By Francis Moran
Ottawa finally got its version of the C100’s terrific Accelerate conferences last week and it was a stellar event from beginning to end.
The C100 is a group — or mafia, as they like to call themselves — of mainly Silicon Valley-based Canadian entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and others keen to support Canadian technology companies. Its 48 Hours in the Valley twice a year brings 20 Canadian companies to the mecca of technology for two days of networking, pitches and meetings. For several years now, The C100 has been bringing itself to Canada through Accelerate events, usually day-long conferences. I have been to several Accelerate sessions in Montreal and Toronto over the past few years and have long yammered at Atlee Clark, C100’s chief organiser, that Ottawa needed one of its own.
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By Bob Bailly
Humans have relatively big brains, and certainly it’s our defining characteristic, as much as a trunk is for an elephant, or the size of its neck is for a giraffe. While brains are actually amazingly similar among all primates (and for that matter, among all mammals) the added advantages our species enjoys thanks to our big brains are abstract thinking and language.
More than anything else, these two characteristics have allowed us to pass significant amounts of knowledge along to contemporaries and to subsequent generations, and it defines our species from all others. Because we are able to generate original thought that can be expressed through language – both verbal and written – we have become the first animal that can trade in ideas.
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By Anil Dilawri
I see a lot of presentations every week. Many of these presentations are investor pitches from small technology companies. Most of these investor pitches are bad … really, really bad. They’re poorly prepared, not well structured, confusing and riddled with jargon.
Following these investor pitches the entrepreneur presenters often say, “It was a good experience, we got some really good feedback on how to improve our pitch.”
There are two main problems with this statement:
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By Leo Valiquette
“True trumps clever any day of the week … It’s far more important to tell a true story even if it’s not perfect in all the details than to make up a clever lie.”
Character actor and memoirist Stephen Tobolowsky spoke these words during a September 2012 interview with National Public Radio. MarketingProfs contributor Jay Pinkert quoted Tobolowsky last week in an article about the value of using honest customer stories to create truly powerful content marketing material.
I’ve written more than once about the power of endorsements willingly provided by those precious entities who validate your existence by giving you money for your product or service. I’ve also emphasized the value of truth and sincerity in advertising, where real people sharing their real stories is far more potent than some paid actor posing as a happy customer, working from a script that has been derived from a variety of customer experiences.
But that article by Pinkert and that quote from Tobolowsky got me thinking about something else, a discharge of clever verbiage that can distort, distend and otherwise bloat marketing copy until it has a poor chance of hooking its intended audience.
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By Leo Valiquette
Every Friday, we round up some of the best articles we’ve come across in the past week and share them with our readers. Front and centre this time around are MarketingProfs, Ventureburn, Search Engine Journal, Fast Company and Convince and Convert.
Make content marketing authentic: The case of customer stories
Although many see content marketing as just that — marketing — smart marketers know that what they’re delivering is a great story. At the heart of that is truth, education, and personality — however imperfect it all may be. Jay Pinkert talks about the power of the customer story.
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Customer surveys are great. Unless you ask the wrong questions.
June 13, 2013 by Francis Moran
The chief technology officer of a company for which I occasionally do some work dug into his archives this past week and came up with a customer survey that was administered when this company was developing its first major product about 20 years ago […]
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Why my pony tail ain’t my brand
June 12, 2013 by Francis Moran
One day last week, I tweeted the message you see to the lower right because I was tickled by the email that came in. In my haste, however, I added a snappy hashtag and thereby made the same common mistake I often accuse marketers — even branding experts — of making […]
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With clients, you must sometimes be cruel to be kind
June 11, 2013 by Leo Valiquette
I recently worked on a client’s blog post that discussed how an IT project can easily stray far from its original problem statement by the time it moves through an RFP process and the creation of a statement of work to at last reach the implementation stage […]
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4 reasons why you need a mobile website
June 10, 2013 by Chamber of Commerce
Smartphones aren’t simply convenient communication devices – they have become an integral part of our lives and our culture. Putting this into context, a mobile phone today is in the possession of the average user for 5,840 hours per year […]
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Great articles roundup: App development, digital footprints, SEO agencies vs. content marketing agencies
June 07, 2013 by Hailley Griffis
Every Friday, we round up some of the best articles we’ve come across in the past week and share them with our readers. Front and centre this time around are Gigaom, Memeburn, Search Engine Journal and Spin Sucks […]
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House renos and the art of customer service
June 06, 2013 by Francis Moran
Regular readers of this blog will know that we have something of an obsession with customer service. At first glance, it might not seem obvious why a technology market blog might be so preoccupied with this. Except, as I have written many times, customer service is based on […]
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Your local newspaper may be your hardest to crack, and least relevant, media outlet
June 05, 2013 by Leo Valiquette
I remember as a boy the time one of my uncle’s chickens laid an egg shaped like a squat bowling pin. It was quite the thing, got him a picture and a cutline in the local paper. My mother still has that worn and yellowed clipping in a photo album […]
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Where do the next opportunities lie for savvy tech entrepreneurs?
June 04, 2013 by Denzil Doyle
Having just completed 50 years in the computer industry, I would like to reflect upon some of the major advances in the industry during that period and to speculate on those that we might witness in the next 50 years […]
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