I don’t know if it’s because we have a client whose software helps companies vastly improve their customer service, or whether we, like most others on this planet, rage against lousy customer service when we are victims of it, but it simply defies comprehension that companies would willingly lose business because they can’t seem to get their heads around the fact that effective customer service is the most potent — indeed, maybe the only — sustainable competitive differentiation in an environment where price advantage will evaporate thanks to offshoring and technological advantage will be leaped over by another’s innovation.

Just this past week, I had a couple of truly outstanding examples of mind-numbingly poor customer service. The first was the Chapters cashier who blithely dismissed my bringing to her attention a major flaw in the company’s online search engine. One of my sons needed a replacement copy of a book he was studying for school and had lost. I went online to make sure the book would be available at the store before I actually went. Chapters’ computer system told me there were no copies anywhere in the city. When I mentioned this to my son, he said the computer had told him the same thing when he had looked for the book a week or so earlier, only to find at least a dozen copies on the shelves. So I ignored the computer system, went to the store and found many, many copies were, indeed, available.

When I mentioned this to the cashier and suggested she might like to bring it to someone’s attention, she brushed me off, saying the shipment of books probably just came in and that it took their computers a few days to catch up. When I said my son had experienced the same thing a good week or more earlier, suggesting it was a more persistent issue than her first glib response would suggest, it was as though she wasn’t even listening; she simply repeated the same pat answer.

Now, I wasn’t complaining. I wasn’t bitching. I was helpfully bringing to the store’s attention the fact that there might be a serious problem with their online system that, had my son not let me know differently, would have cost them this sale as I went elsewhere to get the book. And she simply couldn’t care less. Either through deliberate training or a complete lack of interest, she had a stock answer that allowed her to avoid any meaningful attempt at genuine customer engagement.

For what it’s worth, five days later, the book is still showing completely out of stock all over the city. The kicker is, it’s Orwell’s 1984; at least the concept of doublespeak is alive and well and living at Chapters!

The second unbelievable episode happened yesterday when our phone system went down. We couldn’t get an outside dial tone. Our landline provider is Rogers, so we called them. It took fully 45 minutes — yup, you read that right! — for them to find our account, even though we gave them the phone number in question, the account number at the top of their invoices, every phone number on the account, the name of the company and the name of the key contact on the account! Turns out, Rogers has yet to integrate into their main system the operations of Group Telecom they acquired several years ago when they bought up Sprint Canada. So although everything about our phone service is striped Rogers, we actually had to call a completely separate customer service number, where we told there was a system-wide failure.

But neither of these meets the standard for wretched customer service set by the first-ever winner of the Air Canada-Harold McGowan Memorial Award for Truly Egregious Customer Service. The award is named for Air Canada’s baggage-handling chief at San Francisco Airport who said to me, when I started telling him why my bag had failed to arrive with me on a flight from Calgary, “Keep talking sir, it’s going in one ear and out the other.”

Now, Air Canada is truly a leader in finding new ways to treat its customers like crap. But even by the high standards for low service set every day by the legions of couldn’t-care-less agents of this near-monopoly carrier, Harold’s performance was a jaw-dropping standout. With my journalist’s training, I immediately wrote his statement down on the back of my boarding pass, along with his name. I carry it around with me to show people who, like everyone at the baggage counter who heard Harold that night, simply can’t believe anyone in a customer-facing position would ever say such a thing.

And in his memory, I inaugurated the Air Canada-Harold McGowan Memorial Award for Truly Egregious Customer Service. The key criterion that must be met goes beyond mere incompetence or indifference; to win the award, an individual or company must essentially invite me to take my business elsewhere.

And so the first ever Air Canada-Harold McGowan Memorial Award for Truly Egregious Customer Service goes to — drum roll, please! — Petra, of Zip.ca Member Services, who last week explicitly invited me to cancel my subscription to this online DVDs-by-mail since she and Zip had no intention of ever addressing the increasingly poor customer service I had been experiencing for some time. Without going into extensive detail, what had started as a marvelous experience, degraded over the past year to the point where Zip was unable for more than a week to ship me even one of the 15 titles I had on my list. And all Petra and others at Zip could say was that I should add more titles, and maybe pick less desirable movies or settle for standard-format versions instead of the Blu-Ray titles I was seeking. In short, please don’t ask us to improve our service so it meets what we advertise; restrict your use of us so it falls within our limited ability to meet the promises we made you.

