Although only one team, Cambrian Mobile Content Delivery Network that wants to improve the experience of viewing video content on a mobile network by caching the most popular content at individual cell sites, came away with the $5,000 first prize at this past weekend’s Startup Boot Camp organised by The Ottawa Network, all six of the ventures that were presented to a review panel late Sunday afternoon were viable business concepts that could be made into real companies. And each of them progressed over the weekend from mere concept in the head of the entrepreneur who originally pitched the idea Friday night to unexpectedly polished and, under the circumstance, rather sophisticated business plans by Sunday evening.

This was the real intent of the camp, a weekend-long intensive competition in business-plan development and company creation. Organisers Rick O’Connor and Bob Morais told the more than 50 participants several times that they wanted to see a handful of new ventures emerge from the weekend, something they said would help revitalise a local technology sector ecosystem that Morais said has been knocked back to where it was in the early 1990s by a combination of the global economic meltdown, the flight of venture capital and other funding sources from Ottawa and the uncertainty created by the breakup of Nortel Networks. which had long been the region’s biggest research centre and a regular source of new companies and ideas.

Following are quick summaries of each of the six teams.

Feather Payment Systems

Described by its originator as “what Paypal should have been,” Feather Payments seeks to create a new, more secure and completely private way of making payments both online and in bricks-and-mortar retailers by using a form of public key infrastructure to sign every transaction. The review panel thought it was a good proposition, but one that would be immediately undone “if the credit card companies and banks ever got jiggy with PKI.”

Broadband Networks Corp. wants to bring telecom optical technology to big television players and productions. By building a new optical interconnect module, the company will allow TV production shops to replace bulky and short-haul coaxial cable with higher-capacity, lighter and longer-haul fiber-optic cables. Although I expressed some skepticism based on the fact that fiber is already well deployed in TV studios, entrepreneur Jean-Guy Chauvin insisted his module fills a considerable gap as the industry moves towards adoption of second-generation optical technology.

I’ve already mentioned that Cambrian Mobile CDN was the winner and I agreed with the panel. I thought Cambrian presented the most compelling business case and the clearest vision of how it might be executed. The concept is to develop half-terabyte flash-based caches that would be installed by mobile network operators in their base stations. These carriers would charge high-volume video-content providers such as YouTube to cache their content, a process that would improve the user experience while vastly reducing the traffic load on the carriers’ backhaul networks.

PostKicker was probably the easiest of the concepts from an implementation perspective, and one that, unlike the others, could be on the market in very short order and without much capital. The concept is to eliminate some of the sharpest pain associated with moving by taking over the tedious process of advising everyone of your change of address. The company would develop a web portal through which you could enter your change-of-address details, with PostKicker taking care of actually letting all your various contacts, especially your commercial contacts, know you had moved. Initially, the company intends to do this fairly manually but anticipates that as its subscriber base grows, companies will be persuaded to accept its notifications electronically.

CasaControl has a vision to convert digital picture frames into remote control devices that manage the growing number of automated processes within homes. While I thought it was an interesting idea and the team’s presentation was comprehensive, I agreed with the panel that more ubiquitous devices, such as smart phones, constitute a far more compelling platform for such a function.

A clear crowd favourite all weekend was Carewave. Not only did it attract the largest number of team members, it had a feel-good quality to it that was irresistible. Carewave wants to build an RFID and wireless pager system that transmits a basic safety code to healthcare workers that alerts them about a range of dangers posed by patients in their care. Although Carewave’s presentation was easily the most elegant — industrial designer Mike McGuire even managed to produce plastic prototypes overnight using his 3D printer — the panel pointed out that penetrating the healthcare market is a protracted process.

I will be keeping tabs on each of the concepts and will be sure to let you know if any of them move to then next stage of incorporating a bona fide startup. All the energy and output of the weekend notwithstanding, that will be the real measure of the success of the boot camp. The Ottawa Network plans a second installment in the spring.

Technorati Tags: The Ottawa Network, Startup Boot Camp, entrepreneurship, startups, technology

Although many companies have embraced social media tools, especially for internal collaboration and customer interaction, their adoption by business has yet to cross the chasm into mainstream acceptance, according to a study by research firm IDC that was presented at this morning Social Media Breakfast in Ottawa. Similarly, IDC senior analyst Krista Napier said, “as much we hear about (social media tools) … it’s important to remember not everybody is on them yet.”

