Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: Marketing/Branding/PR (Page 19 of 29)

DEMOfall 07: Day 2 – BatchBlue Does Contacts…Even Your DEMO Ones!

September 27, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Here’s yet another cool online app for small businesses: a customizable contact organizer called "BatchBook." It’s a sleek new way to upgrade your people network, from BatchBlue Software. Customization is the key, the company points out,  because no two small businesses are the same, and requirements vary widely by industry. The contact management needs of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of micro-businesses out there (meaning fewer than 25 employees) are all over the map. And most are simply not being served by the usual CRM suspects.  Batchbluescreen
BatchBook has a simple address-book interface (a very clean, simple UI) that you tag and categorize, and you also customize it for your unique business needs. What may be the best thing of all is you can "build relationships between these records." BatchBook is actually a contact manager, a communications manager, and a task manager all in one. This online app is available now on a free trial basis, then it’s only $9.95 per month. Again, I say well worth it — bring it on!

But get this, DEMO fans: just for kicks, over the past few weeks, the kind folks at BatchBlue built an account for DEMO, populating it with contact info from the past three conferences! So, if you’re a DEMO alum and weren’t at the event, shoot me an email and I’ll give you the special code…  🙂 You’ll not only get access to all these DEMO presenters, press, and event organizers, but a free one-year BatchBook account for yourself!  You heard it right here, friends, from your buddy Graeme. As a DEMO alum, your own account will be populated with "all this juicy DEMO data," as the company told me.  You can then log interesting conference conversations, track new business leads or investors, send thank-yous to the event organizers, and much more.  Let’s hear it for the power of community, huh?  Especially the awesome DEMO community.

‘Conversational Marketing’ – Much Ado About Nothing?

September 13, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Well, take that Federated Media and your fancy-schmancy new buzz words. Or so Elinor Mills seems to be saying in this piece on CNet today: Want to ‘converse’ with advertisers? Me neither. Federatedmediaconf It’s her review of FM’s glitterati CM Summit yesterday — at SF’s Presidio of all places. All the kool kids were there.

But Elinor rips into the whole concept anyway, bursting the bubble pretty well. Brands are conversations? Hooey, she says:

Hold on. Who asked marketers to join readers online? I know blog publishers need to make money, and they do earn revenue off regular old text, video and banner ads. But I’m suspicious when the “conversation” is initiated by the marketer and not the consumer. And what’s this with the slogan of the conference–“Brands are conversations”? No, they aren’t.

And she wraps up her review, after giving us a few quotes from attendees and speakers, with this gem:

Just as advertisers have been able to get their ads printed on stickers on supermarket fruit, tattooed onto people’s skin and even written in the sky, they will surely blanket the online world in ways we can not even imagine. But let’s not confuse plain old advertising and gimmick marketing with a new form of commercial digital communication that ostensibly gives consumers more control.

I think Elinor ate her Wheaties yesterday. [And, no, General Mills did not pay me to say that…… 🙂 ]

Steve Jobs: ‘iFlubbed’ – I Don’t Think So!

September 11, 2007 / / 1 Comment

So, have you heard about the term being applied to Uncle Steve’s move last week regarding the iPhone? Yes, you could have guessed — it’s “iPology” 🙂 …. There’s some interesting insight on this whole overblown thing on a great new blog called MarketingApple. This guy (also named Steve) I think really sets the record straight. An excerpt from that post:

Folks, you are living through what has to be the Golden Age of marketing and Steve Jobs is its king.  Enjoy the ride.

Stevejobsiflubbed

Then, a followup post yesterday on the same blog heralds the latest news that — you got it — one million iPhones have now been sold.

I was discussing this whole thing as it happened with my close colleagues — all of us huge Apple users and supporters — and I got a great summation from one of them over the weekend. He doesn’t want me to use his name, but he’s a very smart guy (serial entrepreneur), and I just have to share his recap and insights with you:

Jobs is the king of concept and design. It’s easy to market the coolest phone ever and the best MP3 player ever, but good luck conceiving, designing, and developing them.

By cutting the iPhone prices, Jobs created a problem, then conceived and developed a solution. Typical Steve Jobs.

