This is the second installment in an unintentional series: Blog posts about holidays for which Hallmark doesn’t make a card. Yet. (Grammar Girl made an e-card, however.)

Thursday last week was National Grammar Day in the U.S., a nascent holiday devoted to furthering proper usage of the English language. Because let’s face it, most of us, intentionally or not, make a dog’s breakfast of the English language in casual usage certainly and, more troubling still, in our professional capacities as well. I fear that microblogging and texting are making the problem worse, not better. Any platform that encourages one to drop vowels altogether is fundamentally adverse to proper usage of English.

As we’ve written about previously, we here at inmedia are unabashed word nerds and philologists who love a good pun and get downright angry at the routine butchering of our parent tongue. To give you some idea of how pervasive the love of language is at inmedia, several years ago at Christmas, grammar themed novelty t-shirts were exchanged, completely coincidentally.

Earlier this week, there were egregious errors in major media that caused my blood to boil. National superhero Sidney Crosby had his name spelled incorrectly on the web site of a major media outlet, this after he won Canada the gold medal in what’s sure to go down as a national sports highlight for all time. There were other misspellings I came across as well, obvious mistakes that two seconds of editing would have caught.

While the media don’t always get the facts right, it’s unforgivable that they don’t use proper spelling and grammar at all times. Everyone needs an editor. It’s a fact. There are people that are employed solely to review copy for mistakes at most media outlets; USE THEM.

For non-journalist types, a best-practices approach to writing would dictate that you write to the best of your ability, make use of available tools like spell-check, and then run your content past another human as another set of eyes can often catch thinkos or typos that spell-check cannot.

Technorati Tags: grammar, spelling, National Grammar Day

Last week, a new angel investing network launched in the National Capital Region to support new business initiatives, mentor the next generation of entrepreneurs, and of course, generate great returns for investors.
The Capital Angel Network (CAN) is an informal network sponsored by the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) where angels can view potential investments and discuss them as a group. The goals are to increase the quantity, quality, and success of angel investments in Ottawa, to create a greater pool of capital for innovative start-up companies and to complement existing angel groups.

Laurie Davis, a long time angel investor in the Ottawa area and a member of CAN’s board of directors, took a few moments to share his thoughts.

What was the impetus behind the creation of this new network?

Davis: I meet with entrepreneurs all the time and they tell me they have a great deal of trouble raising money. It’s always been difficult, but much more so in recent times for various reasons. It takes a lot time and effort to find enough angels to give you the amount of money you need. So if you can gather a number of angels together in a group, it saves the entrepreneur a lot of time and effort.

From the angel’s point of view, I enjoy working with others in a group and hearing their perspectives on things before agreeing to commit money.

What are your key objectives and goals?

Davis: Obviously this is only a useful exercise if companies get funded. In the end, the goal is to have people fund companies they find useful and interesting. We are going to track what happens and see if by the end of the year we have four or five companies that have been funded.

How is CAN different from other angel investor organizations that we have seen in Ottawa over the years, such as Purple Angel, Band of Scoundrels and the Ottawa Angel Alliance (OAA)?

Davis: I am a member of Purple Angel, a founder of OAA and friends with members of Band of Scoundrels. What are we doing different? We got some feedback when OAA wound down that there wasn’t much appetite for a formal organization. With OAA, you had to pay membership dues and commit to a certain level of investment. People didn’t like that level of formality. The bottom line is to try something different until you find something that works. The challenge of course, is to make sure you have real investors, as opposed to the room getting filled up with lawyers, accountants and other service providers looking for business. With the informal model that becomes a little harder, but we’ll be watching it.

Where do you think we have the most significant gap in turning great ideas into competitive commercial products that make it to market?

Davis: In general we have people who know how to go about building a product, but that whole go-to-market strategy, to know how to get a product to customers and to identify real customers – that’s the problem we have.

How will CAN help early stage companies overcome this hurdle?

Davis: We are not going to be tackling it directly. The key thing is, if you have a group of smart people in a room, the expectation is that someone will step up and help. The whole idea of angel investing is not to just provide money, it is to get involved and help where you can. We hope to see a lot of that.

What do you think of Terry Matthews’ recent announcement of his new commercialization fund?

Davis: It all helps. None of us are competing. There is a problem out there that needs to be solved and anything that can be done to solve it is a great benefit to the community.

What is the future of the venture capital model?

