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Building small companies that roar

• Posted by Leo Valiquette
• May 20, 2008
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By Leo Valiquette

Small is the new big.

These words came from Jerry Everett, director of sales and founder of six-year-old conference services firm onconference Inc. Everett was part of a panel of speakers reflecting on six years of entrepreneurship in Ottawa at an OCRI event this week with the catchy title of “Blood on the Tracks.”

Small is the new big wasn’t the overarching theme of the event, but it certainly struck a chord with this nascent PR practitioner. Everett’s point was that consumers (and I’ll use that as the broad term for anyone on the receiving end of a service or product) have had enough with the kinds of customer-service experiences typical of large, monolithic organizations. They are ready and willing for a more customized personal approach typically found only with a smaller company. Peronalized service will increasingly become a key differentiator in the years to come.

We’ve heard this before, of course. A business strategy that focuses primarily on your product or service’s features likely has a short shelf life. New features and fancy bells and whistles come along all the time. It’s difficult to maintain an edge over the competition for long. As for price, well, somebody is always going to find a way to do something cheaper, be it with outsourcing, tightening up the supply chain, or simply focusing on volume over margins.

Service, on the other hand, falls into a whole other category where the emphasis is on behaviour and the relationships built with customers. When customers feel that their concerns and needs are being taken seriously and made a priority, they’re much more likely to become repeat customers.

At inmedia, our mantra is “global reach” with “high-touch local service.” How? By maintaining a laser focus on our client niche and the range of services we offer to them. By having a small, veteran team of counsellors who work together on each account to ensure continuity for the client regardless of who’s in the office. By holding ourselves accountable for the results of our media outreach efforts on behalf of our clients. Small is the new big has been a guiding principal for inmedia from day one.

Wake up call

But the emphasis of the event was much more specific to Ottawa. In an already-sour venture-capital climate, the question was asked, why has Ottawa fared so much worse in recent years than other tech centres across the country?

Panellist Debbie Weinstein, of tech-centric law firm Labarge Weinstein, spoke largely of the retooling of the Ottawa tech sector, from its heavy emphasis during the boom on telecom and semiconductors to emerging sectors such as clean and green, represented by firms such as Plasco, Iogen and Menova.

That may be part of it, but other tech veterans on the panel, namely David Vicary and Rainer Paduch, were somewhat more blunt: Most of the VC cash these days is coming from U.S. VCs and U.S. VCs will back a B-grade technology if there is an A-grade team behind it. The problem with Ottawa, is that the reality (or at least the perception, which often carries more weight than reality) is that we have A-grade technology but B-grade management talent.

(Then, of course, there was the argument from Everett of whether or not a company should even focus on VC capital for growth rather than bootstrapping, but that’s a topic all its own.)

Mr. Paduch emphasized the fact that as Canadians, we’re just too timid. We’re not ballsy enough compared to our American cousins.

Perhaps that’s partly to blame for the fact that we have this habit of hiding in a lab and engineering the hell out of a product before we even validate the need for it with potential customers. There’s too much upfront development cost and far too little initial marketing effort. We need to do a better job of getting out and selling an idea and gauging the market’s interest before putting all the money, time and effort into building the product.

“Entrepreneurship is part of the American dream. In Canada, an entrepreneurial economy is almost shunned,” Brian Hurley said in his opening remarks.

So why is Canada, and especially Ottawa, languishing when the experts say there is plenty of investment capital out there? What keeps us from building more anchor companies for the local tech sector that don’t end up a branch plant? Maybe the answer is only as far away as the nearest mirror.

Leo Valiquette

Posted in:

• Public and media relations
• Startups
• Technology marketing

How may my technology help you? Take 2

• Posted by Francis Moran
• May 13, 2008
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By Francis Moran

I’ve written here before about the abject failure of most technology implementations intended to assist in the delivery of customer service. And I know criticising customer service is such an easy target that it makes shooting fish in a barrel seem a highly skilled undertaking. Still, my experience last night with Rogers, one of Canada’s two major telecommunications and cable television providers, really did take the cake.

Now, Rogers is so pathetic at customer service that I used to have a Treo phone on its wireless network that consistently — and erroneously — told me the operation had failed every time I tried to perform a call-forwarding function. I lived with the problem for nearly four years rather than try to find the Rogers person who might be able to fix it.