Congratulations, Petra, you’ve won the award and lost my business.

Technorati Tags: Customer service, Air Canada, Harold McGowan, Chapters, Rogers, Zip.ca

More words will be written today, perhaps, about yesterday’s presidential election in the United States than have ever been written about a single event in living memory, but I feel compelled to add my own few since rarely in my life have I seen something transpire that I frankly never expected to witness.

U.S. president-elect Barack Obama will enter the White House in January arguably the least experienced person that office has ever seen. He will take up power atop a nation that has been wounded, perhaps irreparably, by grave errors of judgment and downright malicious intent at almost every level. He has ridden a wave of expectation, entirely of his own deliberate manufacture, that no human could ever fulfill, and this may eventually be his undoing.

But this morning, as the world awoke to a tectonic shift in the geology of human endeavour that few thought possible, Obama must be recognized for achieving the unimaginable, for forging a campaign and a connection with millions of Americans that overturned our every expectation about race and its supposed immutable place in the politics of that amazing, capricious, expansive and divisive country.

I lived in southern Africa for many years as a child and never thought I would witness the emancipation of South Africa this side of a bloody and protracted uprising. My parents are Irish, and I went to school in Ireland for two years, and never thought I’d witness the laying down of arms and the embracing of democratic means in Northern Ireland by men wedded to the gun and the laws of violence. And I never, ever thought I’d see a black man in the Oval Office.

The audacity of the human spirit, a force that Obama harnessed to his own equally outrageous personal ambition and rode to the most powerful job in the world, is boundless. Whatever he manages to do with the power he now has, this one man has demonstrated that anything we dream, we can accomplish.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama

Although it had its genesis in a consulting practice that was already several years old, and its first employee had been in place for several months, inmedia Public Relations Inc. was legally incorporated on November 5, 1998, and so today is our tenth birthday.

I would be less than forthright if I said that 10 years after launching a technology focused PR firm that I had accomplished what I thought would be in place a decade out. The tech meltdown damn near put us under and the continued severe contraction of Ottawa’s tech sector means we have slim pickings here at home. And my initial business proposition, that we could create an agency of excellence and extract a premium from the marketplace for that excellence, has proven to be a tough pitch in a market that too often has yet to be weaned off mediocrity.

But we survived the meltdown, the only exclusively B2B technology PR practice in the city to do so. Today, we get very well paid for our excellence from clients who have come to understand the difference. And our deliberate business development strategy over the past three or four years has been to embrace Ottawa clients certainly, but also to aggressively pursue business anywhere and everywhere we see a good opportunity.

My excellent colleague Danny Sullivan’s self-repatriation to his native Scotland a few years back opened a whole new front for us, and our far-reaching Google Adwords campaigns and this blog have brought us amazing opportunities from many other corners. With Ottawa accounting for about 35% of our revenues, we have embraced clients and projects in Calgary, Toronto, Montréal, Fredericton, Moncton and St. John’s; in Boston, Jersey City, San Jose and Chicago; and in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Farnborough and London.

If the business outcome has not been everything I hoped for 10 years ago, the experience has been nonetheless incredible. Most noteworthy has been the extraordinary people who have come to work with me here at inmedia. In an industry where average employee tenure has been pegged at less than a year, inmedianauts tend to hang around for much longer, with the average tenure here topping three years and some having spent five, six and even seven years on board. The consultants who work here are the real product that we sell, and I have had the unmitigated pleasure of consistently being able to bring to market the very best product in the PR industry, period.

Similarly, we have worked on some amazing projects with some of the brightest minds in technology, business and marketing. Our web site lists nearly 90 clients with whom we have worked over the past 10 years, and each and every one of them has represented a unique story, a unique set of market dynamics and a unique set of media and analyst targets to whom that story needed to be told. It is this ever-changing nature of the business that makes PR consulting so fascinating to me.

It has been rewarding, challenging and frustrating, as most any worthwhile venture inevitably is. It has also been a period of considerable personal and professional growth, and I look forward to learning even more as this little PR company continues.

Technorati Tags: inmedia Public Relations, public relations, technology, entrepreneurship, birthday

There is no better time than now to start a technology company in Canada, Montreal-based serial entrepreneur Austin Hill told a sold-out crowd at last night’s inaugural Ottawa Founders and Funders dinner.