Davis: I wish I knew. It certainly is not pretty out there right now. If you look at it from an entrepreneur’s perspective, it is painful. And they are trying to address that by creating companies that need less capital. There are some businesses that you can launch with a few hundred thousand dollars, but others you simply can’t without tens of millions of dollars – and those are the companies no one wants to start right now. This is a huge problem and I don’t know how it’s going to be resolved. There is talk that institutional investors will invest directly in companies, as they once did – that would certainly help, but I haven’t seen this happen so far.

Technorati Tags: angel investor, angels, Purple Angel, National Angel Capital Organization, NACO, Capital Angel Network, Laurie Davis

We’re not big television watchers in our household but like many families in Canada and around the world, we’re putting in a fair bit of time these days with the world’s second-largest (after football’s World Cup) sporting extravaganza, the Olympics. One night last week, it was the women’s halfpipe competition that had my wife and me most excited and the no-holds-barred attitude of these brilliant athletes, plus the controversial “Own the Podium” program that has Canada’s Olympians focused far more on winning than on merely participating and doing well, got me thinking about the pursuit of excellence in other arenas. Like tech marketing.

Let me explain.

The eventual winner of the women’s halfpipe, Australian boarder Torah Bright, fell on the first of her two runs. On the second run, Bright was the very first in the field of competitors to hit the pipe and she nailed an amazing routine and scored a dazzling 45.0 out of a possible 50 points to seize first place. It was then up to the rest of the women, including two highly favoured American competitors, to put in runs that would score better than that.

And here’s where I saw something in many of these athletes that technology companies would do well to emulate. They refused to hold back, to give up in the face of seemingly unbeatable competition, or to tone down their routines so they could finish safely, but in second. The outcome was that nearly all the heavily ranked favourites crashed in the pipe as they did the only thing they could do — pull out all the stops in a high-risk, go-for-broke, all-or-nothing shot at first place.

The same shoot-for-the-stars mentality is behind Canada’s “Own the Podium” program, a well-funded $145-million, pursuit of excellence that set as the target for Canada’s team in these Winter Olympics nothing less than first place in the overall medal standings. It reflected an audaciousness that is terribly uncommon for Canadians in almost all walks of life and it’s been drawing criticism here at home from people who say it’s unsporting of us and even that it puts undue pressure on the athletes. As the prospects of our team achieving that goal became ever slimmer this past week, the chorus of criticism swelled even louder.

I have to say that this sort of winning-is-somehow-un-Canadian attitude infects far more than our sports; it most certainly infects technology entrepreneurs in this country.

Far too many new technology companies play it far too safe. They husband their resources and set far-too-modest objectives for themselves for fear of failure. Here are two critical lessons they could learn from the Olympics.

1. Like the women who followed Torah Bright into the halfpipe, go for broke. Sure, you might well crash and burn, but you’ll do so quickly, the practice will stand you in good stead for your next run for gold and if, like all the women I saw, you come up with a smile on your face and a gleam in your eye that can only come from knowing you gave it your all, everyone who backed you on this crashed run will back you on your next attempt.

2. Set what former Tundra CEO Jim Roche likes to call “big hairy audacious objectives,” just like the Canadian Olympic Committee did with its “Own the podium” program. Was it too audacious an objective now that it has been proven to have been too ambitious? Not in the least. Coming up short doesn’t mean we failed; it most certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have set that objective in the first place. It means that in sports, as in business and most every other aspect of life, the competition can still win no matter how well you play. And who knows how many of the athletes who did win medals and who turned in personal bests did so because they were inspired by this objective?

The bottom line is that if you don’t think you can win, you won’t.

Technorati Tags: Competition, goal setting, Olympics, Torah Bright, Own the podium, technology, marketing

Last Friday was Help A PR Pro Out day.  (Did you get my card? Hallmark truly does make one for every occasion…)

This event, which spins its name from a wildly popular site that provides reporters with sources for pieces they’re working on, aimed to knit together top PR talent looking for work and employers seeking talent. By all accounts, it seems to have been a success.

Here’s the official mission statement of what’s sure to become a recurring event: “Help a PR Pro Out Day is designed to help connect PR job seekers with employers looking for top talent. On Friday, February 19, from 10 am – 2 pm CT PR bloggers, agency leaders, and PR professionals from across the country will donate their time and talents to help fellow PR pros connect with employers as part of the first-ever event.”

Although I’m not in the market for a job, it’s nice to see the PR community working together to help those who may have lost their jobs in the recent downturn to find fulfilling work in their field, or providing those with legitimate talent with the virtual introduction that they need in order to move their careers to the next level.

