By Leo Valiquette
For 12 years I have worked as a business journalist and marketing and public relations professional. In these roles I have engaged with a horde of entrepreneurs, executives, investors and other ink-stained wretches who would rather write about corporate stars than movie stars.
I could write a book or two from what I have learned about what it takes to get a product to market and succeed as an entrepreneur. But attempting to do such a thing without having actually lived that roller coaster ride for myself seems like presumption of the worst kind.
On the other hand, I have been tinkering away for decades on a variety of ideas that I thought could have commercial potential. They’ve kept me up at night. They’ve led me to beg off on Sunday dinners with the in-laws. They have even led me to take a personal health day or two back when I had a J.O.B.
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Associate Peter Hanschke is an Ottawa-based product management specialist. His post is part of our continuing series about the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market. We welcome your comments.
By Peter Hanschke
The ability to demo your product to a prospect is a key activity in the sales process. Prospects struggle to make the connection between what is shown in a slide deck and the issues that they need to address or the problems they need to solve. Furthermore, they also need to be assured that the product you are describing is simply not slide ware. A properly constructed demo that shows how the prospect can address their issues takes time and effort to create. But many companies leave the design and creation of the demo to the last possible moment. The result is the standby method– open the product, show individual features and hope that one or more of the features resonates with the prospect.
The problem is that the prospect is looking for a solution to a problem that they currently have – not a set of features.
Prospects are interested in buying your product or service only if it addresses a need or problem that they have. In today’s tight economy, products that address issues will be considered more favorably than those that are simply a collection of features. The intent of a demo is to show the capabilities of your product in such a way that resonates with the prospect. The prospect needs to truly understand how your product addresses their core issues. Upon completion of the demo, the prospect should have a clear vision of exactly how your product helps them.
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By Linda Forrest
In the modern age of wikis and intranets, there’s no excuse for your PR program to fall apart when there’s a change in personnel.
Here are some top considerations for when your account director leaves and what succession plans should be in place to prevent all the tangible and intangible data associated with managing your PR program from walking out the door when you change account teams or even agencies.
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By Alexandra Reid
In my last post, I shared and reviewed my favourite (free) social media monitoring tools that I use regularly to carry out social media marketing strategies on behalf of clients. Today, I reveal the management and measurement tools I use to organize and keep track of the zillions of conversations I monitor daily across multiple channels.
To summarize, these tools are free and therefore great for small businesses and new ventures. However, they are useless if they are not aligned with a sound social media marketing strategy. They are also far from perfect so we must always cross-examine data with information provided by other tools and sometimes even check information manually to ensure everything is accurate.
I decided to combine my favourite management and measurement tools because many of them do both functions. Technically, some of these can be used for monitoring social media as well. At the end of the day, it’s not so much the tools that matter, but how you use them. These are the ones that I’ve found excel, particularly in the management and measurement departments.
Without further ado, here are my favourite social media management and measurement tools:
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By Linda Forrest 
Earlier this week, Alexandra wrote a post about some of the free tools she uses to monitor social media activity for our clients. Today, I’m sharing how free tools like Google Alerts and HARO can be used to bolster your PR effort. While these tools don’t provide you with the full spectrum of capabilities essential to a successful PR program, for a bootstrapped startup it’s reassuring to know that there are free resources available. What follows is a small sampling of tools and the capability they provide.
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Best of: Think like the fish
February 23, 2012 by Francis Moran
I can’t remember when or from whom I first heard the line, “Marketers should think like the fish, not like the fisher.” But I have always enjoyed it as a pithy summary of our marketing credo that says you […]
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The free tools in my social media marketing toolkit — Part 1: Monitoring
February 22, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
I talk a lot about social media marketing strategy here, but rarely do I mention the time-and-money-saving tools that streamline my community building activities and make our social media program an effective solution for businesses […]
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What an IP Coordinator should know: Something about trademarks
February 21, 2012 by David French
In the previous postings in this series we have addressed mainly issues relating to patents. In this posting we take a break from patents to discuss another very important type of Intellectual Property […]
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A bit of Friday-before-a-long-weekend fun: Internet memes about PR, social media and marketing
February 17, 2012 by Linda Forrest
Many of us are heading into a long weekend, something which makes the Friday clock tick just a little bit more s l o w l y. To help alleviate the painful drip of time before your extended weekend, here, for your pleasure, I’ve compiled a handful of Internet memes about PR, social media, and marketing. […]
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Focus roundtable: The Rise of Pinterest in B2B
February 16, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past few months, Pinterest is a new, visually stunning social bookmarking site that is breaking records for new visitors. It received nearly 11 million […]
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Burning the candle at both ends as the clock ticks down
February 15, 2012 by Francis Moran
As we have discussed before, Katie and Luke Hrycak, the sibling founders of CommentAir, are bootstrapping their venture around their day jobs, an approach that calls for certain sacrifices. Business meetings after 9 p.m., letting the wardrobe grow threadbare and valuing every dollar of friends and family financing is par for the course […]
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The #1 rule for blog content SEO: Write for your readers
February 14, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
Blogs are widely known for their SEO-driving potential because they are comprised of content, which is what search engines use to locate and index results. With Google’s Panda update, quality content has taken centre stage, and businesses that post quality content […]
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Best of: BPM, POS, CMS… Acronyms causing confusion
February 13, 2012 by Linda Forrest
Working in the technology realm as we do, it is inevitable that we encounter many, many acronyms in our daily work. A quick scan of the blogosphere reveals that it’s a hot topic amongst technology marketers like Chris Hoskin and analysts alike […]
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