IDC’s numbers came from a recent survey of 200 business and IT leaders, most of whom could identify Facebook and Twitter as social media tools but many of whom could not see any business value in deploying them. When IDC asked the question, “What words come to mind when you think of social media?”, the most frequent answer was “Facebook” followed by “Twitter.” “Consumer” was the third most frequently stated answer, clearly indicating that businesses do not see social media as an effective business tool. This lack of enthusiasm was further reinforced by the next three most frequently cited answers, “distracting,” “waste of time” and “no business value.”

Still, the IDC study did find some companies were using such tools, although at insufficient rates to be considered mainstream. Using Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the chasm” model of technology adoption, IDC pegged all social media tools as still being in the early adopter phase or having just moved across the chasm towards mainstream market adoption. Leading the way were wikis, with 25% of respondents reporting their use, followed by blogs at 21.5%. Podcasts were being used by 17% of respondents while microblogging, which includes Twitter, was at a dismal 10.9%.

Pointedly, use of social networking analytics was at just 13.1%, which may explain management’s poor appetite for a tool that has yet to generally submit to rigorous measurement.

Respondents said security concerns were the biggest hurdle to greater adoption, followed by a lack of senior buy-in and decreased productivity. Those companies that were using the tools were using them most for departmental collaboration (37.5%), improved customer interactions (34.5%) and improved employee morale (30%).

A further set of numbers suggested that the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon. Noting that use of social media by corporations is often lawless and ungoverned, often resembling “the wild west,” Krista said companies should develop social media policies. However, her research found that only 24% of respondents had done so while another 25% said they “planned to” in the next 12 months. Fully 40% said they had no such plans while the balance either didn’t know if they would or didn’t know what a social media policy would be.

The sobering reality that many consumers themselves have yet to embrace many of these emerging tools may also explain corporate reticence. In a similar study of consumer habits, IDC found that 64% of respondents said they used Facebook. The next most widely used social media tool, YouTube, was well down the adoption curve at only 14%, while Twitter was even lower.

Social media enthusiast Kelly Rusk tweeted me during Krista’s presentation to suggest that these numbers mean “there’s still opportunity for leadership in the space,” and I don’t disagree. The risk, however, is that marketers extolling the virtues of social media will find themselves too far out in front of both their corporate leadership and their markets.

Technorati Tags: social media, IDC, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Crossing the chasm, Krista Napier, Social media breakfast, marketing

For the first time in practically the decade-long lifespan of this technology-focused PR agency, I did not attend any part of the Ottawa Venture and Technology Summit held last week at the Chateau Laurier. Actually, that’s not quite true; I went to a packed StartUp Drinks in the Byward Market on Wednesday night and from there popped briefly into the thinly-attended Young Venture Capitalists OVTS networking event that was happening just a few doors away. But the point is, I didn’t see any of the company presentations, hear any of the speeches or, most importantly, glom onto any of the corridor scuttlebutt that is usually the most interesting aspect of these things.

In the days since, I have heard various reports from attendees from across the investor-entrepreneur spectrum and I have read what little reportage made the public record. Very little of what I’ve heard or read left me terribly hopeful that a new crop of exciting Ottawa technology ventures was about to get funded any time soon. The most consistent sentiment seemed to be contained in the comment VG Partners managing general partner Pat DiPietro made in an Ottawa Business Journal story on the fact that the OVTS and a similar event in Banff had a scheduling overlap. “But on the other hand there are no VCs investing, so it doesn’t really matter right now,” DiPietro said.

This caused me to wonder if venture fairs have passed their sell-by date. Can anyone remember the last company that could claim to have met at one of these things the connection that led to successful funding?

Then my pal James Smith weighed in on his newish blog, Startup Great White North. Unlike me, James not only attended the Ottawa venture fair, he also winged out west to the Banff shindig. Despite the fact he there witnessed “institutional investors focused principally on shaking off modest Thursday night hangovers and cradling Blackberrys and iPhones like long-lost friends” rather than paying attention to the entrepreneurs’ pitches, he decided in the end that investors don’t regard those pitching companies “with the attention my mini-van driving wife might give to passing picked-over roadkill on the road to our cottage.”

I’m not sure I’m as persuaded as James but he does go on to provide a solid list of techniques that serious venture-seeking entrepreneurs can deploy to improve their outcomes from such an event.