For too long, to me at least, it has seemed that PR professionals are very territorial and secretive about sharing their contacts and about extending a hand to their fellow practitioners.

When I was a PR professional in the music business, just as my involvement in the industry was winding down, I and a number of other colleagues formed an informal, regular get together to chat, share and support one another. For so many years, we’d been competing with one another and guarding our contacts and insider information with ferocity. When we broke down those barriers and began communicating with one another, we found that we had tapped into a wonderful resource where we could share ideas, develop strategies and heck, even find opportunities for one another’s clients to work together. When we stopped feeling threatened by one another, we recognized the synergies that existed and determined how best to exploit them, which, in the end not only benefitted us, but our clients as well.

Three cheers to the organizers of the event; here’s hoping that this marks a turning point in our industry and that we learn to better collaborate with one another, whether it’s over a social media channel or a pint at the local watering hole.

Technorati Tags: HAPPO, Help a PR Pro Out, Help A Reporter Out, collaboration, social media, job search, employment

To start, a confession - I’m a bit of an Olympic junkie. More specifically, the winter games fuel my fire way more than their summer counterparts. While I can’t remember feeling this Olympic enthusiasm back in 1988 when the games were in Calgary, I have certainly been captivated as our great country prepared to host the 2010 Olympics on home soil.

As the games got closer, it was apparent that the unofficial Olympic sport of pin trading was going to have some competition this go around; social media was poised to step onto the Olympic stage and this has become the first truly social Olympic games.

For an Olympic junkie like myself, the ability to follow Olympians’ tweets and get up to-the-second results on my mobile phone seemed like it would be my own personal Olympic utopia. But then the Olympics started. After a few days in, I am not convinced this new social aspect of the Olympics is a good thing.

Perhaps it was the prolific accounts of Georgian luge athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili’s horrific death or maybe it was the constant criticizing and mocking of every detail of the opening ceremonies (the performers are lip synching, the cauldron is broken, why are all the drunks chasing Gretzy as he holds on for dear life in the back of a pick-up truck, etc.) that has put a bad taste in my mouth. I can’t help but wonder if people actually consider that Nodar has a mother who could be reading this stuff or that the opening ceremonies are a celebration of our entire sporting world and more specifically, our country. Is there no respect in the social media world?

I put an unusual day one aside and was ready to embrace the competition with this new social media eye view. Then I realized that despite all the lists created to help you follow Olympians on Twitter, there was not a lot of information out there. I think a big reason for this is the IOC’s rather vague blogging guidelines that quite literally has Olympians scared to break the rules. On the other hand, you can’t help but think that these athletes, who have being training for years, must have better things to focus on than throwing out 140 character snippets during some of the most important moments of their lives. And really, I guess it’s a bit selfish of us to expect it.

While it is strictly a personal opinion, I don’t think any social media platform can compete with the excitement of sitting on the edge of your seat in front of your television as you cheer on the athletes going for their personal dream. The only thing that could possibly compete with that? Actually being there.

While I was on maternity leave last year, inmedia went virtual, meaning we sloughed off the shackles of the commuter lifestyle and now all work remotely, communicating regularly by phone, email, Twitter, smoke signals… As such, earlier this week was a banner occasion when inmedianauts from around the country and across the globe gathered in Ottawa for briefings on a new client that we’ll be launching later this month. To most people, it isn’t novel to see one’s coworkers but for us it is. We’ve quickly established effective systems and processes that enable us to work as a cohesive unit, whether we’re in the same time zone or not.

Companies like ours have so many resources at their fingertips that enable telework to, well, work. With information in the cloud or on remote servers, we can all be connected to our data, and to each other, with ease. The telephone works well - we’re all talking to one another every day as well as to clients, prospects and media and analysts - as does email and Twitter and LinkedIn.

Should we actually need to physically be in one another’s presence, we can converge on a shared workspace like the CodeFactory, as we did earlier this week. As @FrancisMoran noted earlier this week, most of our clients never saw our office and there are multiple clients for whom we’ve done scads of work yet have never met face to face.

It was nice to see the rest of the inmedia team in person earlier this week, but it did remind me that while there’s something to be said for “face time,” we are pretty damn effective as a virtual unit.

Technorati Tags: telework, shared workspaces

Mickey Mouse, that is.

