This is the fifth article in a continuing series chronicling the growth path of CommentAir Technologies, a startup based in Ottawa, Canada. CommentAir is developing a wireless technology fans can use at sports venues to receive the same real-time commentary as fans watching from their televisions, a wireless technology that also creates a platform for targeted consumer interaction. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
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.
“I think the most difficult aspect about bootstrapping is resisting the urge to job search for something that will pay a ton, and also letting it take up all of your time,” Katie said in our first post. “People get accustomed to certain lifestyles and it is very difficult to let that go. You have to commit to a job that is less challenging for less money, but ultimately allows you more time for your own venture.”
In this post, we will talk in more detail about what it takes to keep the lights on, the need to delay gratification and at what point an outside investor may come into the picture.
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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, content has taken centre stage and businesses that post quality material frequently have the best chances of being noticed when their audiences search for relevant terms.
In fact, as reported by Brafton via Search Engine Land, 92 percent of marketers say that content creation is either “very effective” or “somewhat effective” for SEO, and 57 percent of marketers have said that they have acquired new customers from their blogs. On the flip side, 60 percent of business decision-makers say branded content helps them make better purchasing decisions.
I’ve read a ton of information on how to optimize content for search engines, and the vast majority of it can be boiled down into one fundamental rule: write content for your readers, not search engines.
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This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from September 2007. We welcome your feedback.
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.
There are so many acronyms in play and unfortunately a lot of them overlap. When you see CMS, do you think it means content management system, or contact management system, or code management system, or client music synthesis, or…
What about BPM? Coming from a musical background, I had always associated this particular acronym with beats per minute. How wrong I was. It can also mean business performance management, business process management, or business process modeling. POS could mean point of sale, point of service, or piece of… you get the idea.
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By Linda Forrest
There’s an art to successfully pitching and writing effective contributed articles as part of a content marketing strategy for your business-to-business technology company. Why should this tactic be considered as a component of your marketing plan? There are many benefits that support the creation and placement of bylined articles, as outlined in a post on the Idea Marketers blog espousing their virtues:
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By Francis Moran
Everywhere I turn these days, it seems that content marketing is being touted as the latest must-do for business-to-business technology marketers. And there seems to be considerable angst over how to do it properly.
“Content marketing is a fairly new concept that many marketers are struggling to figure out,” said a post yesterday on business2community.com. In the post, author Rachel Foster reported on a recent survey of LinkedIn’s B2B Technology Marketer’s Group that asked, “Can you use one word to describe the biggest challenge facing B2B marketing today?” A word cloud of the more than 1,000 comments so far clearly shows ROI to be the dominant concern, followed very closely by content.
In a similar vein, in a round-up earlier this month of the biggest B2B marketing disruptions of 2011, Michael Brenner of B2B Marketing Insider said, “People have been talking about content marketing for at least a couple of years. But in 2011, it really seemed to hit its stride.”
I could cite several additional examples, but I think you get my point. According to a large swath of the B2B braintrust out there, content marketing is the greatest new thing, and we’d better all get aboard.
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Giving your team ownership
February 08, 2012 by Francis Moran
But working toward a deadline and ensuring that all of the pieces fall into place is about much more than technical and logistical details. Perhaps the most important variable to manage is the human factor […]
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The vital role of social media in a changing B2B revenue cycle
February 07, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
With the rise of social media, today’s B2B sales landscape is more complex than ever before. There are hundreds of social media channels. Within them, a vast number of conversations are taking place […]
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More tribal leaders required
February 06, 2012 by Bob Bailly
Has evolution prepared humans to live in the world we have created? Was Desmond Morris correct when he pointed out that, “Man’s biological equipment is not strong enough to cope with the unbiological environment it has created?” […]
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January roundup: What does it take to bring technology to market?
February 03, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
This week, we marked the one-year anniversary of our new blog, and we thank you for being with us and participating in our conversations, which covered a whole host of technology marketing issues […]
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A year of blogging about bringing technology to market
February 02, 2012 by Francis Moran
This blog was launched one year ago yesterday.
On February 1, 2011, we officially re-striped our long-standing inmedia Public Relations blog to indicate that I was evolving […]
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B2B businesses should establish a PRO presence on Vimeo ASAP
February 01, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
Vimeo recently announced a number of site upgrades that will help businesses upload, showcase and share videos faster, wider and more beautifully than ever before […]
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You really can achieve great things when industry, academia work together
January 31, 2012 by Jason Flick
According to Statistics Canada, expenditures by Canadian universities on research and development totaled $11 billion in 2009-2010, up about 0.8 percent from the year before. Spending by Canada’s top 100 R&D companies, meanwhile, fell 9.4 percent in 2010 to $9.4 billion […]
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Preparing for a major offensive
January 30, 2012 by Francis Moran
When we introduced NanoScale Corporation a month ago, we talked about how the company is faced with the challenge of expanding into a conservative market wary of new products or technologies which represent a significant departure from the tried and true […]
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By Francis Moran and 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...) [...]