While we’re on the question of the utility of VC fairs, we might as well start asking questions about the utility of the VC model itself. We have begun work on a series of articles about this very question. We will look at who is actually funding startups in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. We’ll ask experts which pieces of the model work and which don’t. And most importantly, we’ll examine the state of the ecosystem beyond VCs that needs to be in place to help companies, especially those that will never be VC-fundable, bring their technology to market. We’ll look at the proliferation of new government funding here in Canada and compare it with what’s in place in other markets. If you believe you have a perspective on this, we’d love to hear from you. You can email me at fmoran (at) inmedia.com.

Technorati Tags: Venture capital, investment, Ottawa Venture and Technology Summit, Banff Venture Forum, Pat DiPietro, James Smith, technology, technology marketing

I write an awful lot on this blog about customer service, mainly lousy customer service. Like most consumers, I run into my share of companies whose customer-service posture screams at me that they just don’t give a damn about keeping me as a customer. Having a blog gives me a soapbox from which to rant about them but given that this is supposed to be a blog about marketing, merely ranting would not meet our editorial mandate.

So my preoccupation with customer service is based on what I have come to call my first law of competitive differentiation, the proposition that, in an age when almost any technological or cost advantage will rapidly and inevitably be eroded, the only sustainable competitive differentiation for most companies is to treat their customers like the centre of the universe that they actually are.

Sadly, far too many companies pay only lip service to this.

Last night, my wife and I had an experience that showed us the other side of the equation.

It was our ninth wedding anniversary on Wednesday but my wife was in Houston at a trade show so we planned a belated celebratory dinner for last night. We chose to go to Play Food and Wine, an Ottawa eatery we had heard a lot about, whose chef and founder we liked, but that we had not yet managed to try. Reservations were made, nice clothes were donned and off we went.

The first bit of unusual customer service should never have been noteworthy at all. We were greeted immediately upon arrival — a rare enough occurrence at restaurants these days — and they offered to take our coats! I know, that used to be standard operating procedure at restaurants but, upon reflection, I had trouble remembering the last time that had happened to me.

Upstairs we went, drinks were ordered and we looked over an imaginative menu of tempting dishes fitting Play’s tapas-style approach of small plates designed to be shared. We made a few selections, and our waiter brought out the first two, reserving the third one until we had finished off the first two.

Unfortunately, my wife, who had risen at 4am and had been spent much of the day traveling home on bumpy little planes, unexpectedly developed a wonky tummy just as our first courses were being served. She bravely tried to eat a bit but I ended up clearing off both plates as she waited in vain for her stomach to settle. Since it was clear she wasn’t going to be feeling better any time soon, we explained the situation to our waiter and asked him to hold off on our third plate if he had not already ordered it. Clearly thinking that I still deserved to have dinner, he said he could get it on our table within five minutes but I declined, saying it really would be best if we just grabbed our bill.

He was solicitous and attentive at every stage, occupied solely with our well-being, and so he should have been, given the consummately service-oriented business in which he worked. But then he went above and beyond, and here’s why I must sing the praises of Jordan, our waiter last night at Play.

He brought our bill, telling us that he had not charged for the glass of bubbly my wife had barely touched. Very nice gesture.

But wait, there was more.

When he brought back my credit card and slip to sign, he also brought me a small sampler of the hanger steak I had been very much looking forward to having as our third dish. Just enough for me to relish the dish; not so much that my wife had to wait more than a few minutes for me to finish it off.

With a few small gestures, Jordan raised our experience at Play, disappointingly foreshortened though it might have been, from the merely satisfactory to the extraordinary. As soon as I publish this post, I intend to call Play and bring all this to their attention. Meanwhile, my wife has made us a fresh reservation for Saturday night, when I hope we get Jordan again. Although, given the generally fine service we received from everyone else at the restaurant plus the fact that Jordan was empowered — that’s the key word, by the way, when it comes to superior customer service — to go the extra mile for us, I’m sure that whomever is our waiter at Play will deliver the same exemplary customer service.

Technorati Tags: customer service, Play, restaurants

I went to Ottawa’s Social Media Breakfast this morning and an intelligent session on strategic customer engagement broke out.

The above paragraph is the calmest of the leads that came to mind as I drove home from the breakfast; the others were far more excitable, reflecting the deep personal enthusiasm I felt after hearing a presentation on social media tools that put them in common-sense perspective. This is a sharp departure from past SMBOttawa speakers who have presented social media as the salvation of all things.