I just returned from another glorious vacation to Walt Disney World, our first trip with our toddler. We had an absolute blast. The weather was great, the food incredible, our accommodations spacious and affordable, and as usual, the customer service we received was outstanding. This is our fourth trip to Disney since 2004 and every time, we’ve marveled at the incredible customer service and impressive systems in place at the parks, restaurants, cruise ship, hotels, even the parking lots to ensure the best experience possible for the guests.

In fact, Disney has written a (the?) book on customer service called Be Our Guest that details all the elements of superior customer service that the company works so hard to achieve. Most of the time, it succeeds.

Traveling with a little one, you’ve got a lot of gear to lug around. Inevitably, things will get left behind or misplaced. So exceptional is the lost and found system in the parks and on the entire property that even though we lost several items over the course of our stay, most of them came back to us - from our son’s beloved stuffed animal to our rental car keys (thank god!)

It’s the systems that the company has in place that make it almost impossible to do the wrong thing.

For example, when they’re filling the massive parking lots for the parks, there are dozens of staff in the parking lot directing traffic so that the cars coming in single file are parking in order, side by side, with no room for error. There’s no parking willy nilly, instead it’s an orderly process and makes things easy for the staff and the guests. Clear signage makes it easy to remember where you parked and trams shuttle guests from their cars to the front gate on an endless loop.

Another great example is the proliferation of garbage cans on the property. Extensive studies were done to see how far a guest would be willing to walk to deposit trash in the proper receptacle, rather than just throw it on the ground. Subsequently, trash cans were placed at these specific intervals and this, paired with the many people cleaning the park, results in an almost impeccable environment. It would be more difficult for guests to litter than to just place their garbage in the trash can.

How does Disney do it?

The company works tirelessly to gather visitor data, with researchers at the entrance to the park surveying the guests, and now even some touchscreens in rides that ask questions, ostensibly to enhance the rider experience, but clearly to also gather market data.

The amount of staff it must take to operate a park on a daily basis is bewildering, but there’s always a friendly “cast member” whenever you need one. I have yet to encounter someone there who doesn’t seem to love their job, though a quick search on the internet sees that some ex-staff refer to it as Mouschwitz, which doesn’t exactly communicate happy images. Still, I can only speak to my experience as a guest, and that, on the whole, has been wonderful.

The magic one feels at a Disney park takes a lot of work, but no company does it better and you’d really have to try hard to have a bad experience on those grounds. It’s a well-oiled, well thought out machine and what it produces is nothing short of, well, magic.

Technorati Tags: Disney, customer service

It might be an oversimplification on my part, but from where I stand, much of the global debate around what to do about climate change has split along a fairly classic left-right axis. Those on the progressive end of the spectrum have embraced the environmental benefits of reducing anthropogenic climate change and often cast the debate in traditional liberal terms such as mitigating the impact on the poorest people on the planet, cutting our dependence on fossil fuels and the often-corrupt regimes governing countries where such fuels are to be found, and halting runaway consumerism. For many on the farthest end of the spectrum, fighting climate change is a natural outgrowth of their anti-capitalist convictions.

People on the right, on the other hand, are over-represented among the climate-change skeptics and even when they do acknowledge that something untoward may be going on, they consistently sound dire warnings about the economic disruption that will surely befall us all if we do anything significant to address the situation. Free marketeers and advocates for the smallest-possible level of government involvement in our lives are practically default members of this side of the debate.

There are always exceptions to be found but I don’t think it’s any coincidence that it was a Liberal government in Canada that signed the Kyoto Protocol — albeit without ever doing anything substantial to meet our treaty obligations — while it is a Conservative government that has swiftly back-pedaled away from making any concrete commitments. Similarly, south of the border, the last Republican administration wanted to have nothing to do with the issue while the current Democratic president and Congress are far more engaged in the debate.

I don’t want to belabour the point but a quick Google search finds the following two rather representative comments among hundreds of blogs whose writers have opinions about global warming, its causes and what we should do about it that align rather predictably with their self-identification as liberal or conservative.

“Now world leaders, and even some liberals, are calling man-made climate change what it truly is, a hoax.” — Conservative Politics Today.

“Physical evidence of global warming is widespread and startlingly significant.” — U.S. Liberal Politics

As with many left-right splits on issues of compelling human interest, I find myself a bit bewildered by the near-complete binary nature of this one. While I have no difficulty understanding the motivation and point of view of the left-wing campaigners, I am astonished that those on the right can’t see that, within what I believe is an incredibly urgent requirement that we swiftly and decisively move to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the impact of climate change, there resides an almost unprecedented economic opportunity that ought to warm the cockles of the fattest-cat capitalist.

