commbasics

Just got an RFP for a technical conference that many of you are familiar with, asking me to bid for the publicity and marketing of the conference over two years.  They told me they had sent me the request in August, but couldn't find it anywhere, including the spam filter, but the "good news" was that the deadline had been extended for two weeks and now I could have until mid October to submit a proposal.  (Translation: no one has delivered a proposal yet and the original deadline was Sept, 30). So, I went to my team, showed them the proposal, showed the the proposed budget and everyone said, "Pass." Not only was the budget inadequate, the organization seems to be under the impression that the world is just waiting on pins and needles for the next conference to happen.  They have three problems to overcome. 1.  The independent press has abandoned the industry and is doing only high level coverage, so the conference has to create it's ...

And email from SCDSource this week reinforced what we've been saying for sometime: funding media through advertising and subscription doesn't work. SCDSource launched at the same time as we started pushing New Tech Press last year.  They got significant venture investment from the industry with the promise that they could become profitable through traditional means, in spite of overwhelming evidence that the industry would just not support the effort.  The email indicated that after one year, they will have to curtail the blanket coverage they attempted over the past year. We've stuck by our guns focusing on a sponsorship model and the marketing acceptance is still going very slowly but we're growing.  And we are finding a lot of people who are starting to agree. I really hoped for all our sakes that we were wrong and that the good old days would be coming back.  They aren't going to.  Stop waiting.

A few months ago I did a series on the state of marketing and the fallacies that continue to pull technology into financial doldrums.   With the changes going on in media I thought it might be a good idea to focus some time on the profession of journalism because, frankly, I've been asking myself recently: Is journalism a profession? So I've been spending some time in preparing this series by going through the history of US journalism and have found that journalism, as a profession, is a recent phenomenon.   From the time of the itinerant troubadours and storytellers to widespread use of printing presses in the 1700s, journalism consisted mostly of literary attempts, first-person narratives and outright slander.   From the late 1700s through the 1800s, journalism in the United States and England, was focused on maintaining the status quo; supporting incumbent administrations and legislative bodies, encouraging partisanship and making newpaper owners rich and power...

Brian Fuller reported today that Richard Wallace was taking over the EiC seat at EE Times and Techonline, which would be good news if it weren't true.  The truth is even better. Wallace, vice president of international operations and editorial director for Techinsights, will oversee the editorial content development for both EE Times and Techonline as well as lead the integration of both organizations.  This means that Junko Yoshida will have help in her overwhelming job of leading EE Times print and online, as well as the international beat.  And Patrick Mannion and Rich Nass at Techonline and Embedded Systems Design print and online will have similar support. Talking with Rich on the phone this morning, he explained that the disparate arenas of Techinsights have never been fully integrated.  Each operated separately, although the team leaders al interacted with each other on a daily basis.  While EE Times is well known as a "print" publication, i...

Ran into Peter Hillan yesterday.  Pete ws the business editor for the San Jose Mercury back in it's heyday and was a prime mover in making the Merc an important technology-covering newspaper.  Remember when that was true.  He left the paper during the dotcom to start Government West and then came over to the darkside.  He's now a VP at Fleischman Hillard in SF. Our conversation was for professional purposes, but we couldn't start without reminiscing and commiserating about the profession we both love. Here's the thing that just stunned me.  When Pete was the business editor, the Mercury newsroom had more than 450 people covering the news.  That was pre 2000.  Today, the news staff is around 150 and that's after the Merc was swallowed up and combined with the staffs of more than 90 percent of the papers in the greater Bay Area, including the San Mateo Times and Daily News Group on the Peninsula, and just about everything on the East ...

I said almost a decade ago that the EDA industry was cutting its own throat by going to K-mart for it's marketing philosophy and cutting advertising budgets.  The first indicator I was right was when VCs decided EDA was not a great investment (an indicator that has steadily grown over the first few years).  A few years ago I was predicting the same for the Fabless industry because they, too, have been downscaling marketing operations.  Today I read in EE Times that the VC community is significantly downscaling it's interest in fabless companies .  Guess what, folks?  It's happening again. The pattern goes like this:  The market begins to slump so companies look for ways to cut expenses.  Marketing goes just before the janitorial staff.  Less time and effort is spent explaining the benefits the companies provide in their products and technologies.  The publications that dedicate themselves to providing that explanation, faced with ...

Talked to a semi company today that we began talking to several months ago regarding a New Tech Press article.  This is not one of the "big" companies, but they do seem to be profitable.  What was interesting was they may have gotten "it." Seems they went through some significant effort to get some coverage for something they considered a major announcement for them.  They did all the right things.  Spent money on news releases, collateral material, white papers, soup to nuts. Even did some advertising.  The result?  Bupkis.  No pick up other than reprinted news releases.  Luckily, they talked to us a few months ago and they came to realize that the press that might have covered this announcement five years ago... maybe even two years ago... no longer exists.  They know they have to do something different. The would be us; New Tech Press.  Hope springs eternal.

Some of you may have noticed that a posting I had up earlier last week is now gone. The reason for this is that someone in leadership of the company I was writing about threatened to "trash" a friend's reputation unless I did. Using that company as an example of bad marketing is not as important as my friend's reputation so I acquiesced. But something else happened in the process. It proved the power of social media properly used.  This little blog has very few regular readers. Maybe around 500. We get around 500 new readers every month and a few end up getting the RSS feed so that number is rising steadily. In this case, my little flame got to a single customer of this company and set the company's leadership into an absolute tizzy. The fact that this little blog opened up a conversation between him and a customer was completely lost on him, as did the opportunity to take a hard look at his marketing and make improvements. That's the point of all this tal...

The News Tech Press revolution has jumped the Pacific as the China Electronic Market editorial team has decided to be a partner.  Last April's article on Microemissive Displays hit news stands in China last month. This is what sponsored content can do for journalism around the world.  There is still a place for advertising, but if your company management won't fund a realistic marketing budget, this is the way to go way beyond your current circle.