Last night, I had to call them. Although the company has a web portal that is supposed to allow me to manage my wireless services, it almost never is able to do what I need it to do. If Rogers really cared about service, I would be able to do what I wanted to online or, at least, seamlessly switch from online self-service to an operator-assisted session, with that operator able to see what I had been trying to do, able to co-browse through the online portal with me and actually help me get what I need.

And lest you think I’m describing some kind of crazy wonderland here, let me assure you that the ability to do just that exists today in the form of our client ciboodle and its customer interaction software.

But enough of a client plug; back to my story.

I couldn’t get what I needed online so I had to call. (Insert shudder o’ loathsome horror here.) The IVR system was a little changed, and seemed to be intended to drive me to the right department within Rogers’s customer service operation so I followed it down the rabbit hole until it concluded I wanted to talk to someone about my business wireless service.

Sorry, Alice; wrong hole. The agent who answered asked me my name, pulled up a record, asked my postal code and said it didn’t match what was on his record. Of course it didn’t because, helpful IVR notwithstanding, he had pulled up my residential cable account, not my business wireless service. And then he knew almost nothing about what I wanted, which was to upgrade my data plan, and I had to tell him what his own product offerings were so he could sell them to me.

But at least I eventually got what I needed. I wasn’t even that minimally successful with Black & Decker, whose online store was also my starting point yesterday to source a new battery for my cordless grass trimmer. Unable to find the product anywhere online, I used a form to send an email asking where I might find a replacement battery. I listed my part number and the model number of the trimmer and asked where online I could find one or who here in Ottawa, Canada, might stock them.

I received a reply in suspiciously swift order and, sure enough, it had all the hallmarks of a machine-generated — and therefore nearly useless — response. Not only was it hopelessly generic, it actually directed me to click on a URL that took me to one of those advertising services that squat on like-sounding domain names, in this case www.blackanddeckertools.com.

Dear Black & Decker: Do you care so little about your brand and its reputation that you can be so careless in safeguarding it? Do you have so many customers that you can afford to send them to a wholly unaffiliated domain-name squatter? Is this maybe one reason why your stock price is languishing near its 52-week low, about two-thirds of what it was a year ago? Does lousy customer service damage the bottom line?

Just another day in customer service paradise, I guess.

Francis Moran

Posted in:

• Technology marketing

Copyright compliance

• Posted by Linda Forrest
• May 12, 2008
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By Linda Forrest

Having previously worked in the music industry where copyright was king and the profligate flouting of said rights has resulted in that industry’s expected implosion, I feel especially passionate about the issue, as any of my close friends will tell you should they admit in my presence to illegally downloading music… But I digress.

Copyright is a relevant issue for PR professionals and for our clients alike, as highlighted in a recent article on Bulldog Reporter’s web site. In a nutshell, the article gives an overview of the reasons for the increased attention that we must pay to copyright and to outlets’ more stringent enforcement of their rights in the hopes of quelling infringement. This is a stance that may not be popular, but certainly one that I wholly endorse; unfortunately, movements such as these come too late for a dying music industry, but if other industries where copyright forms the backbone of the revenue model hope to survive, a tougher stance is indeed required.

That is not to say that media coverage is of no useful marketing value; quite the contrary. As in the entertainment fields where copyright infringement is rampant, it’s merely a case of the proper copyright owners receiving fair and appropriate a) recognition and b) restitution for their works.

The next time you are thinking about posting a clipping to your site or photocopying and distributing at a trade show that great article in which your company was mentioned, pay close attention to the guidelines set out in the Bulldog Reporter piece to ensure that you’re not illegally distributing copyrighted material. Your PR agency should be able to help you navigate these rules and guidelines and make recommendations to make certain you get the most value out of your clippings while staying on the right side of the law.

Linda Forrest

Posted in:

• Public and media relations

Finding anchors in the chaos

• Posted by Leo Valiquette
• May 09, 2008
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By Leo Valiquette

Print is dead.

That was the sentiment floating around when I returned to school to study journalism in 1997. The internet will be king, was the thought of the day, and that was still years before the pervasive, bandwidth-sucking web services we take for granted today.

But here we are and print still lives, though it is taking a back seat to the avenues for “citizen journalism” presented by the blogosphere and Youtube, as well as RSS feeds and other means of getting the latest news anywhere at anytime in the palm of your hand.