That’s why I so so enjoyed a blog post I read over the holidays by Ron Pernick, managing director of Clean Edge, Inc. and coauthor of The Clean Tech Revolution. In a column titled, “Don’t think of a solar panel,” Pernick said we need to reframe the debate so as to attract the support not just of “Birkenstock-wearing, back-to-the-earth, environmentalists” but also of the innovators, the entrepreneurs and, yes, the nakedly capitalist and return-hungry investors (my terms, not his) who will underwrite the massive changes that must take place.

“We should be framing the clean-tech revolution not in the context of something as amorphous as climate change and as divisive as cap-and-trade, but instead on job creation, economic competitiveness, energy independence, and national security,” Pernick wrote. ” Instead of leading with carbon offsets, cap-and-trade, and climate mitigation, we should be focusing on energy independence and security; clean-technology innovation; green-job creation; and global resource management and leadership.”

I’ve never made any secret of my socially progressive political views.Indeed, I have often joked that from where I sit on the political spectrum, Canada’s sort-of-socialist New Democratic Party looks dangerously right wing to me. And yet, at the same time, I am a business person, an entrepreneur and an investor of capital in technology and other companies. I see no contradiction in this whatsoever. Reframing the climate change debate as Pernick suggests leaves no contradiction for others who, like me, can’t identify with either the left or the right on this one.

Technorati Tags: Clean tech, climate change, innovation, entrepreneurship, Ron Pernick

Like many people, I rang in the new year with friends and loved ones at home, watching the famous ball drop in Times Square on television. With a little one at home, it wasn’t feasible to go out for the evening, and so when relegated to sticking around the house, it’s inevitable that we were drawn to watching one of the many new year’s eve specials on television.

We settled on Dick Clark’s Rockin’ Eve, not because of the entertainers appearing, not because of any particular allegiance to the network it was shown on, nor because the television happened to be on that channel. Rather, we consciously sought it out, so ingrained into all our brains is the brand that is Dick Clark’s new year’s eve special. When I think new year’s eve and television, I think Dick Clark. The fact that Clark has been felled by ill health that has impacted his ability to host the program itself and so foisted Ryan Seacrest upon the viewing public is sad, to be sure, yet we still tuned in. In our case, not to see what J Lo would wear, not to gawk at the ailing state of the iconic Clark, but just because the program itself is such an institution, has such a strong brand.

Before we settled on Dick Clark, however, we wandered the proverbial dial, seeing what else was on. A lackluster performance by Britney Spears in a fountain in Las Vegas was the only game in town, television-wise, from 11pm when Fox started its terrible programming. Some would argue that terrible programming is keeping in line with Fox’s established brand, but I digress. It was sad to see Spears performing amidst a line-up of nobodies. Though it was a boost to the ego to think that they were letting just anyone perform on live television like that; maybe I’ll whip up a song and dance number for next year’s special. Stay tuned!

The other channel we had the misfortune of stopping on was CNN, the most trusted name in news. While Gawker has a thoroughly cheeky recount of the night’s events, to me this programming was the most egregious mistake by a big-name media company on a night full of trainwrecks. CNN has branded itself “the most trusted name in news” yet the buffoonery of a raunchy comic and a respected anchor was far beyond good taste. I wouldn’t trust Kathy Griffin to cross the road, let alone entertain people to ring in the new year. While Gawker points out that CNN, which is struggling in the ratings, needs Kathy more than Kathy needs CNN, it’s unfortunate that the network felt it had to corrupt its branding so flagrantly in order to attempt to lure viewers. As we’ve written about previously, poorly conceptualized stunts like this don’t work, rather, they tend to turn people off.

We’ve been marketers long enough that we’ve helped guide companies through rebranding and new identities and what we’ve learned is that your true brand is not what you thrust upon the marketplace but rather how your customers and the public at large identify your company and its offerings. That’s where Dick Clark got it so right for so many years and CNN got it so wrong. When you deliver something expected, customers are pleased. Likewise, when you provide something totally antithetical to what they’ve come to know from your company, they’re confused and put off. Valuable lessons to learn for all of us.

Happy new year to all! Best of luck for 2010; may the year be healthy, happy and prosperous for everyone.

Technorati Tags: new year’s eve, Dick Clark, CNN, Fox, branding

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