My husband and I went to see Avatar over the weekend. Wow. The visually stunning spectacle has been director James Cameron’s pet project for more than 10 years, his last major theatrical release being a little movie called Titanic. The movie is in 3D but it’s so unobtrusive and simply enhances the story without going for corny effects, a novel approach to an older technology, enhancing rather than interrupting the storytelling process.

It was an inspired move by Cameron to hire virtual unknowns in the lead roles, but a mistake, despite her considerable talent, that he cast Sigourney Weaver in the film because, more than once, it felt like I was watching Aliens or even Gorillas in the Mist. For the same reason he put faces to those with whom we have had little or no previous associations in the lead roles, he should have cast an unknown in Weaver’s role; this was the only distraction that took me out of the marvelous world of Pandora and back into North America, circa late 2009.

I don’t want to spoil the storyline of the movie for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it but plans to, but suffice to say that while the movie is well worth seeing and elements of the film’s story are absolutely creative and novel, the vast majority of the plot is well trodden territory. Thematic elements are very reminiscent of [SPOILER ALERT!] this, and this.

There’s nothing new under the sun, they say, and the same is true when it comes to marketing. While it’s true that in the realm of technology, there are truly revolutionary products being released, there are also a slate of products that are only slight modifications on existing offerings or have very little if anything unique about them, rather they are “me too!” propositions. That’s okay - consumers need options at different price points with different feature sets, and other distinguishing attributes, however small.

The challenge becomes how to market your offering when the basic story (of your product, your company, your industry …) has been told many, many times before. Take a page from James Cameron’s book and find novel ways to tell a familiar tale, use new technology to do so and make it compelling to your audience. In our terms, this means to use novel marketing approaches like social media to communicate your key messages to your prospects and customers, providing them with the information they need in a format that’s interesting to them and that will get them talking to other prospects about why your offering is the one to see and why your marketing campaign is better than that of your competitors.

Technorati Tags: Avatar, James Cameron, marketing

There’s a good reason our blog was so quiet last week. We’ve been incredibly busy launching the world’s first bionic finger, Touch Bionics’ ProDigits, to the worldwide media. We’ve had tremendous uptake on the story from all sorts of media all over the world.

I’ve thoroughly bastardized Dylan Thomas in this post’s title, but it’s for a good cause. This morning, the fruits of my labor appeared on “Good Morning America,” one of the highest-rated morning shows in the U.S. and one that airs worldwide. Here’s the segment: http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerindex?id=9329178.

Getting this segment to come together was no easy feat. We launched last Tuesday, and I began pitching GMA in earnest the following day. I spoke often to with the medical producer there and by Thursday morning, it was set - they were going with the story. I’d lined up a patient in NYC and a prosthetist to come into the city for an in-studio segment Monday morning. Elated, I let the whole Touch Bionics team know we were set; ProDigits were going to be featured on “Good Morning America.” I was told to expect a call from a producer to go over the finer details later Thursday afternoon.

This is where our story takes an unexpected turn. The call came, but it was to say that they didn’t feel the story was different enough from the i-LIMB Hand, which they had covered in 2007, and so they were going to cancel our segment. The patient we were originally going to feature has a partial-hand prosthesis with all four fingers and a thumb so it does not, in fairness, look that much different from the i-LIMB Hand. Nonetheless, this is how I felt.

Having come so close, I was not going to take no for an answer. So I began to pitch all of the other angles to the story - we had other patients, in other locations, with other circumstances. ProDigits is a huge technological advancement from the i-LIMB Hand, it’s the first device of its kind and, before it came along, partial-hand amputees had no other option to regain any meaningful level of functionality. We could tape in advance, we can provide experts, here’s research to back up our claims of the numbers of potential patients… Basically, I would not take no for an answer. I knew that this was a compelling story and that it would be of interest to GMA’s audience. It was just a matter of presenting the whole story of ProDigits and what was available from a resource perspective and convincing them that we could provide the producers with the components they needed in order to put together a good story.

It worked.

