commbasics

I’ve done several posts on both the value and process of creating video content, but it was pointed out recently that some people have misunderstood my position on investing in high quality equipment and professional videography services. So I thought it would be a good idea to clarify my stance. There is nothing wrong with making a significant investment in equipment, professional service and personnel. It will make your videos look great. However, if your investment comes before you make a budget for the creation of what you put in the video and how you measure its effectiveness, then it’s going to be a big expensive mess. When it comes to content development, most companies approach from a “fire, ready, aim” philosophy. It is both backwards and inside out. I’ve talked with dozens of potential customers over the last year, and in nearly all cases these companies have seen a competitor using a particular delivery technology and decide to look into doing the same thing, rarely looking...

Paul Miller posted some stunning data this week in his blog .  I've reported for many years that companies in the semi industry (and yes, that include EDA) underspend in marketing, but I had no idea how low it had gotten.   An Outsell report stated that most B2C companies are spending 4 percent of revenues on marketing while B2B companies spend 2.6 percent.  Semi's on the other hand spend less than one percent.  Since most surveys on the subject show that successful companies always spend between 5 and 10 percent, that explains our economy in a big way.  The report also said that companies are not doing enough to differentiate themselves (What? You mean calling yourself an industry leader isn't enough?) Now, combine that with an EE Times survey Paul references that "technology leadership and great products" don't drive sales.  What does is service, support, cost and availability and that is something no one in the semi...

Dylan McGrath wrote in EE Times yesterday about an online feud between VLSI Research's Dan Hutchenson and Tom Morrow of SEMI .  You can read the details in Dylan's article but the upshot is that Dan wrote in the Chip Insider that many executives in the semi manufacturing industry are bypassing the show (starting next week in SF) because the find it increasingly irrelevant and useless. Let me state this one more time:  Dan said industry executives said it.  Not him.  Industry executives. That revelation started personal attacks on Dan from Tom in a SEMI blog. I had a similar situation when I was quoted in John Cooley's Deep Chip about statements made to me by others about the fate of the Design Automation and Test Exposition in Europe. Lot's of people sent me personal emails that were less then complimentary and a few that were friendly, but all said the same thing.  "You are wrong." Now for Dan Hutchenson and I to accept that state...

Jeff Bier at BDTi just posted a column at InsideDSP about how companies make a mistake when cutting back and skimping on communications.  What a relief that someone in a marketing role recognizes that. Just this week I was talking to a company that said they really don't need to make an outreach to their customers because they are "all on board with our technology."  Really.  He said that.  He believed that every possible customer; every person who has direct decision-making authority in signing the check to buy the product in each customer, has signed off.  The only problem is, none of the customers have agreed to let the company say who the customers are, nor have they actually delivered a check. Several years ago I was working with a semiconductor company that believed they had their cash cow -- a computer company named after a fruit -- completely nailed down.  They didn't need to promote any more to get into that customer's...

OK I know you're probably getting sick of this but I been reading through the newly revived Wiretap at John Cooley's ESNUG and there is a definite trend I'm seeing:  Companies, organizations and events that have been declared DOA are coming back to say they are very much alive and active.  But the "word on the street" was that they were dead. So let's define "word on the street."  The reason a lot of people in the engineering world say that losing the media is not a big deal is because "engineers talk to each other."  Well, guess what?  I talk to engineers too and what I write about generally comes from them.  And since there is no other source of information to verify what they are saying is the media that no longer exists, what else are you going to believe. Yes, when engineers talk about engineering problems, they are a great source of authority.  But when they discuss business, current events, in...

Yesterday and today this blog has had several thoughtful responses/comments to the past two posts from Grant Martin and Paula Jones of Tensilica .  Because this blog generally has a lot of my bitching about how bad marketing is in technology niches I thought it would be worth making a mention of just how good Tensilica's is. The most public face of Tensilica is Grant.  He writes a lot of stuff and not necessarily about Tensilica.  He's involved in scads of technical committees, speaks, presents, sits on panels and is pretty much an industry advocate.  Paula develops and implements marketing and communication strategies.  The company overall is dedicated to marketing in an industry that is almost wholly focused on sales.  Their efforts have been so good that Tensilica is almost an industry niched in itself.  It is both vendor, customer and researcher to the general public. Grant and Paula find great value in technical conferences, advert...

