commbasics

While you may have many happy customers, you can rest assured that every unhappy potential customer and past customer is going to your competitors and telling them how awful you are. You just don’t know it.   No matter how many tech companies we talk to we are constantly amazed at how many believe the exact same thing about two issues. Customer satisfaction Technical superiority In issue one they believe that their customers are, collectively, more happy with their service and technology than with their competitors’; that their competitors are widely hated by their own customer base; and that their competitors, even those that no longer exist and all that are going to be are incompetent boobs. In issue two they believe that customers see their contribution as the “secret sauce” behind the customers’ end products (e.g. “Our chip makes their mobile phone the fastest/lowest power/most versatile mobile phone ever). But that contribution is considered to be a “competitive advantage” by...

We've looked at content for purchase content, owned content and social content in the previous posts and we're getting close to the end of our series.  Today we look at the reality and difficulty of earned content. This is why earned media is so valuable. The chart indicates relative costs and effort that go into the various forms of content and how the market audience views those various forms. Paid content (advertising) is the most expensive of all media and requires the least amount of effort but is the least trustworthy .  Owned content costs less and takes about more effort but us not viewed with the same level of suspicion, generally because there is a level of human contact involved.  Social content takes more effort but even less cost than owned because you can do it even without a website. Social begins to cross the trust barrier because objective third parties may have the opportunity to state their position... if social is done right.  ...

It's time to fess up.  All the problems with the Toyota Prius brake and acceleration systems are my fault.  Let me explain. A few years ago I was a PR consultant to VaST Systems who made virtualization technology allowing engineers to simultaneously test and modify hardware and software designs prior to prototyping and manufacture.  Shortly before I came on board, EE Times did a teardown of the Prius at the 2007 Embedded Systems Conference and one of the small bits of the discussion was how VaST Systems tools were used to build the engine control systems of the 2006 models.  VaST was very proud of this fact and as a result, they turned a lion's share of their concerns to automotive systems development.  Toyota was a marquee customer that th mentioned in all their presentations. Through most of my tenure with the company I regularly but softly recommended that improved safety and reliability should be front and foremost in their presentations, but th...

I want to write something about Twitter... and a lot of other stuff, but before I do I have to establish a concept that I've come up with. This blog has always been about the concept of mass media: what it is, how it's used, where it's going.  We all pretty much know that mass media is information sent to large groups of people and we identify it in traditional forms of broadcast and print.  Sometimes we look at Google, Yahoo, Bing and any other kind of search engine as a threat to mass media, but in reality it is just another form of it.  Google still pushes out a bunch of information to a munch of people so it is still mass media. What makes online mass media the same as traditional media is that the goal is to get a response from 1 percent of the audience.  For example, in EDA, if you sent out a bit of communication to an audience of 10,000 people and you got 100 leads and maybe one sale, you would have more than paid for the effort. But social net...

As I said in part one a few weeks ago ,  Social media attacks the tradition mass communication paradigm with a natural flow of communication, which is why marketers and journalists often chafe at embracing the practice.  What I've seen happening through this paradigm shift (geez, I never thought I'd hear that phrase again) is the rise of the value of talented, trained and experienced communicators within corporations and organizations that are making an effort to figure this stuff out.  That probably doesn't include your company, though. I was describing what is happening in social media to a friend who has no connection with high tech (they do exist, you know).  He thought a bit and then said, "Sounds like their going at it like they're killin' chickens."  It was a great analogy.  When you slaughter chickens (and yes, I have done this) it involves a lot of running about, noise, flyiing feathers and blood.  Total ch...

Had a real surprise this weekend when I got the New Tech Press web metrics for the past week (yes, it's doing quite well, thank you).  I got to the end to see where most of the referrals came from and had to sit down for a minute. About 30 percent of the traffic on NTP comes from referrals, like blog posters mentioning the article or the site and, of course, web searches.  For most of the past year, most of the referrals came from Google, which is no big surprise.  That changed after Microsoft launched Bing last month.   I started noticing that more and more visits were being referred to NTP through Bing almost immediately, but last week, the final result was that Bing referrals were twice Google's. I have no idea why this is so, but I do know that the searches are for subjects in my metatags and keywords and when people are searching for news on EDA, semiconductors, green technology, they are being referred to NTP through Bing, more often than through Go...

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...

The cornerstone of the VComm program was the understanding that most companies looking for VC financing really have no idea what a VC wants to hear.   Two years ago I sat with a group of investors at a major conference and listened to them complain about the quality of the material and, in the end, how useless it was. Understand this:   There are, at any given time according to Dow Jones, 5000 tech startups in the US alone that are seeking funding.   But less than half of those companies have any credible research into their technology market.   The press covering those markets has shrunk almost to the point of non-existence.   The VC's are flying blind nowadays, which explains why so many are having poor returns.   What they need is real information about market potential. But most companies pitching VC's spend 90 percent of their time in front of them explaining how great their technology is.   Get a clue!   They know you are do...