They went for the compelling story of Michael Bailey, a 24-year old student in Atlanta, Georgia, who lost three fingers in an industrial accident nearly two years ago. Michael’s prosthesis clearly shows his remaining finger and thumb and so, presumably, tells the story of the partial-hand prosthesis better. GMA senior health and medical correspondent Richard Besser flew all the way to Atlanta on Sunday to do a great interview with an amazing Michael Bailey and the piece aired this morning. (The hit was all the sweeter because this morning was the the debut of new “Good Morning America” host George Stephanopoulos, ensuring our story even better ratings! In a little banter with his co-host that’s not seen on the posted segment, Stephanopoulos, who got to shake hands with a model ProDigits, said the story had given him goosebumps.)

Phew!

This was a lesson in perseverance, and in knowing the whole story, one that extended well beyond the news release. When I was hit with that first setback, I was able to present that whole story and win the day. We couldn’t be happier with the result, and, more importantly, neither could our client.

Technorati Tags: Touch Bionics, ProDigits, Michael Bailey, Good Morning America, George Stephanopoulos, media relations, product launch, public relations, perseverance

A quick browse through my Google reader shows that it’s that time again. No, not the holidays. It’s time to gaze into the marketing crystal ball and make bold predictions about where marketing dollars will be spent in the upcoming year, what communications trends will appear and how we as marketers can best lever this knowledge.

I don’t pretend to be extraordinarily prescient when it comes to these things, so I’m going to put down my own crystal ball and instead point to a few posts on other blogs that might illuminate the near future for marketers.

A LinkedIn question about New Years resolutions for CEOs has garnered 5 responses so far. What are your clients’ resolutions for 2010 and where do your services fit into those plans?

According to this post, it’s going to be all about social media and email next year.

Will portable identities take off like this post predicts? Will B2B companies further expand usage of social media and take advantage of this brand portability?

And finally, this post predicts all of the above will take place in 2010.

Do you have any predictions for the year ahead?

Technorati Tags: social media, email, marketing, 2010, predictions

Several items in my Google Reader caught my eye this morning. Being the amateur philologist and word nerd that I am, titles about “word of the day” and “word of the year” are assured to be clicked.

EMarketer’s word of the day is cyberdisinhibition. Notwithstanding that it may not, in fact, be a word, it’s an interesting concept - people are more inclined to lose their inhibitions online and this could impact your business considerably as customers are more inclined to complain about bad customer service or spread word about dissatisfaction online than they are in the “real world.” All the more reason to excel at customer service. Sites like the Consumerist are devoted to spreading the word about sub-par customer service; this is not a site where you want your company to appear.

In a year when sparkling vampires ruled the box office (and high school locker posters), an exciting new U.S. President held his first year in office, Michael Jackson and other cultural icons passed away, H1N1 threatened health worldwide and the economic bailouts in America overtook international headlines, the Global Language Monitor has just announced the Word of the Year. The winner is? Twitter. The microblogging platform saw incredible year-over-year increases, the linked ComputerWorld article references research that denotes a 1,170% from 2008 to 2009. It’s undeniable that the platform has made the leap from being strictly for tech geeks and now is the communication platform of choice for the mainstream public.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, cyberdisinhibition

A strange and perhaps first-of-its-kind legal situation caught my eye yesterday. A senior executive from DefJam Records was arrested for not Tweeting. Yes, you read that correctly - he refused to Tweet when the police demanded it of him and he was arrested on a litany of charges.

But, let’s back up a little.

Apparently all the kids are going crazy for Justin Bieber. I’m pretty far out of his target market, so the fact I’ve not heard of him shouldn’t surprise anyone. He’s a 15 year old pop singer who makes the girls’ hearts go pitter patter. Signed to DefJam, he was set to make an appearance Saturday at a shopping mall in Long Island. Being a savvy marketer, James Roppo, senior VP of sales for DefJam, Tweeted about the upcoming appearance, trying to drum up interest and ensure there would be a long line of adoring fans at the signing.

The tactic worked. A little too well. Three thousand young girls showed up, long before the star himself arrived, and the crowd quickly got out of control.

This is the point in the story where I debate whether I should disclose that maybe, just maybe, when I was a tween myself, there was a certain band that I was crazy about — I’m not saying who but it rhymes with Mew Hids on the Knock. And I just might have lined up outside a shopping mall in the dead of winter while I had chicken pox in order to get the autographs … of the band members’ mothers. And maybe, just maybe, I was so far back in the line that when a security guard shut the door to the mall saying that there was no way we would all get in, a mini riot of weeping young girls ensued. Maybe. Nope, too embarrassing - never happened.

