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 the right tree.
One of the rules of thumb that guides the efforts of our affiliated PR agency inmedia Public Relations is, you can’t put much faith in online directories, which are notorious for being out of date. As I said in my previous post, there is simply no substitute for primary research of publications and their websites, looking up editors and journalists and qualifying that they do indeed cover the kind of story you are looking to fire at them.
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By Jesse Rodgers
There is no doubt that enterprise software is currently in fashion.
That’s because in enterprise software there are big problems, bigger data, and bigger budgets where you don’t need to find millions or even thousands of customers to build a business.
Take Workday, for example, that is estimated to have $500 million in ‘bookings this year’ on just 310 customers.
I see three key things that are currently driving opportunity in this space:
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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 StartupCFO, Harvard Business Review, Content Marketing Institute, MarketingSherpa, Forbes, and Fast Company.
How customers evaluate your product
If you sell to B2B customers then you know how hard it is to get that purchase order. It goes without saying that it helps to put yourself in the shoes of your prospective customer to try and see how they perceive your company and product. What would their concerns be? How would they go about evaluating this opportunity? Mark MacLeod shares a valuable framework for determining how customers think about a startup’s product.
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By Caroline Kealey
Here are my all-time top five principles for strategic communications planning:
1. Communications should be focused on results, rather than activity
Often, communicators are in the business of generating “stuff” — speeches, media releases, and promotional materials. The communications function is much more effective when it is driven to generate results, such as increased rates of awareness, product sales, improved stakeholder relationships or strengthened internal alignment. The tactics are important, but they are fundamentally secondary to the primary alignment of the communications function toward solid outcomes.
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By Alexandra Reid
This is a story about a 70-year-old woman who wants nothing to do with social media but is doing it anyway, inspired by an article I read on ReadWriteWeb last week, “Why boomers won’t release their grip on technology.”
Please let me first point out that I know she is not of the Boomer generation. I’ll get to that later.
According to the article’s author, Brian Proffitt, we need to “Put away the cozy image of the little old lady knitting a sweater for the grandkids, or the distinguished gentlemen playing chess in a park, because the newest elder generation is not going to sit quietly in a rocking chair.”
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Pitching to busy media figures in various media environments
October 23, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
Public relations, or, to be more exact, media relations for the purpose of getting a story told through some manner of media outlet, is a process that takes its cue from a basic tenet of marketing – understand who your potential customers are […]
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The plight of product managing myself
October 22, 2012 by Peter Hanschke
For many years now I’ve been writing blogs about all things product management. I’m not sure that there is a subject I haven’t talked about. I found that the majority of topics came from my interactions with software companies — large, small, new — as well as […]
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Great articles roundup: Steve Blank, Canadian startups, crowd funding, failure, biases, and advertising
October 19, 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 Forbes, Financial Post, iNova Capital, Inc., TechCrunch, MediaPost and Canadian Business […]
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Canadian angel investors to gather in Halifax next week
October 18, 2012 by Francis Moran
The National Angel Capital Organization’s Angel Summit, an annual gathering of those critical early-stage backers of new ventures, will wing its way to my former home town of Halifax, Nova Scotia, next week for three days of professional development workshops […]
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The thin line between being persistent and being a nuisance
October 17, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
One of the guiding principles here at inmedia Public Relations is that real work has only just begun when your hit the “Send” button on a news release blast. But this of course raises the next obvious question – how much “work” is warranted once that button has been clicked? […]
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Meet ..duo
October 16, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
Our Francis Moran first met ..duo cofounder Daylin Mantyka while on Startup Canada volunteer duty at Accelerate Okanagan’s Jump:Start:Challenge, an investor-ready pitch competition for technology companies and entrepreneurs. He was one of the judges […]
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Social media gaffes: They can happen to anyone
October 15, 2012 by Chamber of Commerce
Missteps are increasingly becoming a part of the landscape of business social media. While unfortunate, those of us who run social media pages as businesses are still only human – and make human mistakes […]
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Great articles roundup: MVP, innovation, niche communities, and startup marketing tips
October 12, 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 ReadWriteWeb, Fast Company, Forbes and VentureBeat […]
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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...) [...]