Hill told the entrepreneurs and various investors gathered at the Velvet Room how he raised US$25 million on a US$100-million pre-revenue valuation of his company Zero-Knowledge Systems Inc. (now called RadialPoint) just as the whole tech sector was going kaflooie at the beginning of this decade. The tough times that followed taught him very difficult lessons about being an entrepreneur as he was obliged to lay off employees he had personally recruited and induced to move to Montreal.

RadialPoint emerged from the meltdown as a much stronger company, Hill said, because of this focus on creating value. And the same opportunity exists today, he insisted.

“People who understand technology and people who have money and know how to make it work effectively have never existed together in Canada like they do today,” he said, making this “a great time for Canadian startups.”

Hill got chuckles from at least the founders in the room when he asked what you get when “you cross a lemming with a sheep?” The answer, of course, is a venture capitalist, and the current economic meltdown means only the truly committed risk-takers will be left standing. Tough times have a way of “washing out some of the people who weren’t serious about our sector in the first place,” he said.

I managed a brief aside with Hill that I used to ask him about his latest venture, Akoha. I have been curious ever since I signed on to the game whether it was purely a philanthropic undertaking or whether there was a revenue model behind it somewhere. “A very powerful revenue model,” Hill assured me before going into some fascinating details I won’t spill here since I neglected to get his permission to do so. But go take a look at the site for yourself.

Curiously, I was just this morning able to personally experience a sharp contradiction to one of Hill’s contentions, although I suspect he’d be happy to hear about it. Ottawa and other tech-heavy Canadians cities lack the kind of meeting places, like coffee shops, where you can wander in and be sure to run into people you need to meet, he suggested, saying that was his common experience in California. Well, for what it’s worth, I wandered into my friendly neighbourhood Bridgehead this morning only to run into Scott Lake. We spent a good 40 minutes chatting about his newest venture, ThinkSM. While we were doing so, I pointed out the head of one of Ottawa’s largest integrated communications agencies who wandered in while Scott recognised some major investor who was also at Bridgehead having a meeting over coffee. So maybe we do have some of that gravitational pull Hill was pining for.

The dinner itself was a good room and full kudos need to go to Allan Isfan of FaveQuest who pulled it together.

Technorati Tags: Founders and Funders, Austin Hill, RadialPoint, Zero-Knowledge, Akoha, FaveQuest, ThinkSM, entrepreneurship, venture capital

“I’ve just come to expect that my (public relations) agency can’t write,” was the astonishing admission I heard a few weeks back from a vice president at one of Ottawa’s larger technology companies who called us to see if we’d be interested in participating in an agency review process.

(I’ve promised not to name him (or her) for reasons that will be obvious as you read the rest of this post.)

I could hardly believe my ears. But yes, he said, it had long been his experience that the PR practitioners he had been dealing with from a range of different agencies and across a number of companies just weren’t very good writers, and so it fell to him to write most of the materials used in his campaigns. One of the key reasons he was approaching inmedia, he told me, was our very strong reputation in the marketplace as superb writers, a reputation he said was confirmed when he read our blog and web site.

I chalked this one up to what I assumed was just an unfortunate experience on the part of one technology marketing executive until I relayed the story to a colleague last week, a CEO at another technology company here in Ottawa and an insightful marketer in his own right. I was again utterly gobsmacked when he said he didn’t view writing as a core requirement in the PR function, that the ability to pitch the story was far more important.

“And what do you do,” I asked him, “When the pitch is initially well received and the next words out of the reporter or editor’s mouth are, ‘Sounds good, send me something about it.’?”

Here’s the thing. To work at inmedia and, I believe, to be an effective media relations practitioner anywhere, you must be able to write at an expert level and you must be able to effectively pitch what you’ve written. There is no hierarchy between these two fundamental skills. Lack one, and you’re out of the game.

And here’s why.

To believe, as these two otherwise successful technology marketers clearly do, that writing is either not terribly important or that your PR function, whether internal or an agency, can be permitted to be lousy writers, is to completely beggar the entire communications process.

In the first instance, despite all the wonderful new communications tools at our disposal, most journalists still want to see something in cold, hard black and white, even if it is delivered electronically. And even if they don’t ask for it, it’s just gotta be in your best interests to give them well-written material so they have the complete story, with all the relevant facts and accurate spellings of company, product and people’s names to which they can refer. This is just so basic I’m staggered it needs stating.

