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2007 has been a great year and 2008 is shaping up to be even greater. I'm mostly speaking about Refresh Partners, the marketing agency that Colin Smillie and I started in mid 2007 to focus on social networking marketing. Most of our clients are larger marketing agencies who are contracted by consumer brands for specific campaigns, but we do have a fair bit of entrepreneurs who come to us with great ideas. While we normally can't discuss the projects with the consumer brands because of NDAs, I wanted to share some of the other projects that we have been engaged with. [ More ]
The standard way of thinking about corporate communications is that it is a carefully planned and crafted one-way street of getting your message out to your stakeholders. With the arrival of the web in mainstream of corporate marketing programs in the mid 90’s, there was speculation that the opaque walls of the corporation might finally come down and lead to a transparency and cooperation that centered on the web. In 2000, Doc Searls and three other authors released the book the cluetrain manifesto, where they argue that the... [ More ]
I was recently asked how to build a great PowerPoint presentation, so I decided to write an blog entry on what I have learnt over the years.
1) Don't use PowerPoint...
Unless you are presenting or summarizing information, PowerPoint is not the best tool to use. This is because it forces you to communicate in a certain way. Bullet points and large font sizes on a slide don't allow for much detail. It is better to use a word processing and/or spreadsheet application for the bulk of the information and to use PowerPoint only to summarize that information. Some advertising agencies would even go one step further and state... [ More ]
Seth Godin in his Modern Marketing blog mentions that 'consumers own markets' and I couldn't agree more. Without going into the hyperbole of the dot-com era about how the Internet will change everything, I do believe that changes have happened to specific industries because of the use of both Internet-based technologies (P2P) and the instant global collaboration and communication that the Internet provides.
It reminds my of the book ClueTrain Manifesto which pushes the fact that the Internet puts consumers in charge of markets and that any... [ More ]
I was once approached by a Scandenavian startup trying to push their new streaming cipher encryption algorithm. I mention this because it highlights a perculiar attribute of the security industry. Its adoption cycle is not based on the market's demand of a new innovation, but simply on the government's mandating.
That makes it hard to make real revenue in this industry if you are trying to innovate and create new opportunities unless you remember who starts the adoption cycle; the feds and only the feds. This makes for a very slow adoption cycle and one that does not often change and any security startup, and their investors, need to understand this.
Luckily, we are... [ More ]
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