By Leo Valiquette
Back in November, Peter Hanschke blogged about the need for the lean and mean startup to beware the million-dollar cheque. In that spirit, I have an anecdote to share which illustrates that the mere prospect of such a windfall can also do significant damage.
At a time when early-stage ventures, particularly those in Canada, are thirsting for capital, be it traditional VC or an angel round, it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that a startup should be wary of a nice fat cheque.
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By Alexandra Reid
Demonstrating a marketing program’s success is key to maintaining a happy client. Do good work and prove how it contributed to the client’s goals – seems like a simple enough equation. But managing client expectations throughout a social media marketing program can be tricky. This is because these programs typically require a huge amount of small work spread out over a long period of time and over a large number of channels. It can be tough to maintain the faith at the outset of a program while communities are still being developed. Without a strategy and regular communication, it will be challenging to convince your client to see past the masses of tweets and status updates and understand that all of your wee daily efforts add up and support larger goals that will provide a return on investment.
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By David French
This is part one of a two part series. Part two will be published next week.
I recently had an extended discussion with someone which resulted in the conclusion that there is more to patenting than just getting patents. We started with a discussion of the business value of a patent and then addressed the business value of patenting. Here is the concept.
If you are going to start the patenting process, it is absolutely essential that you do some searching. Searching is essential because you can only patent an aspect of your own idea that is new. There is no point in filing a patent application if you cannot identify a feature that is new. So a patent novelty search is about searching for bad news: defining the boundaries of the forbidden territory that you cannot claim because it is delimited by the “Prior Art Wall.”
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By Francis Moran
A few years back, my pal Ian Graham acquainted me with his “law of three.” If any subject or person or issue crosses Graham’s attention three times in relatively short order, he believes he ought to pay attention to it. It’s an intriguing notion that I have found plays out in my own life more often than I might expect. Graham’s law intersected last night with my colleague Leo Valiquette’s piece earlier this week about “the mocking white glare of an empty page.” Having begged off posting yesterday to finish a client project and faced with having to produce a post for today, I was struck by an article I read about Canadian movie house Alliance Films seeking to charge Canadian journalists as much as €2,500 for interviews with bold-name stars such as Brad Pitt at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It was the third article I read this week about interesting and controversial developments in modern journalism and, not wishing to be mocked either by my empty screen or by my hardacre blog editor, the idea for this post was clumsily conceived.
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By Alexandra Reid
As a regular weekly 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 Copyblogger, GigaOm, The Flack and GeekWire.
20 mistakes that will undermine your call to action and cost you sales
As content marketers, we spend a lot of time obsessing over increasing traffic. It’s the sexy thing to do. However, the number of leads fails to match our expectations because we don’t spend enough time creating a killer call to action. There are dozens of call-to-action mistakes that can doom your efforts to convert traffic into leads or sales. Copyblogger shares 20 of the most common.
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How I learned to stop worrying and love a blank page
May 09, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
As a student of the written word, I’ve dealt with just about everything when it comes to catering to a client, managing a team of journalists and editing the work of others. But the greatest challenge is often found in the mocking white glare of an empty page […]
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Anything they can do you can do better: Competing in social media
May 08, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
I shamelessly adapted the title of this post based on the original Fast Company article, Anything they can do you can do better, which explained that when it comes to designing new products, companies must aim to build them better than their competitors […]
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Five old school mistakes creeping into digital and social media planning
May 07, 2012 by Rob Woyzbun
The near-ubiquitous availability and always-on nature of the Internet has changed how consumers learn about, consider and make decisions regarding almost everything: purchases, politics and even the causes they support. We live in a world where Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic claim that “the medium is the message” is true — in ways even he might not have considered […]
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Great articles roundup: B2B marketing messages, inventor mistakes, dirty secrets, social media, incubators, accelerators, and value propositions
May 04, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As a regular weekly 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 Business2Community, Financial Post, VentureBeat, eMarketer, and TechVibes […]
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April roundup: What does it take to bring technology to market?
May 04, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
We covered lots of new and interesting subjects on our blog last month. Contributor Caroline Kealey discussed the importance of measurement for communications people. Terry Lavineway shared important information on business incentives in the federal budget […]
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Lessons in entrepreneurship from the Startup Canada launch
May 03, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
“A million people walk into a bar in Silicon Valley. Nobody buys anything. The bar is declared a huge success.” […]
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Check your baggage at the door
May 02, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been speaking with a number of entrepreneurs, executives and others with a stake in Ottawa’s economy on topics ranging from international trade and building an export-oriented business to financing. The common theme has been what business owners must do to get out of their own backyards and make things happen […]
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Why startups should build social media communities before they launch
May 01, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
Social media has become an integral part of the marketing mix for new companies. Startups are employing these valuable channels to promote themselves, receive market feedback, interact with key industry players, and offer relatively inexpensive customer support […]
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By Leo Valiquette
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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...) [...]