commbasics

That takes some effort to listen and be aware of what the opportunities actually are but if you ignore them you do so at at your own peril. Throughout my career as a professional communicator I come across clients who are absolutely sure they know who their audience is. Invariably they are wrong.Let me give you an example. Many years ago I counseled a semiconductor company that had a great business selling components to Apple for the iPod. They sold almost 30 percent of all their product to Apple. They knew that Apple was never going away. In our research into the effectiveness of their content we found what seemed to be a discrepancy. We knew that there were multiple product groups that the client’s technology would fit, but they were focused only on the iPod team. We told them they needed to start a focus on development teams. They responded, “We know who to talk to, you just concentrate on putting out press releases.” Six months later, at a trade show, two Apple team managers came ...

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...

The biggest barrier to adoption of marketing automation (MA) is a complete lack of understanding of what it is and what it does. That is also the single biggest barrier to effective use of customer relationship management (CRM) software.  The biggest barrier to adoption of marketing automation (MA) is a complete lack of understanding of what it is and what it does. That is also the single biggest barrier to effective use of customer relationship management (CRM) software. According to the Content Marketing Institute , (CMI) which issues reports on the state of the content marketing),the use of content marketing as a strategy is growing and is prevalent in growing companies. However, only 39 percent of the companies reporting having a strategy are claiming to see results, which tracks well with the stat that 35 percent have a documented strategy.   To check those numbers, we approached more than 50 companies in the past year and asked them if they were doing and we focused ...

Avoid these words at all costs. And if you discover that by removing them your content ceases to be interesting to you, imagine how little it means to your customer. There are lots of lists that identify words, phrases or concepts you should avoid using in your content, but I've had a list of nine for several years that I've never seen included in those lists.  Joe Basques and I went over a few of these in a Hangout ( that you can see here ).  The full list follows. Leader/leading There's an old Afghan saying. “If you think your are leading, turn around.  If there is no one there, you are just taking a walk.” Everyone who claims to be a leader in this world is really following after someone else.  They’re probably far behind the pack and everyone knows it.  If you want to know who the leader is, look for the company that never uses the term to describe itself.  Leaders don’t have to say it. Key This actuality means “of crucial importance...

Our economy is struggling for a lot of reasons, but one reason that seems to get almost no practical discussion is the lack of trust.  Everyone knows it exists but very few believe it is their problem because, after all, each of us knows we are trustworthy.  Right?  Lawyers, corporate executives, politicians and journalists know their poll numbers are in the tank collectively, but individually they all believe that they are, somehow, different than everyone else.  What’s more, individually, they are appalled when they find out that, no, few people trust them. “That’s their problem, Not mine!” I understand that position and, personally, I believe most people are trustworthy and act ethically most of the time. Yeah, I’m naive, but if find that to be true more often than not.  What I also find, however, is that very few people invest any effort into presenting themselves as trustworthy and put no thought into how they present themselves. They merely assume peo...

 The technology world is hell-bent on serving the needs of big data in the cloud because, after all, the cloud is the place to be, right?  And one of the big benefits of the cloud is how it simplifies the marketing process. However, the technology industry (mostly semiconductor and its related industries) that support those customers generally hate marketing, don’t want to invest in it and say they already know who their customers are.  They really don't need the cloud, they think. Those industries are still using mass market techniques and a shotgun approach to marketing, blasting the marketplace with generic, repetitive messages; targeted at the people who have no authority to make purchases and very little influence on those who do.  For example, several years ago I worked with a rapidly growing semiconductor company who happen to have gotten into the iPod when it first came out.  Gave them instant credibility and massively growing sales.  They...

The content that matters is not about you. It's about the problems your customers are trying to solve. Over the past few weeks I'm mentioned the changes in search technology from Google (Hummingbird) and how it will affect both B2B media and marketing.  I've also touched on google's concept of the Zero Moment of Decision (ZMOD), the moment when a customer actually decides to Google a company or product to make a purchase decision (which is actually long after the decision has been made). Today, however, I sat down with a good friend by the name of Douglas Alexander, who told me a very interesting story about his product search and selection process.  You may recognize Douglas's name from reading EBN, Electronic Purchasing Strategies or any number of component engineering and design publications.  He's currently writing what may become the definitive educational book on component engineering. I published the audio from the discussion on my Spreak...