Let’s just say that I can imagine how the scene quickly devolved. Hell hath no fury like 3,000 lovelorn 11 year olds scorned. The police implored Roppo to Tweet to the fans to tell them that the signing was off, but he refused. It took Justin himself Tweeting that his appearance had been canceled for the melee to break, but not before five people, including a police officer, were injured.

It’s obvious that this man did completely the wrong thing and endangered many people needlessly in the hope of drumming up publicity for his label and his client. He’s probably going to have a lot of time in a quiet place to think about his actions if he’s convicted. His charges include endangering the welfare of a child, obstruction of governmental administration, reckless endangerment and criminal nuisance.

What lessons can be learned and applied to other marketing situations?

First and foremost, always do what the police tell you to. Use common sense. Don’t endanger people with crazy stunts for the sake of publicity. I assure you it will backfire.

Second, if your market expects you to communicate using a particular channel, you cannot go offline when the going gets tough. Even in crisis situations, even if you’ve done the wrong thing, you need to communicate with your market. In this case, Roppo drew these fans using Twitter and, once they were in danger, he needed to use the same channel to disburse the crowd.

Third, know the size and scope of your situation and act accordingly. The blame has been shifted by DefJam to the shopping mall for not being prepared to handle the crowds. If this kid is the phenom he obviously seems to be, then the onus should be on the label to ensure that he’s being put somewhere than can support his legions of adoring fans. If you’re participating in market-facing activities like a trade show or conference, ensure that the level of your participation makes sense - have enough materials on hand to distribute, have enough staff on hand to manage booth traffic, and so on.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Justin Bieber, DefJam, marketing

At the peak of the dot-com and telecom bubble at the beginning of this decade, my wife, who is also a technology marketing strategist, and I often amused ourselves by imagining the response we might get if we created an entirely fictitious company and put up a website that employed all the utterly meaningless buzz words that were being bandied about at that time. I forget what we going to call the company — the name certainly had the word “solutions” in it — but I remember that we invented an incredibly persuasive mission statement that actually said nothing at all.

We didn’t think we’d get any customers, but we were pretty sure we could get some VC funding.

That little inside joke of ours came to mind this morning as a I watched a lovely little video by Made to Stick co-author Dan Heath on “Writing a mission statement that doesn’t suck.” Using a pizza parlour as example, Heath shows how an initially-quite-effective mission statement is turned into mushy pablum by the use of words that sound aspirational but that really don’t mean anything at all. Actually, it’s not that these words don’t mean anything at all; it’s that they could mean anything to anyone.

I do a lot of work helping technology companies figure out their differentiated positioning in the marketplace. This work is usually done in the same sort of group-think environment that turned “serve the tastiest damn pizza in Wade County” in Heath’s example into the mushy and meaningless “present with integrity the highest quality entertainment solutions to families.” Every time the word “solution” is suggested — and it is suggested almost every time — I implore the workshop participants to imagine the word doesn’t exist. “Now,” I ask them,” What is it that you actually do?” The answers immediately get much sharper and focused and far more meaningful.

The little joke my wife and I still wish we had managed to play on a gullible marketplace was predicated on this tendency to avoid specificity in favour of being all things to all people. In marketing, though, the joke will be on you because in trying to be all things to all people, you will succeed only in being nothing to anyone.

Technorati Tags: mission statement, Made to Stick, Dan Heath, technology, marketing, positioning

There’s a war going on on the internet. A war between traditional content providers and consumers. Ironic, given that the battle is over a communication channel, that what we have here is a failure to communicate.

It’s been impossible for me to avoid information lately about paid content on the internet, subscription models for newspapers online, and Rupert Murdoch’s gaffes when it comes to information distribution in a connected world.

It all started with an article in a recent Vanity Fair about Murdoch’s determined stance on making readers pay for online content. The fact that he told an interviewer last week that he plans to drive readers to the paid content by blocking Google from indexing his newspapers, a move that renders their content invisible to the world at large, shows that, as Michael Woolf posits, perhaps he just doesn’t understand what’s at stake here and just how pervasive Google is.

As Valleywag suggested, perhaps Murdoch should read a recent report from Forrester that says that 80% of the 4,000 consumers polled will not pay for online newspaper content and that the remainder are divided on the payment model they’d agree to (subscription versus paying for individual articles).

The real trouble starts when you factor in that 60% of newspaper executives are working on paid-content models. Yikes.