I knew right from the opening slide, “Your social media strategy won’t save you,” that this morning’s speaker, author, entrepreneur and self-confessed Twitter addict Tara Hunt (@missrogue), was going to be something quite different. What I didn’t know was that she was not only going to dynamite the worst of all the social-media-as-brave-new-world myths I have become so tired of hearing, but that she was also going to put the customer back at the centre of the whole value chain.

I live-tweeted a few of her better lines, as did others at the session, and you can see her whole presentation here. In a nutshell, however, Tara told us:

• Social media is a tool, not a strategy.
• Social media has not changed the world, it has not changed how we connect with other human beings, and it most certainly has not changed how we decide to buy, or not to buy, something.
• The customer must be at the centre of every effective business strategy; if it doesn’t make the customer happy, don’t do it.
• Social media has a role, potentially an incredibly potent role, to play in influencing each stage of the purchasing-decision process.
• And she finished with very practical advice on exactly how social media tools can be deployed as part of a customer-centric campaign.

In one tidy presentation, then, Tara managed to hit on what seems to be my two most frequently raised topics these days:

• Social media is not a brave new world; the fundamentals still apply.
• Customer satisfaction is the only sustainable competitive differentiator.

Thanks for not drowning in the Kool Aid, Tara.

One fascinating side note: Early on in her presentation, Tara used Comcast as an example of a company that seems to be doing great outreach via Twitter but still letting down their customers and creating all kinds of lousy customer-service issues. Practically no sooner had she referenced Frank Eliason, who tweets as @comcastcares, than Frank himself was weighing in via Twitter, insisting that customer satisfaction was up 9% at the U.S. cable giant and offering to join a debate with Tara!

Technorati Tags: Social Media Breakfast Ottawa, social media, Tara Hunt, customer satisfaction

A weekend-long, competitive startup boot camp in October that will see the winning team take away $5,000 in seed funding was the most interesting piece of a coherent new programming line up announced last night by The Ottawa Network, the city’s grassroots networking club for the technology sector.

The startup camp, which will be repeated in the spring, was the second of four “program pillars” revealed by TON president Rick O’Connor. The first pillar, Network, will see TON continue to hold business networking and educational events, although at two a month, these will happen only half as frequently as last year’s somewhat over-ambitious weekly schedule. The third pillar, Finance, will feature a repeat of last year’s popular Founders and Funders dinners that saw angels and venture capitalists rub shoulders for an evening with entrepreneurs looking for funding. Details of the final pillar, Grow, will come later.

TON will also start charging a membership fee for the first time since it was founded in 2001 by a cohort of down-sized refugees of the telecom crash who gathered together to commiserate and help each other found new ventures and find new jobs. General membership will cost $25 per year in a move O’Connor said the organization hopes will lead to a more committed, targeted and involved membership.

The first startup boot camp is scheduled for October 23 to 25, and TON hopes to attract up to 75 participants who will self-categorize themselves into the various functions a new company needs, such as development, marketing and so on. On the Friday evening, as many as a dozen of the participants will pitch their ideas for a startup and teams will be formed based on who else wants to join them to work on that pitch for the weekend. On Sunday evening, each team will make its pitch, with the winner coming away with $5,000 if it incorporates as a fresh start-up.

TON’s new programming line up is a welcome evolution for an organization that significantly revitalized itself last year after a couple of years of fairly moribund existence. We’ve been big supporters of the network almost from the beginning, and I saw several instances last year where exciting new ventures got a solid helping hand as a result of a TON initiative.

Even better, in my view, is the introduction of a membership fee. As Shopify founder Toby Lutka said at a different event a few months ago, “Twenty four dollars is a slightly more annoying version of free.” His point, which I thoroughly endorse, is that if you have created something of real value, people ought to be willing to pay you something to use it. Not incidentally, in the process of charging for something, you also find committed customers, rather than just tire kickers. Those who can’t afford the fee — TON has always been attractive to those looking for work or operating ventures on a shoestring — can still attend up to three events a year without paying anything.

I’ll be a regular at TON events both for its inherent value to my own business and so that I can continue to bring its news to readers of this blog.