When you've been in the communciation game as long as I have, you want to run, screaming, from the room when a marketing guy says, "We really don't need much media coverage.  Our customers are engineers and they all talk to each other.  So we just need to reach a few of them."  I swear, if I had a dollar for everytime I heard that I'd be an angel investor (who could fire a long of marketing guys). So when UBM TechWeb CEO Tony Uphoff tossed out a Facebook link to an article on word-of-mouth marketing  I was immediately drawn to it.  I was surprised to learn, however, that the age group most influenced by word-of-mouth marketing are teenagers, while adults will use word of mouth early on in their shopping process but rely more heavily on media when they make their decision. That immediately brought to mind the axiom above.  If it is true, that engineers make buying decisions based on what their peers tell them, without benefit of t...

Contributed articles became a very big deal during the Web 1.0 boom.  Suddenly, print and online publications had a huge need for new content.  Not only did publications start running news releases, verbatim, but they started asking companies to write opinion and analysis about their own industries.  Public Relations companies were flying high organizing the rush of opportunities.  Then the boom busted.  Publications started disappearing, mostly print but several online publications as well and both journalists and PR folks started looking for other means of income. That did not, however, stop the demand for contributed articles.  The publishing world found that they could fill a lot of space, especially on line, with opinion, white papers, technical documents and presentations that they didn't have to pay for and could cut their newsroom budgets even more.  When webinars came around, they could actually charge companies to put their crappy ...

Been having some interesting discussions with web managers for b2b companies.  All of them start talking about their web traffic and SEO results.  I always step into the discussion with a series of questions that ends up stumping all of them. "So.  Who are all of those people visiting your site?" They stare at me blankly for a few seconds and then respond, "Why they're our customers, of course." "Like who?" "Well, we don't know who they are specifically..." "Then how do you know they are your customers?  Maybe they're your competitors." "They might be..." Then the stumper:  "So if you really don't know who it is visiting your site, why does it matter how many there are?" It is possible to determine if the right people are visiting your site, but the problem is that most marketing managers never ask that question and so most web site managers never take the time to dig deep...

A few months ago I wrote that life was not all goodness and light in the Cadence marketing world , but that seemed to be a false prophesy with the presence of EDA 360 all over the Design Automation Conference in June.  Today it was announced in EE Times that Cadence marketing wunderkinde John Bruggeman had abruptly left the company , as the company reorganizes its marketing effort once again. Kinda reminds me of what I was saying even earlier about what happens when engineers make marketing decisions. So it seems that Cadence is moving away from the big vision to expand their markets and go back to "the Cadence that wants to keep building increasingly complex tools for a shrinking and unrewarding market," as EE Times editorial director Ron Wilson said. Then again, maybe we are seeing preparation for the sale of Cadence.  Could be...?

Just got Gabe Moretti's email newsletter where he takes me to task for bagging on the EDA industry's lack of marketing acumen.  Always like to know when people disagree with me and Gabe makes some good points.  But there was one that popped out to me: "Lou repeats the old mantra that EDA companies area really not making the tools that the costumers want, and that should they ever get smart enough to just do that they would become widely profitable. There is nothing farther from the truth than this statement. I agree that EDA could benefit form an injection of capable marketing know how, may be even using social media. We do not need to discover what is needed to take a design to silicon: we have done that for over thirty years as an industry and longer than that as in-house CAD departments." To which I answer with an old adage, "If you guys are so smart, why ain't you rich?" I'm off to check out a profitable industry.  C ya. UPDATE:...

The term “return on investment” (ROI) gets bandied about a lot in my business, as in “what’s the ROI of you service?”  We all know what that questions is supposed to mean: how much money can I make back from what I pay you?  But no matter how many statistics and case studies you throw at the questioner, the real question is: “How little can I actually pay you for your service?” I’ve started answering that question with another question: What is your content worth?  If the customer can answer that question, I can better answer their original question. Every company, especially engineering-driven companies, says their content has immense “value.”  They believe that their customers have an absolute need to hear what they have to say.  It is so vital that the customers very existence depends on purchasing a particular product or service.  At least, that’s generally how they answer the question.  But they can’t put a monetary value on that content....

I didn’t go to the 2011 Design Automation Conference in San Diego because this year I decided to stay home and see what I could pick up virtually from video, audio and news coverage day to day.  It was much more cost effective and focused, despite the usual bandwidth problems with the convention center. My apologies for mixing metaphors but this is how I wrap up the issues arising out of DAC.  It is said that if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door, but when your customers are up to their asses in alligators, vermin are not their critical problem.  Gary Smith gave his usual glowing report of the future for the industry (he thinks it’s well on the way to being a $6.6 Billion industry by 2015, and once again he claims that this year Electronic system level design (ESL) is going to be really big this year (just like it has every year for the past decade, according to Gary.)  But this year he added a big caveat. He said that the indus...