Brian McConnell at GigaO m gave a great post today on why advertising, especially online advertising, isn't working ask expected.  His position is that too many companies have given over their marketing strategy to the engineering departments, who are granularizing advertising and content to death. "Sometimes, people just like to shop," he explains simply. I'm not an advertising guy even though I understand the value of advertising in subsidizing the distribution of real information.  And I have to admit, that sometimes I forget that advertising is a form of information, no matter how biased.  What's getting me on this kick today is the realization that Twitter is turning us all into advertising copywriters. Twitter isn't much more than ad copy.  Everyone on it is selling something be it a position, an image and often a product.  They are trying to express in as few words as possible and idea that will get some traction.  Som...

The report this week in EE Times of the impending demise of the ultrawideband industry is an interesting case study in the importance of good marketing.   I had the dubious pleasure of advising two UWB companies in how to best make a name for themselves and the technology and had an even harder time getting them to do decent marketing than I did for any EDA company I worked with.  Like most technology companies, everything was run by engineers, including marketing.  They said they sold their product to engineers and knew how to talk the them.  They all said they had the leading technology and showed me all kinds of wonderful demonstrations to show how bullet proof their product was.  They insisted on exhibiting at CES to launch.  They insisted they only needed tactical help (setting up editor meetings).  Oh, and they didn't want an ongoing program. I was naive.  I thought the technology was cool.  I knew I could get meetings for...

Been thinking about lots of stuff this week as I took off three days.  First time off in about 5 years.  Need to do that more.  One of the things that popped up was what to trust in media now that traditional media has shrunk to the point of irrelevance on tech industries.  This is what I came up with: Don't trust anyone with more than 30 percent market share. Yeah, it's a riff off of the hippie adage, "don't trust anyone over 30."  But I think it fits. When the economy is strong, having stable market leaders is a good thing.  Markets grow.  The leaders follow basic competition concepts.  Everyone is happy.  But when things turn bad, leaders hunker down and do whatever they can to kill innovative competition so they can avoid losing market share.  And when those leaders are doing their own thing media-wise (social media, private conferences, etc.) they do everything they can to control market conversation....

OK, so I got no comments on my posting where I said “...advertising doesn’t work ...” on the blog site.  I did get phone calls, text messages and a few emails.  Mostly from advertising sales people I know.  They didn’t read the entire statement on advertising.  They only saw those three words.  So let me be clear: INTERNET advertising doesn’t work LIKE WE THINK IT DOES.  I’ll be even more specific.  ADVERTISING doesn’t work like we think it does. I’ve said this before.  Everyone THINKS advertising increases sales directly.  Everyone THINKS advertising drives lead generation.  It does none of that.  Advertising only reinforces and validates a decision that has already been made.  No one looks at an ad and says, “Holy crap, I need me one of them!”   Unless they are an idiot, that is.  No thinking person believes advertising.  Ask the minion in the next cubicle if he believes what ads push... unless y...

There is a common belief among the tech industries that the most important person to talk to is the engineer.   Magazines like EDN , EE Times , Electronic Design and Electronic Products are traditionally dedicated to the electronics engineer and providing "solutions" to the engineer's problems.   They are right, of course, that the engineer has to be convinced before a product can be sold, but the problem is that in today's economy, the engineer isn’t the final decision maker.   That decision rests with the CFO.   And they aren't buying anything right now because no one is telling them what they want to hear. The CFO asks only one important question and, invariably, the head of engineering answers that question wrong.   And the reason they answer the question wrong is because the vendor's marketing efforts are geared only to answer the questions the engineers ask, so the engineers are not prepared to answer the CFO correctly. Wha...

Back in the 60's and 70's a lot of young people got around the country by hitchhiking.   For a long time, that was considered a cheap way of getting around the country, but in the mid 70's some people started requiring hitchhikers to pony up some of the expense.   There was a popular bumper sticker that spelled it out. "Gas, grass or ass.   No one rides for free." This week there has been a controversy simmering over Facebook's revision of it terms of use , which essentially states that any content you post on your personal Facebook pages becomes the property of Facebook.   That includes the pictures of your kids and vacations, your essays (notes), and the information you share about yourself.   Lot's of people are pissed off about this and are considering quitting Facebook, but they can no longer pull the content out of the Facebook servers. The concern has to do with not only content ownership, but privacy issues.   Ove...