When the first rumors surfaced about Apple getting into the cell phone market, people laughed and predicted instant failure. Before the iPod, the Diamond Rio had more than 50% market share, and they were dropping the price quarterly to meet new competition. Apple came out with the iPod (with a hard drive) at 3-5 times the price of the average price of MP3 players at the time and couldn’t make enough of them. Other MP3 players with hard drives came out shortly after at half the price, and those companies couldn’t sell the ones they produced for the launch, while Apple couldn’t make enough of theirs. Then, when you could buy flash MP3 players for $20, Apple released the Nano at $250 and the Shuffle at $150, and, again, they couldn’t make enough of them.

Steve jumped on 2.5″ and 1″ hard drive technology for the iPod and, later, on multi-GB flash, when they were both expensive, new technologies, and Apple’s volume alone drove the technology towards commodity pricing. Apple never dropped prices, they just come out with new models at the same prices with thinner designs and more storage.

They can’t release iPhones the same way, even though their prices have fallen, because they are using so much flash. It costs them less to make the 8GB today than the 4GB four months ago. They could drop the price to gain wider market acceptance, so they did. Adding more storage and making the iPhone thinner won’t be enough to release a new model. They need to bump up the speed, make the display as big as the case (40% larger), add faster broadband, and add a VoIP softphone. (Nokia has them and HP just released the new iPaq with more features and a VoIP softphone built in.) All the new cellular chips designs have WiFi embedded, so ALL new phones next year will have WiFi. The cellular carriers may block the SIP (the de-facto standard for VoIP, session initiation protocol) ports to disable VoIP, and there will be a new RTP (real time protocol) invented to transmit VoIP over any open port — maybe that’s what Steve is up to next? 🙂

People just keep laughing every time Apple does the unexpected, but their concept and design is so good that they become the market leader. I can’t wait for the iTV-LCD, the iDVR, the iCarStereo, and the iGameBox.

Now, does that nail the situation, or what? (And also raise some interesting new possibilites.) I told you I hang around with smart guys….

UPDATE: To correct a typo….sorry.

Yahoo Eats Blue Lithium

September 4, 2007 / / 0 Comments

The advertising M&A game just keeps going and going…. MarketWatch reported earlier this evening that Yahoo will buy ad network BlueLithium for $300 million in cash. Yahooeatsbluelithium Blue Lithium, as I reported in my blog post How the Top Ad Networks Rank on August 18, is currently the fifth largest ad network. A few minutes ago, this Red Herring article went up, noting that Blue Lithium was founded in January 2004 and was backed by Walden Venture Capital and 3i. The article went on to state:

BlueLithium is also known for its behavioral targeting, which has become the must-have for online marketers. Behavioral targeting allows marketers to target users based on the sites they’ve visited, as well as demographic and geographic characteristics. Yahoo recently launched SmartAds, a nascent effort in this area.

YHOO was up 5.46% today, closing at 23.97. In after hours trading, it was up another 0.63% to 24.12 as of about 8:00 pm Eastern.

Business Week Sucking Wind; Forbes Rocks On

September 4, 2007 / / 0 Comments

When a news release hit my inbox early this morning saying the publisher of BusinessWeek, Geoffrey A. Dodge, was joining Salesforce.com as SVP of media sales, I was surprised. But then I quickly realized that, if I lived in NY, I would have probably heard about this last Thursday, because I see the news broke in the NY Post and Silicon Alley Insider then. And it turns out it was probably not such a big surprise at that time to those in magazine circles, since he’d been passed over for the job as president of BusinessWeek some months ago.

Busweekvsforbes

I think the bigger story here, however, is the pain being felt by BusinessWeek these days, as it lags category leader Forbes by a long shot in ad sales, and has been much slower in integrating its print and online properties. Forbes wrote the book there, and is doing the best of the major biz pubs, by a good margin. Reason: they “got” the Internet early on.

For the lowdown on the status of business publications these days, read this nice analysis from Media Life that came out with the Dodge news. I show one chart from that story here (Copyright 2007, MediaLife Magazine.)

Bizpubssales

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