Second, how in the heck does a PR practitioner demonstrate her or his understanding of the story without writing about it? Yes, a properly written document proves the communicator can — gasp! — communicate. That is, the words run together in some sort of comprehensible order, everything is spelled correctly and the commas and periods are in the right places. But it still won’t be any good unless the person writing it actually has a thorough grasp of the subject matter.

Effective writing is not a case of cutting and pasting bits and pieces from other documents to make a different document and it needs to be more than a merely technically accurate use of words, grammar and punctuation. Effective writing is the process of distilling what has been learned — from other documents, certainly, but also, and critically, from interviews with a range of subject-matter experts — into a new piece of work. It not only communicates the story to all who read it, it also demonstrates understanding.

Bottom line: If your agency can’t write about it well, they almost certainly can’t pitch it well. And even worse, they probably don’t even understand it well.

So, did we get the business? Well, that’s another story that I cover here: The Ottawa inferiority complex theorem strikes again.

Technorati Tags: writing, pitching, media relations, business development

“Life has a way of making the foreseeable that which never happens … and the unforeseeable that which your life becomes.”

I heard that line on Thursday evening last week when I went to see the new movie, Appaloosa, a terrific duster starring Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen as two gunslingers hired to keep the peace in the town that gives the movie its title.

But the words could just as easily have been spoken by Stephen Poloz, senior vice-president of financing at Export Development Canada, who earlier the same day gave the keynote luncheon address at the Ottawa Venture and Technology Summit.

For a banker, Poloz had lots of funny lines as he delivered a logical explanation of how a bit of a live-for-today spending spree by American consumers in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks led inevitably to the near-collapse of the entire capitalist system.

If your world can be randomly eviscerated by unimaginable events well beyond your control, he argued, “what’s the point of having a credit card paid off?” This attitude led Americans to “spend every nickle they earned and every nickle they could borrow.”

The banks played along. “You can’t have a good speculative bubble without a good bank,” Poloz said, adding that the key thing the banks did was redefine what once was known as “uncreditworthy.” “Now we just call them sub-prime, and give them a loan.” Those loans were packaged up and sold off as well-rated and secure investments, adding further leverage to a situation that was already cranked way beyond sustainability.

And when housing prices stopped rising, the blow that American consumers feared would come from terrorists ended up being a self-inflicted wound. This last bit is my take, not Poloz’s.

What Poloz could not do, however, was give any counsel, and this is where he started sounding like novelist Robert B. Parker’s enigmatic retired soldier Everett Hitch. “The most important insight here is, we don’t know” what’s going to happen, Poloz said. “The models don’t explain what happened and they can’t explain what’s going to happen.”

Trouble is, he then started applying those broken models by way of reassuring his audience.

For example, he said the $700-billion package put together by the U.S. government would be enough to counter the $7 trillion he said speculators had blown into the markets because banks can take a dollar of fresh capital and lever $10 in new loans from it. Well, maybe under the old model they could.

Further, he said the meltdown of the U.S. economy would not have the same repercussions as those experienced by Latin American countries or Japan or others in decades past because, unlike then, the economy is not fragile, the regulatory regime is strong and the government has a good balance sheet. I’m not sure which American government he was referring to, but none of those three sound anything like they apply to the government that runs a big country just south of here.

For all of us who have been whipsawed by the markets over the past several weeks, the unforeseeable truly has been made into what our lives have become.

Technorati Tags: Export Bank of Canada, Stephen Poloz, Ottawa Venture and Technology Summit, Appaloosa, economy

Defiantly channeling the “greed is good” credo of character Gordon Gekko from his self-avowed favourite movie “Wall Street,”  venture capitalist Paul Dawalibi from St. Lawrence Capital ruffled more than a few feathers at an Ottawa Network event at TheCodeFactory last night.

“Arrogant putz,” one attendee said to me as I headed out the door, while another, accused by Dawalibi of asking a “hostile question,” retorted back, “That was a hostile presentation.” Other opinions were equally scathing. “Why would any self-respecting entrepreneur submit themselves to that,” one audience member asked me rhetorically, while another wondered, “Is this is what it’s come to in Ottawa that we have to put up with the likes of that,” after commenting that Dawalibi’s presentation and approach seemed rather barren of ethics.

Indeed, at one point Dawalibi, whose fund claims an interest in backing green technology, told the 40 or 50 people in the room, “If it (an investment in a company’s technology) earns me a 10x return, I don’t care how badly it pollutes.”