Just sat in a webminar on the use of social media in churches, hosted by TheCity (a division of Zondervan).  I wasn't as impressed by the product as I was by the representatives of churches talking about how they are using social media to reach their "market."   Churches have a pretty captive base market in the congregations.  A church of 130 regular attenders knows they are going to reach that 130 people, plus potentially another 6-10 people every week that the attenders interact with.  So that church, weekly, has a reach of 1300 people.  That's without social media.  Factor that in and the number goes to 13,000 very easily.  Put 10 churches like that into play and you are covering a small city.  But not all churches are doing that and for good reason.  It takes focus.  That's what the churches involved in the webinar were. Focused. Each one had a single person, either paid staff or committed volunteer w...

Disturbing, though not surprising news out of the EDA industry this week.  I've stated a few weeks ago that Cadence has been going through another round of culling in the marketing departments and last week I learned that Synopsys , too, has been quietly downsizing marketing (why market when you're number one and your competitors aren't even trying).  Haven't heard a peep out of Mentor, but with Carl Icahn barking at their heels they have other problems... and Magma cuts it's marketing budget every year so that's nothing new. None of that is disturbing, though.  At a recent company meeting in Cadence fairly recently, the executive team did a panel presentation on where the company was heading.  My sources (confirmed twice) reported that after the presentation, one brave soul rose to ask someone to clarify the vision for the company (because it just wasn't clear in the presentation).  Charlie Huang, chief strategy officer took ...

Following up on my last post this morning , I needed to vent.  This is what I came up with. The kind of marketers available to the EDA world   Their reward for their efforts   EDA executives discussing what they really want in a marketing program after they have punished the marketing team and/or cut its budget. Where EDA executives go to look for marketing and PR to replace laid off marketing teams or fired agencies   The type of customer EDA executives are trying to reach  The type of customer that would respond positively to the message the executives come up with  How EDA executives view the power of the messages How EDA customer view the messages EDA executives produce I feel better now

The announcement of Steve Jobs taking another medical leave is an unfortunate but timely bit of news to put this series wrap up in perspective.  Jobs has established Apple as the leading consumer electronics company in the world.  For all intents and purposes, what Apple does drives the rest of the industry. Apple did not introduce the media player, it just made one that most people could use.  Apple did not introduce music sharing, it just made it legally acceptable.   Apple did not introduce the smart phone, it just made the smart phone practical for the mass market.  Apple did not introduce the tablet computer, it just reintroduced it when the public actually wanted one.  Jobs was at the center of all these decisions.  Important to note: Jobs is not an engineer.  He has some technical experience but he has stated the college course that was most responsible for the creation of the Mac was a calligraphy class he audited at Reed College,...

In the past two posts I've shown that the consumer electronic industry, with few notable exceptions, has consistently failed to address and meet the need of the buying public ; that the semiconductor industry that follows that lead has delivered suspect information regarding market demand; and that the support industries to the semi industry has no solid idea what their value is to their customer, much less express that value to them.  How have we got to to this place? First off, we have a leadership in place; and a generation of engineers in marketing that were trained by that leadership, whose frame of reference rests in the 1980s markets -- back when electronics was still in the entrepreneurial phase of its life.  In the 1980s, Lockheed Missiles and Space Division was still putting together technical documents with pen, ink and typewriters.  Semiconductor-based products were just the province or technology early adopters (nerds) and were considered generally be...

So yesterday I talked about the failure of the semiconductor industry, as a whole, to accurately anticipate much of the market need.  I identified the causes of that failure as an inadequate funding of the marketing effort as well as a pervasive preference to withhold accurate data from industry analysis that is relied upon to develop new products.  How deep does this go?  I’m going to use the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Industry as an example.  They support the semi industry with the tools they need to design and analyze complex products. At the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDAC) industry forecast meeting this month it was pointed out that while semiconductor revenues have increased by double digits in 2010 while EDA is still in single digits (although it had decreased the previous two years).   Aart DeGeus, CEO of Synopsys, repeated an observation he has had many times in the past that EDA is not “getting its fair share” of the value i...