Marketing Magic to a Thumping Beat.

The buzz in my business is all about online marketing. My customers want to sell on the web, promote online, use social media like facebook and twitter to speak to customers, provide online portals for their dealers and email customers with offers. I guide my clients carefully through these steps because I know what happens when it all goes bad and how quickly this new world can jump up and bite the unprepared. I hear horror stories all the time, so let me share a couple of my favourites in the hope that any of you who are contemplating marketing online will do so carefully and seek professional help. A nation men’s clothing store sent me an email advertising overcoats on a Friday around noon. I was meeting with a client around the Polo Park area so after checking the email on my iPhone and being in need of a new overcoat I dropped in. I approached a fresh-faced sales associate and asked about the promotion. My request was met with a blank stare and an assurance that they had no ove...

In the last couple of years digital handheld audio recorders have transformed from unwieldy cassette or DVD based monsters used by news agencies or on the other end the micro-cassette low fidelity note takers that business people used to dictate a memo or capture their thoughts into palm-sized recording studios capable of capturing live sound with amazing clarity and detail. TV, print and radio interviewers, birding and outdoor enthusiasts, students, conference attendees, podcasters, musicians and concert goers are purchasing these new breed of digital recorders looking to capture their audio sources quickly and easily without having to set up stereo microphones, miles of cables and stands. All these digital recorders use flash memory to record on. Flash memory is the same kind as you find in iPods, digital cameras and those tiny removable storage sticks used with computers. Simple and widely available SD memory cards ranging in capacity from 512 MB to well over 16 GB give you hours of...

Recently, I got a chance to live with a Blackberry Curve cellphone. Normally I use an iPhone so I was eager to put the Blackberry through its paces. Blackberry’s thrive in large corporate environments where they integrate well with business Microsoft based servers. They use a push email system owned by Blackberry to push emails to each handset rather than wait for the cellphone to pull the email off the server. This speeds delivery of mail and quick communications is key in these fast paced environments. The Blackberry Curve has a 2” x 1 ¾ inch colour screen. The iPhone’s screen is 3” x 2”. The Blackberry is thicker too but has a solid robust feel to it. The Curve has a keyboard with small keys for each letter or number you wish to push. Many people prefer this typing style as there is a tactile, firm feel that the key has been depressed as opposed to the iPhone's virtual keyboard where touching a location on the screen does not. The applications you get with this Blackberry includ...

PC users have had a rough three years since the release of Microsoft’s Vista operating system. The new OS had three huge problems. It was invasive asking users to verify standard operations to the point of frustration. It required users to search for new drivers for all their attached gear, as Vista did not play nice with others. And finally, it chewed up resources and many users computers did not have the speed, memory, or storage capacity to allow them to upgrade without significant investments in new hardware. Three years later Microsoft has dropped the Vista designation and gone back to calling their OS Windows and this version is lucky number 7. So is it an improvement over the dreaded Vista and will it tempt those users still using XP to finally upgrade? Cruising around a few of my favourite blogs the general consensus seems to be that Windows 7 is an improvement but there is no killer new features and some of the weirdness still exists. One of the things that stopped many PC us...

Some times the best tech devices are the low tech ones. In this world of newer is better, let’s look at those tech devices that drive us crazy and celebrate the stuff that just works. Cellphones Cellphone manufacturers are stuffing their offerings with new features that most of us will ever use. Searching the web on anything other than an iPhone is a frustrating exercise. When was the last time you used the calculator on your cellphone? Texting is huge with young people, but most mature adults can’t be bothered punching a key 4 times to type a Z. And what’s with those ultra tiny keys? Photos taken with most cellphone cameras can hardly be called photos. These blurry, pixilated, tiny images are rarely useful other than to capture a moment in time when nothing better is available. I went shopping for a new cellphone with my wife recently and she returned determined to keep her current phone as none of the new offerings had buttons large enough for her to read. I think the first company t...

We all by now have seen and many of us own an Apple iPod. We know that it is a wonderful music player and some of us have used it to store a music video or maybe even a movie or two. Apple’s latest version is the iPod Touch and it has a few more tricks than your iPod Nano, Shuffle or Classic. The Touch is really an Apple iPhone without the phone part but with a, headset, a simple, little application and a WIFI connection you can turn it into a telephone and best of all….your calls will be free. You can do this by using VOIP or “voice over internet protocol”. You telephone calls do not travel over conventional phone lines but travel through the internet instead. The iPhone and iPod Touch runs on a version of the Apple’s OS-X, the same operating system as their personal computers. This makes them a very powerful microcomputer able to run a variety of programs and applications just like a laptop or desktop computer. Apple’s truly brilliant concept has been to allow third party software de...

As talk of economic recessionary doom and gloom swirls around our businesses and everywhere we turn companies are cutting back, laying off workers and downsizing it is at these times we need to learn the lessons business history has taught us. Back in the great depression Proctor and Gamble marketed its “Ivory Soap” and made it a household staple dwarfing it’s rivals for decades afterwards. As the 1990’s recession griped the USA, computer-chip maker Intel launched it’s famous “Intel Inside” campaign featuring the multi-coloured hazard-suited dancing tech nerds pushing back it’s competitors and increasing its market share to the point where it dominates the entire sector today. As marketers, we need to remind our CEO’s of these lessons and encourage them to go against the grain, Zig while other’s Zag, as Marty Neumeier author of ZAG teaches us and have the courage to invest in marketing rather than cutting it. Now is the time to break out those Superman tights boys and be a superhero. T...