It was a remarkably unrepentent and jarringly discordant approach at a time when greed and unrestrained capitalism have toppled so many of Gekko’s modern-day Wall Street compatriots.

Dawalibi’s “I am not your friend” pitch to entrepreneurs was also in sharp contrast to the other funding source represented at last night’s event, the Ontario government’s Accelerator Investment Fund. Investment manager Shirley Speakman put as much emphasis on the friendly and nurturing support structures the fund offers its portfolio companies as she did on the half-million dollars she could invest.

Technorati Tags: venture capital, St. Lawrence Capital, Paul Dawalibi, Investment Accelerator Fund, Shirley Speakman, The Ottawa Network

Okay, this has nothing whatsoever to do with technology or marketing but I just had to write about this joyous new oasis in the heart of our city.

All summer long, as I trundled to and from work, I have been monitoring activity at a small city park on Main Street in Ottawa east. The neighbourhood, badly mauled when the Queensway — what our British readers would call a motorway and our American readers a freeway — split it in two more than 20 years ago, is gradually recovering. New residential developments have gone in, a lively farmers market on the grounds of Saint Paul University draws crowds every Saturday and the highly desirable blocks between Main Street and the Rideau River contain, by my reckoning, some of the most attractive housing to be found in Ottawa.

A couple of weekends ago, there were crowds of children and adults working on the park site so I knew some big changes were pending. Just what they were up to was immediately evident when I biked down Main Street on my way to work the following Monday and was greeted with this joyous burst of colour and life. It was such a happy scene I actually burst out laughing as I pedaled past.

One of the mainstays of Main Street, in operation for more than 100 years, has been Lady Evelyn Alternative School, which my two lads attended, first at the excellent Rainbow Kids’ School, a preschool housed in the same building, and then through eight years of kindergarten and elementary school. A few blocks up from the park, Lady Evelyn is an amazing institution in this city, even if its decided lack of emphasis on academic performance has teachers at other schools rolling their eyes. It is, rather, a warm, community-oriented and nurturing place, where a dozen or more languages can be heard spoken at any school gathering and where my boys thrived in their personal development and did well enough academically to qualify for competitive arts and enriched programs when they moved on to junior and senior high school.

The new kids park, formally known as the Old Ottawa East Children’s Garden, is very much a partnership between students at Lady Evelyn and a group called Sustainable Living Ottawa East. According to a story in the Ottawa Citizen, each student at the school painted one of the 300 pickets that border the park while corporations such as Home Depot, Microsoft Canada and UPS kicked in materials and money. Despite a late start, an organic vegetable garden has yielded some produce this year and other plants, many of them donated by neighbours, abound.

It’s a beautiful thing, and I salute everyone involved.

Technorati Tags: Old Ottawa East Children’s Garden, Ottawa, Main Street, Lady Evelyn Alternative School

We’ve written a couple of posts about the wisdom of continuing marketing activities through the summer months when, it is broadly assumed, everyone is on vacation and so not paying attention to such things. Our consistent counsel has been to maintain a steady level of activity since not everyone is on holiday at the same time, mind share is a highly perishable commodity that needs constant refreshing and you might even gain a leg up on the competition that put its marketing on a summer hiatus.

One area where this does not apply seems to be our own business development activities, which are largely based on networking and getting out where we know we’ll meet technology companies. There are precious few such events during the summer months and this isn’t entirely a bad thing since it vastly reduces the time I need to spend, especially in the evening hours, doing the networking thing.

But man, I tell you, come Labour Day and the whole tune changes, and this year seems to be even more pronounced than usual. I don’t know whose hand was on the dial this year but the volume has been cranked way up.

Here in our home town, The Ottawa Network has introduced a new schedule of events that gives us somewhere to go every Wednesday evening. Judging from the numbers turning out so far, they’ve hit on topics and approaches that are drawing a good crowd.

OCRI, of course, greeted September with a new season of programming and we’re regular attendees at many of these. On the private-sector side, Ian Graham of The Code Factory — and a client of inmedia’s — has a pretty full calendar of activities at his downtown business incubator.

The start-up community here in Ottawa and elsewhere is also newly galvanized. We’re looking forward to Ottawa’s first DemoCamp of the season, the city’s 10th edition of the wonderfully grassroots event that sees six new companies show off their product or application and get feedback from a room of their peers.