Technorati Tags: The Ottawa Network, startups, startup boot camp, Founders and Funders, technology

Like my friend Ian Graham over at The Code Factory, I subscribe to what he calls “the law of three.” That is, if something is mentioned three times in a short period, you should do something about it. Well, two different people over the past week asked me for advice on how to improve their writing. I shared some of my usual tips and I pointed each of them to a couple of posts on this blog where I previously wrote about our fondness for the The Chicago Manual of Style and about my personal approach in quizzing job applicants to determine if they are real writers or not.

Then this morning, my regular email from the excellent Daily Writing Tips was all about online style guides, making it the third mention in short order about ways to help improve your writing. So I thought I’d share some good counsel from my own experience and from Daily Writing Tips.

1. Read a really good newspaper every day

I’ve been telling eager writing students this for years, especially if they’re looking to get into the journalism or communications professions. But it holds true for any writer because excellent journalism is a daily lesson in effective writing. Journalists are trained to impart solid information in very quick order while avoiding superfluous wording and hyperbole. I can’t think of a better definition of what ought to constitute good writing in almost any business context.

Here in Canada, we are extraordinarily fortunate to have the Globe and Mail, in my opinion one of the top five English-language newspapers in the world. While the Globe and the others make my list mainly for their journalistic strengths, the Globe is my personal favourite because of the consistently high quality of its writing. My other top writing pick, London’s The Guardian, is now within easy reach for all of us, thanks to the Internet. Read either — or, even better, both — of these newspapers every day with a critical eye for how the stories are written and you’ll not only become a better writer, you’ll also be very well informed.

2. Practice makes perfect

If you want to be a writer, you must write. Malcom Gladwell in his book “Outliers” suggested that besides talent and opportunity, it takes a lot of hard work to become proficient at something; in fact, 10,000 hours of hard work. If I have spent just one quarter of each working day writing — and many, many days I have spent much, much more than that — then I have logged in excess of 15,000 hours at my keyboard. So maybe by now, I’m getting good at it! How many hours have you put in?

A fascinating study out of Stanford University suggests that text-messaging and Twitter updating are actually improving the literacy standards and writing skills of today’s young people, a sharp contradiction to conventional wisdom that would suggest the shortened words and fractured syntax usually employed in these communications forms would erode writing skills. Turns out, according to writing and rhetoric professor Andrea Lunsford, it’s a simple matter of practice — young people are spending a lot of time using text online, honing writing skills that they otherwise would have abandoned with their textbooks and essay assignments. “We’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” Lunsford is quoted as saying by Wired magazine.

3. Everyone needs an editor

Anyone who has ever worked with me knows this is one of my utterly intractable rules. Nothing, including this post, leaves our shop without at least one set of eyes reviewing it. A good proofreader catches the typos and what my wife likes to call the “thinkos” that always find their way into our copy, and this is hugely valuable. But a good editor does for your writing what going up against a better tennis player does for your tennis — she or he improves your game. Invite that challenge.

4. Have a good library of reference books

I have often mentioned how my copy of “The Pocket Oxford Dictionary” that always sits right beside my keyboard bears testimony, through its missing spine and generally dog-eared and bedraggled appearance, to the regularity with which I consult it. In the same short stack of references that I always keep at hand can be found “CP Style Book” and “CP Caps and Spelling” as well as a basic French-English dictionary and an ASCII character table. These are the tools of my trade.

If I swing my chair around to look at the bookshelves that line my office wall, I estimate that a good 10 feet of shelf space are devoted to other dictionaries, a thesaurus or three, and many other textbooks, references, style guides and general-interest books about writing. (One particularly treasured volume, even more ragged than my own Pocket Oxford, is a slim little work of ink-stained and yellowed paper titled, “The Educational Dictionary.” It has no date in it so I don’t know when it was published. But on the otherwise blank first page, it bears, in Gaelic, my late mother’s signature and the name of the school she attended in the early 1940s. Both for what it is and, mainly, for who owned it and gave it to me, it bears pride of place on my bookshelf.)

The rest of my top 10 list refers to specific sources either that I use or that were recommended in this morning’s Daily Writing Tips.

5. The Chicago Manual of Style

This is probably the definitive bible of American-English writing. You can buy it for about $50 or, even better, subscribe online.

6. The Canadian Press references

For we Canadians living between the American and British versions of the English language, the various references published by our domestic news-gathering service, The Canadian Press, are indispensable. You can subscribe online or buy dead-tree versions here.

