By Hailley Griffis 
We found no shortage of amazing startup articles to share this week. One challenge that startups often face is getting media coverage and one of the posts in our lineup today addresses this issue for startups, even if they are from small towns. Next, we have advice from investors like Mark Cuban on how to pitch, as well as startup tips from the founder of ScaleOut and comments from Y Combinator’s Paul Graham. This week’s posts come from TechVibes, The Washington Post, The Telegraph and Ventureburn.
How to make the media care about your startup — no matter which city it’s from
This subject is relevant, even in a city like Ottawa. Despite the fact that Ottawa does not suffer the same disadvantage as startups in Atlantic Canada, startups in Ottawa often talk about being overlooked in favour of those from Toronto, Waterloo or Montreal. Shaun Markey makes a great point about the need to reach out to individual editors and reporters if you want media coverage for your startup, because they will not come to you.
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By Denzil Doyle
Judging by the amount of student unrest that occurred last year, ostensibly focused on high tuition fees, our politicians at all three levels of government would be wise to brace for more of the same in the coming academic year.
The first thing they should do is get a better understanding of what is bothering our youth, because a little bit of investigation would reveal that tuition fees are relatively low on their totem pole of unrest. We must understand that young people are better educated than they have ever been in the past, that they are entering the workforce with unprecedented debt, and the job opportunities are nothing like they were for previous generations. The mismatch is more pronounced in the manufacturing sector and it is due mainly to the complete absence of some of the more innovative components of that sector. For example, we assemble automobiles in Canada but we do not design them here and we have very little involvement in the more strategic activities like product design and product migration.
Where it makes sense for Canada to innovate Read More
By Francis Moran
We have a bit of a preoccupation with customer service here at Francis Moran and Associates, and we write about it a lot. It stems from my conviction that superior customer service is the only truly sustainable competitive advantage available to most companies. If you have a technology advantage, the next wave of innovation will leapfrog over you. If you have a price advantage, someone will eventually figure out how to do it more cheaply. But if you treat your customers like the kings and queens they are, you will prevail over the long term, and even more so if you are in a commodity industry. In fact, I feel so strongly about this that I call it “Francis’s first law of competitive differentiation.”
Usually, we are bewailing the sorry state of customer service almost everywhere. It’s as though most companies have yet to figure out that the cost of retaining an existing customer is a fraction of the cost of acquiring a new one. Every so often, someone does such a truly horrible job that I am obliged to award them my Air Canada-Harold McGowan Memorial Award for Truly Egregious Customer Service in honour of Air Canada’s baggage-handling chief at San Francisco Airport who said to me, when I started telling him why my bag had failed to arrive with me on a flight from Calgary, “Keep talking sir, it’s going in one ear and out the other.”
But nobody’s getting that award today. Indeed, just the opposite. Read More
By Leo Valiquette
In this socially enabled age, it could be argued that “try before you buy” has become as anachronistic as a laptop case with pockets for floppy disks.
As a consumer, why bother to waste the time when you can simply turn to product review sites and customer review ratings?
Because opinion is seldom objective, that’s why.
Many negative reviews say more about the reviewer than they do about the quality or performance of the product. It’s impossible to appreciate and factor in all the variables that could be influencing another buyer’s reaction. They may have had unrealistic expectations, their needs may not have not have been an appropriate match, or they could have been looking for features and functionality that were not present and are not relevant to you.
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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 April 2011. We welcome your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
It’s fitting that we follow up last week’s post on the strategic value of marketing in its purest sense as a process for enabling customer validation and iterative product development with a definition of this thing called lean startup.
Strategic marketing is a fundamental aspect of the lean startup methodology, a methodology first defined by Eric Ries almost three years ago. And lean startup itself as a process for bringing technology to market warrants careful consideration by any entrepreneur in the socially enabled age of Web 2.0.
It’s fitting because just this month, Ries updated his definition of lean startup based on how the concept has evolved since it was first coined.
Ries defines lean “in the sense of low burn. Of course, many startups are capital efficient and generally frugal. But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste.”
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Great articles roundup: PR agencies and Google, digital marketing misconceptions, startup failure, investor pitching
August 23, 2013 by Hailley Griffis
In this week’s roundup, we explore how PR agencies are in fact not dead, and why digital marketing is more than just social media (and other misconceptions.) In addition, we focus on startups […]
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When the rampaging elephant drops dead
August 22, 2013 by Francis Moran
When I started inmedia Public Relations in the late 1990s, Ottawa and much of the rest of North America was mid-way through one of the most inflated economic bubbles that had been experienced up to that point. […]
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How small businesses can prosper from B2B marketing
August 21, 2013 by Chamber of Commerce
Small businesses account for a huge chunk of business revenue produced in our country. In fact, there are nearly seven million small businesses in America. […]
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A tale of ProFantastic customer service
August 20, 2013 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette Your quality as a vendor is often demonstrated best by how you deal with prospects who have decided your product or service is not for them. As Francis wrote in his last post on customer service, we have a particular preoccupation with this subject because of its timeless relevance to any technology […]
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Now that you’ve launched an app, time to work on v2.0
August 19, 2013 by Peter Hanschke
By Peter Hanschke This is the last instalment of my journey product-managing myself to build and commercialize an iOS app. In my previous post I revealed the name and details of my app and how important it is to test as many scenarios and on as many platforms as possible. I signed off the post […]
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Great articles roundup: Demo day, VCs, cost of content marketing and startup PR mistakes
August 16, 2013 by Hailley Griffis
In this week’s roundup we rail against misconception, with articles from PandoDaily, Venture Beat, Business to Community and Washington Business Journal. […]
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Show up and throw up: A presentation epidemic
August 15, 2013 by Anil Dilawri
Nobody ever said, “That was an okay presentation, I just wish it was longer.” Yet day after day, in boardrooms around the world, presenters set up their laptops and present way too much information to their disinterested audiences. […]
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Ottawa’s new innovation complex needs lots of parking. And maybe a few other things, too
August 14, 2013 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran Once they got past an inexplicable preoccupation with parking, participants at a focus group session last night had some good input for Ottawa’s economic development folks who are planning an ambitious innovation complex just west of the city’s downtown core. Ian Scott, an economic development officer in the city manager’s office, gave […]
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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...) [...]