Nontheless, a media executive in a prime position to sing print’s funeral dirge still believes it has a future, even if it is likely to be somewhat diminished compared to the past. That man is Paul Miller (pictured), CEO of Tech Insights – a division of United Business Media that operates the prestigious tech journal EE Times. His team was in town recently to meet with local marcomm professionals and, among other things, explain how their company is incorporating the operations of local reverse-engineering firm Semiconductor Insights into its range of services.

Miller discussed the premature claims about the death of print in the broader context of the death of traditional media as the prime source of news and information. We live in a chaotic time, he said, in which companies with marketing dollars to spend don’t know what to do. Should they focus their spending on Google AdWords? Should they try to stimulate interest in their company’s technology and their own subject matter expertise in the blogosphere? Is there still value to be had through traditional media, be it in print, online, or both?

His take was that, despite all the sound and fury surrounding the funnels of community discourse now available online, there will always be a need for trusted sources of information with a track record of accuracy and impartiality. And for a company to adequately generate the right kind of buzz about itself, it can’t depend on any one avenue.

As we agreed in a chat after the event, it’s difficult to vet much of the content and the sources of that content in the blogosphere, never mind ensure what kind of audience is being reached through that avenue. As for Google AdWords, well, it can be a powerful tool. In the past week I’ve heard two different CEOs say how most of their new business now comes from Google hits. But once you have drawn that traffic to your website, what will visitors find? Are they greeted with concise and impactful information? Can they easily find what they need to have a clear understanding of your value proposition?

In other words, have you generated the right content to sell yourself with what visitors find on your website? And that brings me back to the start of this piece – the often exaggerated death of print. Print may diminish in importance, but the need to generate clean, accurate and compelling content will not, no matter which side of the PR-journalism fence you’re on. In this age of internet chaos, the need for expert storytellers as part of a well-rounded public relations and marketing strategy is greater than ever.

Leo Valiquette

Posted in:

• Marketing strategy

Tech community disagrees that BDC should ‘abandon its dogs’

• Posted by Francis Moran
• May 08, 2008
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By Francis Moran

I have been soliciting opinions all this week on a story by the Canadian Press, carried in the Globe and Mail on Monday, that said the Business Development Bank of Canada‘s venture capital wing had been urged by a federal government-ordered study to “cut its losses more often, abandoning the dogs in its portfolio in favour of the stars.” With the government-owned bank a key investor in many Canadian technology companies, the implications of this could be bad news for those still working on achieving their business plans.

(In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that the BDC is a welcome lender to inmedia and I have always been very happy with its service of our operating loans, even if the money does come at a bit of a premium. Additionally, we have a further, if indirect, dependency on the bank given that many of our clients count the BDC among their investors and, therefore, the source of the funds they use to pay for our services. Some of these clients have a happy and valued relationship with the BDC as VC; others are considerably less enamoured.)

“BDC seems to have some difficulty to walk away from non-performing investments to concentrate on winners,” the CP story quoted the report’s authors saying. “Build winners, walk away from losers.”

I asked several people in the community for their reaction to the story and their opinion of what it might mean if the bank became a less patient investor.

Most sidestepped that issue entirely and went straight to the heart of what they thought was a more relevant criticism of the bank, an apparent unwillingness to take the lead on new investments. BDC’s venture capitalists, many told me, are happy to have another investor do the initial due diligence and offer the first term sheet and only then will they pile on.

One person I spoke to noted that the bank’s charter is very clear that it does have a mandate to be an engine of economic growth for Canada. While not suggesting that BDC should become as interventionist an instrument of government economic policy as, say, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, it clearly should play a more nuanced role than your average cold-blooded VC.

Perhaps, in the end, BDC has the balance right. Allow some other more hard-headed investor to validate the investment before joining the syndicate, but then be a little more patient in waiting for the investment to pay dividends. There certainly was no appetite among the people I consulted to have the bank become more cut-throat in its treatment of what the CP called “the dogs in its portfolio.”

I’d love to hear from others on this issue. Should BDC walk away more swiftly from its underperforming investments or should it play a waiting game? Either way, what would that mean for Canadian technology companies?

Francis Moran

Posted in:

• Startups
• Technology marketing