7. When using the Queen’s English

I have never used them but Daily Writing Tips recommends the free, downloadable “The BBC News Style Guide” and “Guardian Style”, available free online and for sale as a book.

Technorati Tags: Writing, The Code Factory, The Chicago Manual of Style, Globe and Mail, Guardian, Daily Writing Tips, Outliers, Oxford Dictionary, CP Style Guide, Guardian Style, BBC News Style Guide

Regular followers of this blog will know that lousy customer service is one subject certain to get my rant on. My consistent points are that the cost of acquiring customers is almost always far higher than the cost of keeping them, that effective customer service is the only sustainable competitive differentiator, and that most customer-service operations fail by forcing their agents to be powerless automatons more interested in getting the customer off the line than actually servicing them.

So while browsing through the WhyHire.Me blog of my pal Andy Church today, I was delighted to come across his happy experience with what he called empowered customer service from Canadian cellular carrier Rogers Wireless. The fact that he gives a shout-out to what, in my experience, is one of the least helpful categories of customer-service providers in existence, cellular telephone companies, makes it all the more necessary to give his experience a broader airing.

Technorati Tags: Customer service, Andy Church, Rogers Wireless

When baggage handlers for U.S. air carrier United Airlines manhandled and broke Dave Carroll’s beloved, custom-made, $3,500 Taylor acoustic guitar while he and his band-mates looked in impotent disbelief from inside the aircraft, and then refused to compensate him for it, the Canadian musician didn’t get mad, he got even. He wrote a song, “United Breaks Guitars,” posted it on YouTube and, nearly five-million viewings later, Carroll has become the lyrical poster-boy for disgruntled airline passengers everywhere and United is learning very difficult and expensive lessons about the power of the individual in the age of social media.

The key lesson United needs to learn here is that it broke much more than Carroll’s guitar. It broke the cardinal rule of customer service and it broke my first law of competitive differentiation. That law states that the only sustainable competitive differentiation for most companies in today’s economy is superior customer service. In an era where a technological advantage lasts only as long as it takes competitors to reverse engineer your product or leap-frog over it with an innovation of their own, and where a price advantage erodes just as swiftly as your competitors can off-shore their own manufacturing, keeping your customers happy is the sole long-term strategy you can employ to develop and sustain a sharp differentiation from those competitors.

In the challenging world of airline travel, where every operator goes to the same places at the same time for much the same price, it’s the only differentiator.

Canada’s WestJet Airlines, which used to be an upstart little operation out of Calgary, has stolen fully 37 percent of the domestic airline business right out from under the nose of the once-monopolistic Air Canada by emphasising and delivering on a promise to treat its customers better. Air Canada’s reputation for lousy customer service is so well established I have named my annual award for the worst customer-service experience of the year after the airline and one of its (surprise!) baggage people who displayed the same indifference that drove Carroll to song.

Superior customer service doesn’t mean nothing will ever go wrong, and you’ll never have a disgruntled customer on your hands. However, if you assume an orientation from the outset that says your customers will be well treated, it’s amazing how many fewer things will actually go wrong and how forgiving those consumers will be when they do. And when something does go wrong, superior customer service is all about setting it right again. It’s all about how you treat customers in good times and in bad.

When I awarded the 2008 edition of my “Air Canada-Harold McGowan Memorial Award for Truly Egregious Customer Service” to the Canadian online DVD-rental service Zip back in November, the post I wrote on our blog unleashed a fury of responses the likes of which I had never before or since experienced. I had to block most of them because they were simply frothing-at-the-mouth irrational and offensive. And they completely missed the point. My complaint was much less about my actual experience with the service, which, in my view, had deteriorated substantially over the few years I was a subscriber, and all about the utterly indifferent response I got from Zip’s customer-service people.

One more recent responder, whose slightly more reasonable comment I now wish I had actually allowed, told me I wasn’t the centre of the universe. How completely wrong. As a customer, I am exactly the centre of the universe since no company will have a universe without customers.

Taylor Guitars, by way of sharp contrast to United, offered to repair Carroll’s guitar for free and further capitalised with a YouTube video of their own directing viewers to their web site to learn more about how to protect your guitar when travelling.

The singer himself has shot to newfound stardom and is booking new gigs left, right and centre, and the world awaits the second in what he promises will be a trilogy of songs about his experiences with United. He has also turned down all new offers of compensation from United, saying it had its chance to deal properly with his complaint. (In fact, the second song promises to be all about United customer-relations agent Ms. Irlweg who, Carroll says, was the last person at United to tell him he would be receiving no compensation.)

