By Leo Valiquette
“This is the most manic depressive way you could possibly live life. You’re never having a good day. You’re either having the best day ever, or you are thinking you are about to die.”
So begins the trailer for The Startup Kids, a documentary about young web entrepreneurs in the U.S. and Europe. At a time when “anybody now with a laptop and a wi-fi connection can build anything,” the possibilities are near endless. Nonetheless, entrepreneurship is, as it has always been, a risky leap of faith coupled with levels of commitment and persistence that border on the obsessive.
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By Professor Dominique Turpin
I have some sad news: the Chief Marketing Officer is dead.
Fortunately, I’m talking about the CMO position rather than a particular person. But the decline of the CMO’s influence is an alarming trend in companies that claim to put the customer first but in reality continue to be product-driven.
CMOs are increasingly powerless and peripheral. The CEO sets the overall strategy, the R&D and innovation teams design the product, and the CFO determines pricing and departmental budgets. The CMO, meanwhile, reports to a chief executive who often has only partial knowledge of the customer. No wonder some CMOs are considering a career change.
The CMO position is dead for several reasons:
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By Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are TechCrunch, The New York Times, VentureBeat, Bloomberg Businessweek and Boston Magazine.
Should your startup go freemium?
Over the last several months, there has been an intense debate about the viability of freemium business models. For some, freemium is a costly trap, a business model that sacrifices revenues and forces a startup to support freeloaders who will never become paying customers. For others, freemium is the future of business, the logical conclusion for a world in which the cost of bandwidth, storage, and information processing approaches zero. Both sides agree that the model is extremely powerful. As Rob Walling of HitTail notes in a recent Wall Street Journal article, freemium is like a Samurai sword: “unless you’re a master at using it, you can cut your arm off.”
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By Fiona Campbell
Ryan Holmes, CEO and founder of HootSuite, gave an inspirational talk as part of the ignITE speaker series in the Okanagan about his journey as an entrepreneur, followed by a fireside chat and Q&A with Jeff Keen, CEO of Accelerate Okanagan.
Wynne Leung, a UX/UI designer from the Okanagan, attended the event and offered her perspective:
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By Leo Valiquette
The Ottawa-Gatineau economy, according to the Conference Board of Canada’s Mario Lefebvre, is one that cannot be counted down and out.
That was the sentiment he delivered last week at Forecasting Ottawa’s Economic Future, an inaugural event that featured his outlook for the local economy and a panel discussion with frank perspectives from several of Ottawa’s business leaders.
Lefebvre reviewed Ottawa’s performance through the worst of the economic downturn in 2009 and 2010, a period during which it suffered losses in employment and GDP that were often marginal compared to other major urban centres across Canada. In fact, in the darkest days of 2009, disposable income continued to rise, thanks in part to continued job growth in the federal public sector; job growth that, at this point in time, outstrips the program spending cuts since announced by the Harper government. Despite that belt tightening, Lefebvre remains bullish on the local economy’s outlook beyond 2013 thanks largely to the presence of the public service.
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CMI-MarketingProfs report reveals B2B content marketing confusion
November 06, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs recently released a report on the state of B2B content marketing in North America that declared, “B2B marketers are spending more, using more tactics, and distributing their content on more social networks than they […]
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The neuroscience behind elections
November 05, 2012 by Bob Bailly
Over a year ago I wrote a blog entitled Election emotion, where I looked at an article from Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail. In it, she examined how decision are made during elections. I’ve always been intrigued by electioneering, and must admit in my career to […]
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October roundup: What does it take to bring technology to market?
November 02, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As usual, we covered a lot of ground on our blog over the last month […]
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Even angels are going enterprise
November 01, 2012 by Francis Moran
There’s been a growing amount of attention paid recently to the surge in interest by startups in working on enterprise-grade products and services rather than the quick-to-market consumer and web applications that for so long seemed to dominate pitch contests […]
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Pitch perfect: Startups should focus on problems, not platforms
October 31, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
Not everyone understands a platform. But everyone understands a problem. That’s a hard lesson a lot of startup teams fail to grasp […]
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Make sure you’re barking up the right tree
October 30, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about walking the fine line between being persistent and becoming a nuisance when it comes to pitching a story to the media, but there’s another consideration that goes into that – making certain that you are barking up […]
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The allure of building enterprise products
October 29, 2012 by Jesse Rodgers
There is no doubt that enterprise software is currently in fashion […]
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Great articles roundup: Startup customers, hypercycle planning, 2013 B2B content marketing report, marketing research, thought leadership, and innovation
October 26, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are StartupCFO, Harvard Business Review, Content Marketing Institute, MarketingSherpa, Forbes, and Fast Company […]
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By Leo Valiquette
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Tweets by @FrancisMoranRecent Comments
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...) [...]