moran
Last week, tech heavyweights from around the world lined up to bid for Nortel Network’s portfolio of more than 6,000 telecommunications and web-related patents […]
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Happy holidays
July 01, 2011 by admin
Whether you’re celebrating Canada Day or Independence Day, we want to wish you all a happy and safe holiday long weekend […]
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June Roundup: What does it take to get technology to market
June 30, 2011 by Alexandra Reid
Is it the last day of June already? Perhaps it whooshed by because we were so hard at work, writing about what it takes to bring technology to market […]
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Why companies must incubate
June 29, 2011 by Jason Flick
Over the past couple of years, incubators inspired by organizations such as Y Combinator and TechStars have taken the limelight and become hotbeds for angel investment and innovation. Montreal alone has seen at least six new incubators created so far in 2011 […]
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Community management: Simple ways to keep track of key information
June 28, 2011 by Alexandra Reid
This is part two of my three part series on monitoring, managing and measuring social media. Last week, I discussed how to choose the right tools for monitoring social media and how to use them to their best effect […]
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