Archive for November, 2007
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #7
This is the seventh in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.
Rule #7: Be able to articulate your distinctive competence.
So why, exactly, should someone buy your product or service as opposed to the other guy’s?
It may seem obvious that you need to be able to tell a prospect what’s distinctive [...]
More on Apple and Social Media
Following up on my earlier Apple post… after writing that I saw that Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim wrote an item called Apple’s Social Media Hell - Why it Needs to Repent, talking about Robert Scoble’s outburst about his malfunctioning Mac.
Andy’s point is that as Apple becomes more mainstream it won’t be able to [...]
Tech Marketing Summarized
I’m not a big fan of the “I’m a Mac” ads; mostly, I think they talk to the Apple faithful, not potential new customers. The Mac guy comes across as smarmy and smug, while the PC guy is more likeable. And in some cases, they’re just not accurate. (And I’m writing this on my beloved [...]
Majoring in History
I worked for many years for a now defunct software company called Softbridge.
Softbridge had a long legacy (by software company standards) of technical excellence, and we traded on that legacy.
In our marketing literature, we touted the fact that we were one of the few companies that was on the dais with Bill Gates (at Windows [...]
Whole Foods Makes a Whole Mistake
I understand why the Whole Foods board decided to ban company executives from blogging or commenting on any non-Whole Foods site, a decision that Houston Chronicle business writer Loren Steffy talks about on his blog. But it’s the wrong decision.
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey got in hot water, you may remember, for posting about the [...]
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #6
This post is the sixth in a series inspired by Pragmatic Marketing’s 20 Rules of Product Management rules for technology marketing.
RULE #6: Product management should help sales channels, not individual sales people.
Obviously, when you’re developing market approaches and sales tools, you’re product and company will be best served by your focusing on those that can be widely [...]
BlogWorld Expo
Last week I was at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas. Lots of interesting stuff at the conference, and here are a few highlights.
There were apparently about 1500 people registered. I don’t think that many came, but it was busy. The crowd was an interesting mix; lots of bloggers, lots of business types, and then a [...]
What do you do if you’re NaviSite?
If you’re a B2B marketer in the tech space, you’ve no doubt heard by now about the major fiasco that NaviSite, a web hosting provider, has been dealing with.
They acquired another company, and in the course of consolidating customers into their Massachusetts data center, hit a perfect storm of botched operations and bad luck. As [...]
BlogWorld Expo: Media Choices
Good talk this morning by Leo Laporte on new media publishing, in which he talked about how podcasting has stalled out (in terms of adding users) in a way that blogs and online video haven’t. He made some good points about which media work for what types of communication (video - emotional, audio - conversational, [...]
Church bulletin marketing
The other day, I had lunch with my friend Peter. He lives on Boston’s North Shore, and I went up his way. We went to a very nice little Greek restaurant in Peabody that was just about empty.
Peter has been there a couple of times and told me that, while it’s not usually this empty, [...]