Today’s media world is transparent for those who wish to see, Have a question for your marketplace? Then pose it in any of the many channels available to you. You’ll quickly learn what your customers want and what they don’t want. The fact that those in control of the traditional media aren’t even trying to really understand the tools available to them and devising new revenue models around this new reality is just pathetic. Perhaps the traditional media deserves to dwindle to the point of irrelevance if it’s so unaware of its environment.

The idea of including marketing in an agile product development strategy, as @FrancisMoran wrote about earlier this week, isn’t all that far removed from what newspaper execs need to do here. Listen to your market as you’re deciding what to do and involve them in the process. Rather than engineer newspaper content delivery to suit your revenue desires, find out how your readers want to access your content and build a revenue strategy around that. Seems obvious…

Technorati Tags: newspapers, Rupert Murdoch, Forrester, Vanity Fair

Finally, Amazon has announced that its e-book reader, the Kindle, is available to Canadians. While much of the rest of the world has been happily e-reading for quite some time, we’re just now being graced with Kindle’s presence, something I wrote about last month.

While I’m an avid reader, I can’t quite imagine reading a novel on an e-reader, though the fact that the Kindle would alleviate the constant challenge we face in our household to find bookshelf space for the masses of reading material we own, is rather appealing. Still, we’ve already placed our order for a new bookshelf from Santa rather than a Kindle. Perhaps next year.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, Kindle, Canada

While much of the PR industry will refer simply to “news releases” as a term to cover the whole spectrum of outbound news flow, at inmedia, we at least choose to assign some level of importance to releases before deciding on the level of effort to placed against them. Attributing a level of media value to a release at the outset will ensure that PR resources are not being wasted on outreach that is never going to yield results.

A good example to illustrate this news value is the customer-win announcement. Companies love to be able to announce new customers and often feel that this should always be a newsworthy item among the media. And so it may be, some of the time. There is a huge difference between announcing a deal where the new customer is prepared to speak about the strategic decisions behind a purchase that has a significant dollar value attributed to it, and a deal where the customer is not prepared to say anything more than the fact they are “working with” the new vendor. The news value here is vastly different; one can reasonably be expected to be pitched for real coverage, while all the other can hope for is, at best, a couple of lines pulled direct from the release.

Sometimes this value-assessment exercise can be challenging. Companies often have an inflated opinion of the importance of their news, but taking a clear stance at an early stage helps prevent awkward questions after the fact. News that is simply an FYI to your market should be exactly that - a piece of information to be noted but without anyone making a great fuss.

Conversely, news that you know has real value should be explored to its fullest extent. I’ve had a few experiences in recent months with news stories that had definite value but that took a bit more than just sending a release to media to secure coverage. Follow up is hugely important; it can be amazing how often you speak to editors who claim to have not seen your news story, then checks inbox, finds it and agrees that it’s something they should be covering! For important news, you should never assume that simply sending the email will guarantee it is seen by your targets.

Another common experience is the editor who may have seen the release but “doesn’t cover news” so thought it was irrelevant and deleted it. For this situation, you need to be aware of the deeper issues that your news story addresses. If you are releasing a new product, why does it have the new features and functionality it does? Do they address a trend in the marketplace? Can this trend be explored as part of a feature?

Establishing the importance of news is a crucial exercise for any PR person to undertake for every announcement, helping both manage expectations and ensuring that effort is expended in the most useful areas.

Technorati Tags: News release, public relations, objectives, value for money

An excellent, if low-key, presentation at last week’s OCRI Zone5ive shed some interesting new light on a pervasive issue we on this blog and many other technology-company watchers have commented on before. Canadian tech ventures take a distant back to seat to their American competitors when it comes to marketing their products and services. And, I can tell you from working on both the transmitting and receiving ends of the marketing efforts of a number of British and European outfits, those guys also regularly best the Canadians at engaging with, and reaching out to, their markets.

Conventional wisdom says the Yanks, and maybe the Brits, are simply more brash than we are; natural-born salespeople, they are simply louder, more confident and more aggressive. Perhaps there’s some truth to that; certainly, I have never come across anything more doggedly relentless than a British ad-sales guy trying to get me to buy space in his publication. But putting poor Canadian performance down to our supposed more docile domestic character prevents us from recognizing a more systemic issue that Peter Hanschke, the product-management specialist who presented at Zone5ive last Thursday, brought to light in his examination of agile product development and how it encourages — even demands — a very tight fit with marketing and early customer engagement. (You can see Peter’s slides here.)

