Author Archives: admin

B2B Buzzing

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One of the best lines I’ve recently stolen is that “the Internet is a gigantic copying machine,” to which I appended “with a share button.” Needless to note is that social networking is a driving force in consumer marketing.  Companies as diverse as Apple, Proctor and Gamble, and General Motors (gizmos, suds and duds) are active users of social media to create brands, promote products, and otherwise find cost effective means for memes.  Collectively consumer product companies are effective in targeting buyers, generating sharable content, and getting unpaid workers (you) to spread the word. B2B companies are borderline imbecilic on the process. Granted, the similarities between your average teenaged movie buff and all stakeholders in an earthmoving equipment purchase decision are about the same as the similarities between horses and horse fish.  With the exception of the single-decision-maker for a consumer product vs. group decision making for enterprises, the mechanics … Continue reading →

Badly Branded

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Novell knew how to murder brands. A recent lunch with a long-term friend and SuSE Linux leader reminded me of the problems faced with messaging and branding in both commodity and fragmented markets. Linux is a commodity, and was intended to be such. The lack of differentiation in the core product was Linux’s primary selling point to shops that stayed stuck on one or another UNIX derivative or even proprietary operating systems. Creating unique brands for commodities can be tough, though we did have success with SuSE’s brand before Novell diluted it. The Linux market is becoming even trickier as advances in deployment and scalability expand. Today’s global content start-ups are rushing to EC2, RackSpace and RightScale in order to avoid growing pains while chanting hadoop and nosql. Less data-intensive operations use traditional clustering or stand-alone servers. Some people need real-time Linux, and a few folk want stripped-down distros for … Continue reading →

Social Service

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Facebook is your friend.  So is Google, just not a close friend that you share things with (aside from your GPS location if using an Android phone). Recently we performed a pro-bono experiment in association with a book launch.  Even though the author had a platform and a publicist who wrangled radio talking time, we deployed a little advertising using both Google and Facebook.  The results show why social media makes a difference, and how to move from static to dynamic in social environments. Over an 18 day period we pushed Google and Facebook ads which had the same creative layouts.  Viable keywords were selected with Google as were “interest” categories on Facebook.  For Google, the test was divided between taking clickers to a landing page on the author’s blog site or directly to Amazon.com after a few reader reviews had accumulated.  In Facebook all clickers were taken to a … Continue reading →

SMB Samba

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Even SMBs have inertia. I have been waiting for a solid uptick in cloud services adoption by Small and Mid-Sized Businesses (SMBs).  Yet a recent report from Microsoft indicates that SMBs are not yet adopting SaaS and cloud services at a blistering pace.  Then again, given Microsoft’s rapidly plunging market value, maybe their survey sample included only Microsoft loyalists … both of them. According to 3,258 respondents representing companies with less than 250 employees, fewer than 40% plan on paying for cloud services in the next few years, though this is a full 10 points higher than in Microsoft’s previous poll. They also report that those SMBs with their heads in the clouds are doubling the number of services which they rent.  The analysis suggests that cloud adoption will be gradual and, given SMB investments into non-cloud infrastructure, a hybrid model will persist. In the absence of established infrastructure, small … Continue reading →

Don’t Compete

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If you are launching a new product, don’t bother competing. Unless yours is a new and completely untapped market, odds are you face stiff competition.  Studies by think tanks and corporations indicate that over time every market becomes dominated by three or four huge firms.  They have money, mindshare and enough marketing savvy to crush newcomers faster than the hot chick at the end of the bar crushes every cad with a sorry come-on line.  Going toe-to-toe with market gorillas is painful. I know from experience (well, at least a good analogy). For years I studied Krav Maga, the Israeli Defense Force style of hand-to-hand combat.  My instructor taught Krav Maga in the IDF.  He stood maybe five foot eight and might have weighed 150 pounds fully clothed … wearing boots, carrying a backpack and smuggling bricks.  Some of his students easily cleared six-two, massed in over two-forty and were … Continue reading →

Punked Publishing

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I saw a grandmother reading her Kindle this morning. A seismic shift is occurring in the publishing industry, and before all is done a great deal of corporate blood will be shed.  Nimble organizations will survive and perhaps thrive. Old institutions will die.  The very nature of content is forever changed, and as always, marketing people are both over and under reacting. Electronic book reading devices (e-readers herein) are getting very successful.  Some reports have e-book sales at 20% of the market, shaving a few years off industry predictions.  One interesting tangent to this is that e-book readers buy more books than people who thumb-through dead trees (and will phrases like ‘thumb-through’ exit our vocabulary?).  This is in part due to the retail price of digital books being about half that of paper, and thus there may ignite impulse purchases, such as is the case with single MP3 files as … Continue reading →

Slab Segments

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Cheap tables are a’plenty. Being a reformed gizmo glutton, I still receive a number of consumer electronics communiqués … hourly.  Most are for products I have no intention of buying, especially television sets that could cover my living room wall and still provide nothing considered entertaining.  Yet an occasional marketing lesson appears between engorged LED boob boxes and pocket cameras with more pixel resolution than the televisions. Today it was cheap tablet computers, or what I prefer to call slabs. Below those afore mentioned money wasters were a selection of slabs ranging from $129 to $320, and available with seven to ten inch screens.  This price range is a fair bit below the lowest end of the iPad 2 product line and the poorly marketed Xoom.  These slabs were not insufficient, sporting the same base memory, Wi-Fi and all the functionality of last year’s Android OS.  For customers lacking coolness … Continue reading →