As I said in the last post, our hope lies in our willingness to move outside our circle of comfort.   What blows me away is that most people are less likely to make that move when their circle is putrefying around them.   The news is filled right now with the hope that whatever the federal government does with the stimulus package will solve the problem.   At the same time, no one believes it will.   So the nation's hope is in an organization no one has any faith in.   I've been peppering these posts on hope with pithy quotes from past presidents and now seems to be a good time to pull out this one.   "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country." -- John Kennedy In a time when we are invoking the names of people like Kennedy, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, we aren't spending a whole lot of time paying attention to what they actually stood for, and that is the individual responsibility to not give i...

"If Not Us, Who? If Not Now, When?" —Rabbi Hillel (Ronald Reagan only quoted him) Hope requires faith, and as the Bible says, faith is not faith if you can see with your eyes what it is you are hoping for.   But for faith to live, someone's gotta have hope. Hope is not wishful thinking.   That's because most wishful thinking is being wistful to a return to the "good old days" before you lost hope.   Hope is looking forward.   There are some people doing just that and that's what we need right now, real leaders with hope. I've met several over the past few months that are hopeful about the immediate future.   People like former Synopsys exec Sanjiv Kaul,   Morgenthaler's Drew Lanza, and two guys forming a huge fund called NEOS that you will be hearing about over the next year.   Corporations like nVidia , Virgin, Siemens and   SAP are launching major investment funds this year and are looking all ...

Brian Fuller did an interesting post Wednesday about his favorite subject, vendor as publisher , but also got into a discussion on press releases and their relative value... which he and I agree is pretty low right now. What got me started on this post was a call I got from a small publication publisher who was thinking about offering a news release writing service for companies, cutting out the PR professional from the mix.   I did my best to dissuade him from the idea, simply because press releases are just a huge waste of time and money for the most part.  Companies big and small put hours and hours of time and money into these documents because they think it is giving them "visibility" on the web.  They never stop to think that almost every release reads exactly the same, whether it's a plain old vanilla release or a fancy schmancy social media release with a bunch of bold words and links.  Most release provide no real information and are ...

Why am I doing this?   That's a question I get a lot.   There are also people who think thy know why I doing this blog and New Tech Press and the VC communications program, etc., etc.   It occurred to me today that I haven't really stated why. Here's why. I no longer believe in the effectiveness of the public relations practices that we are all used to.   I no longer believe 99.999 percent of the news releases put out everyday have any value.   I cannot see how media and analyst relations practices that have developed over the past century can possibly bring awareness of small, innovative companies.   I believe that everything has changed, from the way information is distributed to the way it is consumed; from the way information is gathered to how that gathering is financially supported. For the past 12 months, I have not taken another client that wants to do business as usual.   I have told dozens of companies that what they want t...

John Ford at the DFTDigest blog asked a question about the EE Times Edge , like, what is it?   He figured it out, but for the rest of you who might have missed a big change in the electronics media, the EE Times newspaper we have enjoyed for many years has gone away.  It has been replaced by the Edge, a magazine format analysis publication.  You won't find product announcements and news anywhere but online at EETimes.com and their associated DesignLine sites.  In fact, pretty much the only news you will find are your rewritten news releases. It costs less because there is less paper so TechInsights will make more profit off the publication.  The editors are not going to be taking meetings with you to discuss your product announcements and little victories because they are going to be looking at the big picture now.  You're going to have to demonstrate how you fit if you want to talk to them.  Personally, I think the 'zine is dynamite.  Especially check out Loring Wirbel...

We're entering into the budget dance for 2009.  You know the steps: 1.  We'd like to talk with you about your services (spring) 2.  Let's schedule a meeting (summer) 2.  We're out of budget for this year.  We'll need to talk next year after we've determined our budgets (fall) 3.  We're right in the middle of our program and don't have time to talk (winter) And back to step 1. Here's a hint for all you marketers who are considering exploring the world of social media and alternative marketing approaches:  Leave yourself some leeway in your budget to experiment down the road.  If you spend the same amount on news releases, trade shows and collateral material that you did last year, the best you can hope for is the same result as last year.  The definition of insanity, etc.