commbasics

By Joe Basques Frivolous - self-indulgently carefree; unconcerned about or lacking any serious purpose – Dictonary.com I’ve had three very similar conversations with three different colleagues this week.  I’ll spare you the specifics, but the conversations went something like this… ME: Hey, with DAC just around the corner I thought I would check in and see if you needed any help with your marketing plans and preparation. THEM: No, unfortunately we’re not doing anything in that area.  We’re planning on putting out a press release and that’s about it. ME:Well, you know that’s not going to produce any results, right? THEM: Yeah, we know, but it’s what we’re going to do. These guys know they should do something in the area of communications but they're not sure what. They do what they always do, without any real thought or purpose, even though they know it will be inefficient and ineffective, hoping to raise company profits. Companies are doing things the way they hav...

Today on Bloomberg.com,  Rosabeth Moss Kanter made what might be a revolutionary statement.   Ms. Kanter  holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship at Harvard Business School, where she specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change.  Her article, entitles " In a Recession, Put Everyone in Marketing "  She says the way out of a recession is marketing.  Specifically, she says, "Start looking for new markets now.  Companies dependent on a few large customers are particularly vulnerable to changes in their customers' fortunes, but all companies need the flexibility to move quickly into promising markets. In uncertain times, managers should increase efforts to identify additional uses for company products and additional sources of customers for the future. "Creative thinking can find opportunities to offset losses from current customers. Starting research now on less-familiar industries or parts of the world ...

Everyone likes to say they're leaders.  In fact, in the past week alone, more than 21,000 companies around the world have called themselves "a leader" in something according to Google.  But if we have so many leaders, why aren't we going anywhere? Footwasher Media and New Tech Press have decided to do something to find at least one real leader in the technology world.  If you think you are a leader ... or you know a company of investor you think is a leader, let us know and the best candidate will be given an unsponsored video interview on New Tech Press.  Here are the guidelines: 1. Anyone can recommend any company, including their own 2. The nominated company must have a product or technology that is truly game changing.  The technology can't be an incremental improvement over an existing technology but a complete restructuring of the way things are done.  For example, when ARM and Rambus first came onto the scene, not a ...

Attended a seminar at Stanford University last night and listened to several speakers, one of which is in the market research business.  He quoted statistics from the European Society of Market Research that more than $26 billion is being spent on market research in the world .... and almost nothing on implementing the data gathered. Everyone says they want market data.  They want leads.  They want information.  But no one seems to know what to do with the information once they get it. There are tools and services out there that help interpret and implement programs, but it requires an investment. Like that's going to happen.

My postings on where the communications budget lies has prompted a discussion on the Linkedin Marketing Operations Future Forum and a consultant in the field, John Merritt has posited that whoever owns the analytics owns the budget.  And according to John, finance and marketing finance owns those budgets in many tech companies now.  This actually makes sense. The reason marketing can't get avoid budget slashing by finance is because they can't justify their existence to the CFO.  However, if the CFO holds the analytics from IT, he has the justification already, he just doesn't know what he's looking for.  The question is, does marketing know enough of what to look for that they can point it out to the CFO. This is getting more and more interesting.

OK, the speculation is off and running.  Have received three separate reports from attendees at DATE 2009 in Nice,  France that state the attendance, minus exhibitors, is under 1,000 with more than three-quarters from universities.  So with about 25 exhibiting companies, down from 168 last year, it looks like DATE and DVCon are about equal this year.  Last year and the year before, total attendance was 4700. The question is, however, how many attendees were coming for DATE and how many for the ARTEMSIA conference, co-located with DATE? Looking forward to the official numbers.

Last week, I made a rather revolutionary statement that communications should be taken out of marketing as a responsibility and put into IT.  There's a simple reason for this leap of logic and it is tied up nicely by Willy Sutton's r eason for why he robbed banks. "Because that's where the money is." In a perfect world, marketing needs to control communications and messaging.  The process of hearing from the market and translating into what engineering and sales needs is the traditional way of life in business.  And when you are selling laundry detergent, that is the way it is.  But in the tech world, life is not perfect.  In the tech world, marketing budgets are being slashed.  People who understand communications theory are being replaced by engineers who understand, well, engineering.  These are the same people who say that engineers are "immune to marketing" so why do we even need marketing. And yet, the...

I just attended a joint meeting or the Project Management Institute (PMI) Marketing and Sales SIG,  Marketing Operations Partners , (MOP) and the Marketing Operations Cross Company Alliance ( MOCCA ) on the subject of the future ... of the marketing operations field (just in case you were wondering.)  It was, in a word, revelatory. PMI has realized that a great deal of the input and output of marketing and sales is not organized, but has a significant impact on it's own resources, especially with the growth of social media.  The IT departments of companies are most heavily impacted with the development and maintenance of dynamic websites featuring blogs, video and audio podcasts, forums and customer services.  They formed the Marketing and Sales SIG to get some insight into the issue and reached out MOP and MOCCA to get some clarity and direction on the issue.  What came out of the two-hour session was a dynamic proposal to establish a marketing operati...