On a somewhat larger scale, the superb Toronto-based blog startupnorth.ca is organizing a two-day conference it has grandly titled Startup Empire. Featuring two days of workshops, speakers and networking “by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs,” the event takes place November 13 and 14 at The Diesel Playhouse in Toronto.

I don’t know if I’ll make it to Startup Empire but I’ll seize any good reason to go to Montreal if only because it provides the opportunity to tuck into the best smoked meat on the planet at Schwartz’s Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen. On November 27, there’ll be a lot more than good brisket bringing me to town, however. inmedia has singed on as sponsors of StartupCampMontreal3, which will see scores of new companies compete to be one of five that will formally present to what organizers hope will be hundreds of attendees. This is our first interaction with the Montreal startup community and I’m very much looking forward to it.

Also on the list of firsts for inmedia was the foray I made down to Waterloo a couple of weeks ago to attend the official launch of the University of Waterloo’s VeloCity residence and to also drop in on the exciting and so-successful-it’s-bursting-at-the-seams Accelerator Centre. I blogged about this visit and will keep you up to date as I return to VeloCity October 16 for a presentation on public relations.

And, last but not least, my time at the Red Herring Canada Conference 08 at the beginning of last week yielded not only a well-read blog post on the antics of organizer Alex Vieux but also introductions to a couple of dozen new companies.

Bottom line: We’re less than a month into the new networking season and this PR guy has one full dance card. Let’s hope these trade winds steer me into some high-value ports.

Technorati Tags: networking, business development, The Ottawa Network, OCRI, The Code Factory, start-ups, Schwartz’s Delicatessen, Ottawa, Montreal, Waterloo, Toronto

I already wrote a post at Dangletech.com, where I try to contribute weekly, about the most fascinating highlight the Red Herring Canada 08 conference held earlier this week at Mont Tremblant. For my money, the best entertainment was the riveting behaviour of Red Herring publisher and CEO Alex Vieux who dominated the event with his bewildering mix of brilliant observation, insightful analysis and boorish, insulting and condescending treatment of those who paid big bucks to attend.

But there was, fortunately, more of value beyond Vieux’s theatrics and here, in no particular order other than how they appear in my notebook, are some of the better gems from nearly two days of presentations, round tables and corridor chitchat at an event focused on technology startups and the venture capitalists they pursue for funding.

Miranda Technology Inc. chairman Brian Edwards said there is a “liquidity crisis in Canada,” leading many funds-seeking companies to consider going the capital pool company route on the TSX-Venture Exchange. “That’s pretty scary to me.” And while he applauded that lots of government money is going into research in Canadian universities, he said there is “very little management of that money. … We need to bet on the creation” of new companies.

Jacques Bernier, senior vice-president at Fonds de solidarité FTQ, was equally skeptical of the temptations of an early or inadequate IPO. “We won’t touch” a company that goes public on the venture exchange for its first million dollars or so and then comes to his firm looking for more. Being public “puts the focus entirely on the wrong place,” he said.

Mike Grandinetti, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, said too many companies looking for funding have “an unhealthy focus on not wanting to dilute” the founders’ ownership. If you’re in it to win, he said, retaining less than 50% ownership — sometimes much less — should not be an issue. As for the view that markets are too unsettled or times are too tough, “turbulence creates opportunity,” he said.

RBC Venture Partners managing director Robert Antoniades agreed with Grandinetti on founders accepting lower stakes in their companies, saying, “You can be a very successful entrepreneur with 10% ownership.” He cautioned founders not to try to remake a “VC process (that) is well understood.”

The critical role marketing plays in the early development and revenue growth of a young company was emphasized by Yahoo Canada general manager Kerry Munro. He encouraged companies to boost their marketing spend when the economy turns sour. “Marketing is the first thing you cut in times of trouble,” he said. “It should be the first thing you invest in in times of opportunity.”

The challenge, he added, is to see marketing in a new light. “Most companies in Canada look at it as a cost and not as an investment.”

One Ottawa CEO who successfully found venture backing earlier this year told the conference he did not share any belief that money is not available, so long as the idea being pitched is worthy. “If you want to raise VC money, you’d better come up with an idea that’s VC-fundable,” said OverlayTV’s Rob Lane, something he defined as having the potential of being worth $100 million some day.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneurs, venture capital, Red Herring, Miranda Technology, capital pool companies, TSX Venture Exchange, Fonds de solidarité FTQ, MIT Sloan School of Management, RBC Venture Partners, Yahoo Canada, OverlayTV