And United? Well, the Times of London claimed the fallout delivered a 10 per cent hit to United’s stock price, costing its shareholders about $180-million. It would be nice to think a consumer backlash of this nature could cause that kind of real pain to an unfeeling global corporation, but the stock-price dive probably had more to do with lousy second-quarter results that were released as Carroll’s video was going viral. Still, the airline and its utterly indifferent front-line agents, whom Carroll names and shames in his catchy and witty song, have become the laughing stock of the world wide web.

Update: The second in Carroll’s trilogy of revenge hymns is now up on YouTube.

Technorati Tags: Customer service, Dave Carroll, United, Westjet, Air Canada, Taylor Guitars, social media, YouTube

It’s been an interesting spring and summer here at inmedia.

The global economic downturn undoubtedly had its impact on us. Although we are headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, we have not been an Ottawa agency for a long time now. Over the past few years, we have worked for clients in Kelowna, Calgary, Toronto, Montréal, Halifax, Fredericton, Moncton and St. John’s. Outside Canada, for many years we have had a substantial footprint in Scotland, where we have clients in Glasgow and Livingston, and we have worked for clients in Farnborough and London in England. In the U.S., we’ve had clients in Boston, Jersey City, Chicago, San Jose and Phoenix.

Based on this extensive geographic diversification, we thought we might be able to better weather the economic storms that began to rage last year.

We were wrong.

Though our clients might be almost everywhere, they are, in the main, selling into just one market — the U.S. enterprise. And that market is a very badly wounded beast that is only now, and very tentatively, beginning to get back on its feet. As our clients cancelled or delayed programs, their spending with us fell and we found ourselves once again in an adjustment mode that, after nearly 11 years as a technology-focused public relations boutique, is not unfamiliar territory to us.

Our response was three-fold.

First, we’ve gone virtual. We’ve put our servers and shared resources in the cloud, locked the office doors for good and given back the key. With clients all over two continents, we’ve essentially been virtual to most of them anyway. We believe it makes us the kind of agile and responsive service offering this new economy demands.

Second, we focused our PR business development efforts on opportunities where we believed we would be given a real chance to demonstrate our differentiation. This has paid outstanding dividends, with four new clients engaging with us over the past 60 days. Two others have renewed their programs, and two more that had reduced programs are again spending a bit more with us, albeit on an ad-hoc basis as they continue to sharply evaluate every dollar and pound. And our pipeline is fairly robust.

Third, and most critically, we also began to focus on areas where our unique capabilities would gain us higher-value work. Public relations is a terribly commodified business, and the buyers of PR-agency services are still too-often wedded to ancient notions to which our approach simply fails to pay homage.

(This is not a universal truth, let me hasten to add. Our most recent account win saw us triumph over three U.S. boutique agencies and a large and experienced agency with extensive feet on the street on both sides of the Atlantic. The final round, between us and the big guys, offered the client a sharply differentiated choice, I believe. Entirely to their credit, they gave us every chance to show them a clear foretaste of what they would experience if they hired us, and they obviously liked what we showed them. Far too often, however, we never even get the chance to show how we’re different, or the prospect simply fails to grasp how that difference might change the PR agency game in their favour.)

In addition to this long-standing commodification of PR, the economic downturn has created a new class of competitors and made all existing competitors even hungrier. There are now legions of one-person PR shops staffed by perfectly competent former agency and client-side types whose practically non-existent overhead and sometimes-lifestyle approach to business make it impossible to compete. At the other end of the scale, we have bowed out of agency-selection processes where large multinational agencies were offering more services at a lower cost than we could manage as they struggled to at least cover their infrastructure costs.

It’s enough to make any wise business person look to new opportunities, and we have, with considerable early success.

So where are we going? We will continue to seek out high-value PR opportunities where our value proposition as a small but very senior band of sharply focused players with global capabilities can compete. But we’ll also look for opportunities to work with clients on a more strategic level, where the broader marketing and even business decisions get sorted. Although much of the last 10 years has been about guiding technology companies through the specific challenges of harnessing media and analyst coverage, we have a broader and more strategic pedigree that we’re keen to put to work.

In short, we bring technology to market. Stay tuned for more on this as we renew our commitment to this blog.

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