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Great articles roundup: Online and real-time marketing, social customer service and the Gmail Promotions tab

• Posted by Hailley Griffis
• August 02, 2013
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By Hailley Griffis 

We’ve rounded up some of the best posts we came across this week. Today we’re looking at the justification for online marketing and some tips for implementing a real-time marketing strategy. One of our  favourite topics is customer service, and we’ll take a look at four excellent examples of using Twitter for that purpose. Finally, we’re finishing up today by looking at Gmail’s new Promotions tabs and how that affects e-mail marketing. We grabbed this week’s articles from Bdaily, 1to1Media, SocialMediaExaminer and Time Business.

Is online marketing just a waste of time?

There are many things that a business should consider before jumping into online marketing. Vicki Stone outlines some of the questions that should be asked beforehand. The most sound advice requires a business to look at their customers’ current habits to figure out whether or not online marketing raises the right kind of awareness they are seeking. Though most of the time, when it’s done correctly and there are clear goals for your online marketing efforts, it’s absolutely worth the effort.

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Hailley Griffis

Posted in:

• Content marketing
• Marketing strategy
• Product marketing
• Social media
• Technology marketing

‘The definition of an entrepreneur is someone who is abnormal’

• Posted by Francis Moran
• August 01, 2013
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By Francis Moran

Ottawa entrepreneurs were treated last night to a rare performance when seasoned entrepreneur and pioneering angel investor David Rose, founder or funder of more than 75 technology companies, spoke at the city’s monthly StartupGrind event. Describing himself as a third-generation entrepreneur, Rose spent fully 40 minutes answering StartupGrind organizer Cheryl Draper’s very first question about his early adventures in company creation and angel investing. As entertaining as his personal story was, it was the concrete advice he gave to entrepreneurs that made the evening valuable.

Like many other tech sector observers, Rose pointed out that it has never been easier to start a company. His first venture consumed $20-million of investors’ money to get to a revenue-producing product. His next venture cost $2-million to get to the same stage, and the third just $200,000. The costs have dropped by another order of magnitude — or maybe even two — to the point that today, he said, “almost anyone can start a web company at almost no cost.”

This low cost of entry means that too many people start companies to do easy things or to mimic things that have already been done, Rose said, a paradox that I don’t hear enough people emphasizing. The world doesn’t need another recruitment site or social shopping site, he said. Instead, “look around for real problems that haven’t been solved by anyone else…The first question (every entrepreneur needs to ask) is, ‘Does anyone want what I’m going to build?'”

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Francis Moran

Posted in:

• Financing and fundraising
• Startups

The tech world should defend the Keystone pipeline

• Posted by Denzil Doyle
• July 31, 2013
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By Denzil Doyle 

It is encouraging to see the emphasis that President Obama is placing on the jobs and other economic spinoffs that will be created by the proposed Keystone pipeline, because if the arithmetic is done properly the numbers will surprise even the staunchest opponents of the project. They will demonstrate that the pipeline industry is a mature industry that uses a broad range of proven technologies.

The communications between Canada’s scientific community and its politicians and bureaucrats leave a lot to be desired. The environmentalists would have us believe that whether we are talking about the north-south or the east-west pipeline, we are dealing with unproven technology. To hear them talk, one would think that they are the world’s first pipelines and they will leak continuously.

The fact of the matter is that there are over two million miles of pipeline in North America and they are monitored by over 20,000 devices called Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Some of them have been in use since the early ’70s and the majority of them use satellite technology. A typical pipeline has a SCADA terminal at every pumping station and there is a pumping station about every hundred miles.

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Denzil Doyle

Posted in:

• Commercialization ecosystem
• Random thoughts

Investor pitching 101, with Communitech’s Frank Erschen

• Posted by Leo Valiquette
• July 30, 2013
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By Leo Valiquette

“It’s all about the content, it’s not about the sizzle. You have to give investors the content they need to make an investing decision.”

So says Frank Erschen, pitch coach, angel investor and executive in residence at Communitech. While in Kitchener-Waterloo last week, I had the opportunity to sit in on his session with Erisvaldo Gadelha Saraiva Junior, executive director of Brazil’s Yupi Studios.

Yupi Studios is a startup focused on developing apps, games and other creative content for smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and social networks. While it is paying the bills as an app factory for hire, its goal is to raise the $500,000 to $1.5 million it needs to devote itself entirely to developing its educational gaming platform, Yupi Play. Here is a recap of Erschen’s counsel on how Yupi Studios and any other startup in search of capital should structure their pitch to make the most of that eight to 12-minute opportunity to woo an investor.

For Erschen, an effective presentation should include the following slides, to tell a single compelling story with a natural progression: Read More

Leo Valiquette

Posted in:

• Financing and fundraising
• Marketing strategy
• Startups

Why the best target for your sales and marketing efforts is a reptile

• Posted by Bob Bailly
• July 29, 2013
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By Bob Bailly

As a self professed science nerd my study of choice over the last decade has been neuroscience, so much so that I’ve built a consulting practice centered on a notion that we can improve our selling success by incorporating its scientific findings.

This field of study has been called neuromarketing, but others, like Robert Schiller, have also linked these concepts to their own fields of interest. He writes:

“Neuroscience – the science of how the brain, that physical organ inside one’s head, really works – is beginning to change the way we think about how people make decisions. These findings will inevitably change the way we think about how economies function. In short, we are at the dawn of ‘neuroeconomics.’

“Efforts to link neuroscience to economics have occurred mostly in just the last few years, and the growth of neuroeconomics is still in its early stages. But its nascence follows a pattern: revolutions in science tend to come from completely unexpected places. A field of science can turn barren if no fundamentally new approaches to research are on the horizon. Scholars can become so trapped in their methods – in the language and assumptions of the accepted approach to their discipline – that their research becomes repetitive or trivial.”

Whether you feel neuromarketing, neuroeconomic or even neuropolitical thought is appropriate, here are some ideas you might want consider if you’re in the business of selling technological products or services.

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Bob Bailly

Posted in:

• Marketing strategy
• Product marketing
• Random thoughts
• Startups
• Technology marketing