About three years ago I attended a financial conference where a big VC stated, categorically, that the reason they were not investing in semiconductor or EDA startups was because there was a lack of informational coverage to validate research.  In other words, because media coverage of the industries had significantly degraded, they couldn't afford to pull the trigger on investment. This same VC firm has invested heavily in Web 2.0 and green technology over the past three years and you can see why.  There is lots of coverage on those areas.  There is pretty much nothing but coverage on those areas.  The only coverage on semi and EDA is negative. You might say that that is the media's fault because, after all, the semiconductor coverage is all about the economics of the industry, not the technology so it's naturally going to be bad.  But I would like to point out that the the green Web 2.0 industries has yet to turn a profit, yet the media contin...

I woke this morning with my iPod Touch alerting me to Oracle buying Sun .  It took me a few minutes to get it through the sleep haze.  When things cleared the entire concept brought a big smile to my face. I've know for many years that Oracle has been sniffing around the semiconductor world, trying to find a profitable way in.  They've looked at Sun avariciously through that entire time because it had the greatest profit potential, but it was either too expensive or had too many suitors.  The stock crash solved the expense issue and one by one the suitors went away with IBM finally bowing out.  I hadn't thought they would move this fast but they must have had everything ready to go for this moment. There will be lots of people wonder what this will mean, but I have a pretty good idea.  The design and building of semiconductors is primarily a database issue, but one that is decades old technologically, incredibly fractured and extremely ine...

Just in case you were wondering, I haven't given up on blogging.  It's just that the economic recovery is well underway and I have been up to my eyeballs talking with companies about how to communicate with their markets.  In the past three weeks I've talked with representatives from three European RDAs, Peruvian entrepreneurs, a company making technology for super efficient light fixtures, green building contractors, solar power technology developers, and a revolutionary semiconductor test technology that could kill a third of the EDA verification market. I'm also meeting with realtors and mortgage bankers about how to use social media to expand business, helping launch a catering business, counseling politicians on how to use Youtube and setting up a social network for Silicon Valley VCs. If your business is not picking up right now, you're just not paying attention.

There's a rumor floating around the Peninsula that the Daily News is ceasing operations and being folded into the San Mateo County Times and San Jose Mercury News.  I'm happy to say it is not true. There is some consolidation going on.  The paper has been printed under two mastheads (Palo Alto Redwood City, San Mateo and Burlingame Daily News) for several years, but will now go under the title "Daily News" alone without a city designation.  The rumor may have been given rise that the parent company of the Daily News Group, MediaNews Group Incorporated, was renegotiating their loan on the purchase of the Daily News Group in Los Angeles. Things are tough all over, but it doesn't mean and end to all things.  Both the Daily News Group and the San Mateo Daily Journal have been hit hard with dropping ad revenues, as well as increased competition from the upstart Daily Post (from the founders of the DNG who sold to Knight Ridder who sold to M...

Interesting tweet to day on Karen Bartelson 's Twitter page.  She ponders a survey's question on how much Synopsys will spend on social media this year.  She calls the question a "non sequitur since most of social media is free?" That is a common misconception, but mostly because most people discount the human cost of social media AND they have a limited understanding of what social media actually is.  Let's deal with that last one first.   Social media is any medium that elicits a response from the audience through the medium.  Funny thing is, if a newspaper publishes a letter to the editor on a topic that paper covered, that means the newspaper is a non-electronic social medium.  Radio and television call-in shows also qualify.  Take another step up to email.  If you respond to a piece of spam -- even if it's to pass it on to someone else -- that makes your email a social medium.  Your website ...

I'm encouraging my team to st art blogging, and Joe Basques out in Austin prefers podcasting (not surprising for a broadcast journalism major).  So when Moshe Gavrielov of Xilinx went postal on the marketing/media industry and marketing ROI at the Semico Summit last week (r eported by Dylan McGrath ).  He wanted to do something about it.  So here's another installment of the Joe and Lou sho w.

Spent the day yesterday at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose and got some input that make s a fitting conclusion to my three parter on what social media does. As I said before, social media, in itself, does nothing.  Its components are just mediums like a piece of paper is a medium.  You decide what to do with it.  That confuses a lot of people because newspapers, radio, TV and even the internet to some degree just seems to "magically" appear with information and little or no cost to us, 24 hours a day.  We're used to getting our information however we want it.  What is happening, though, is that magical, free flow of real information is being overtaken by poorly produced marketing crap and we are losing the ability to parse what is real and what is hype. In talking with a dozen media people yesterday, I see a definite trend.  Those who continue to work in advertising-supported media are depressed and worried.  Those who...