Agile product development is not a new process; it’s been around for nearly a generation. But it is particularly well suited for this era that increasingly embraces concepts like minimal viable product — swiftly develop the bare bones of a product and get it out in front of customers who will equally swiftly tell you whether they like it or not so you can decide whether to enhance or kill it. Agile product development allows for such iterative and ever-evolving product-development cycles that are highly responsive to equally dynamic market forces.

But here’s where Peter’s presentation got really interesting for this marketing strategist.

In order for the process to be effective, agile product development must embrace marketing at every stage. How can you decide what the market wants and will value if you haven’t engaged your potential customers at the very outset? How do you know if you’re meeting customer specifications and requirements if you don’t show them your still-in-development stuff and get their feedback and input? Under an agile regime, product releases are based on having created value for a customer, and how do you parse that without talking to the customer?

More interestingly, it’s not just a case of marketing contributing to the process; we marketers also gain massively. Imagine, Peter told us in a scenario that got the attention of every one of us more accustomed to last-minute demands to go market the hell out of a finished product scant weeks or days from launch, if we were able to build the entire marketing piece alongside, and in lock step with, the product itself? And because customers are inherently and intimately involved along the way, agile product development kicks out early customer references for use in media and analyst relations programs.

All music to my ears until one attendee threw a large bucket of freezing cold Canadian ice water on the whole thing.

How many people here, he asked, have ever actually worked in or for a company that used such a process? Asking for a show of hands, he found his one of the very few hands in the air.

And that’s the real issue that can’t merely be chalked up to our alleged more-demur national character. It is my consistent observation that too many Canadian technology companies are engineering-centric, rather than customer- or market-centric. Engineers love to build what they love. Regrettably, this is, far too often, a great distance from what the market would love to buy.

Peter protested that engineers hate to build things that people don’t use, and I’m sure that’s true. But he himself sharply identified a tendency whereby products are developed according to an internally produced specifications sheet and then, fully finished, are tossed over the transom to sales and marketing to go flog. He called it the old way of doing things; I’d call it far-too-persistent, even today.

This is not to say every Canadian technology venture is a solution in search of a problem. With a colleague, I have just finished a strategic marketing plan for an Ottawa company that was sharply market- and customer-focused from the outset. Consisting of a cadre of brilliant ex-Nortel optical engineers, this gang did not look at its collective capabilities and ask, as so many do, “What could we build?” Instead, they researched a number of sharp and immediate pain points within optical networking and selected a few around which huge value could be created if the right solution was developed.

Working with them was a novel experience. Unlike with most of my clients, I was not handed a finished product and told to develop the marketing plan for it. Rather, in what was sometimes a difficult process with which to keep pace, the product and its feature set were constantly in flux; every time we got together with these folks, we needed an updated briefing. Indeed, by the time we finished the plan, it was exclusively in support of a new product that didn’t even exist when we first engaged with them just a few months prior. The first product they had showed us no longer needed immediate marketing support because it had been completed and OEM’d into a major optical equipment manufacturer — the customer! — where it was perfectly meeting that customer’s requirements. (And, not incidentally, generating real revenue that was underpinning the company’s growth and its development of the next products.)

It sounds a bit chaotic but it really wasn’t. At every stage, we could evolve our thinking to make sure our analysis and market research, to say nothing of the go-to-market strategy, continued to synchronize with the product under development and the customers for which it was intended. The product closes a painful network-management gap between the optical layer and application-level IT management tools and so, for example, it posed a critical channel question: Should it be sold on a per-node basis by equipment vendors or on a per-seat license basis by the IT tools vendor? Or both? With eager channel partners in both camps, only an openly collaborative culture that embraced the feedback and input of those channels and of the end customer allowed the client to conclude which approach would best serve the market, and them.

If Peter is right and engineers want to build products that people actually use, then even the most engineering-centric technology company should embrace agile product development methodologies and the close knit with marketing that is stitched in with them. In his experience, he told me after the presentation, it is never a case of engineering resisting marketing once it has embraced agile. If so, marketers should become agile’s most overt evangelists.

Technorati Tags: Agile product development, product marketing, marketing, strategy, Zone5ive