Marketing Magic to a Thumping Beat.

In my business, I talk with big and small clients all the time about their marketing and advertising efforts and specifically their websites. I am often surprised that a minority of these otherwise perfectly capable business people have trusted their website to the kid down the street, a brother-in-law or the cheapest developer they could find. The results have ranged from frustration to unmitigated disaster. I have heard of major corporations being held captive as the rights to their URL’s are owned by their web development company, that the software used to create their site was proprietary and can’t be moved, updated or repaired, that the servers hosting their site mysteriously vanished taking their site down with them or that the Brother-in-law, who has taken over two years to produce three pages, has found a new job and can’t finish their site. Would you trust your inventory control system or POS to anyone other than a professional, what about your accounting or sales managem...

We have all been in a business meeting presenting an idea that we are convinced will make our company more successful, reduce costs, or increase sales only to suddenly find ourselves back on our heels, defensive and stumbling as we retreat from a withering storm of criticism, questions and negativity. By the end of the meeting our idea is a smoldering wreck burning in the center of the board room table or has been banished to the purgatory of “committee study” doomed to be ignored, watered down or simply forgotten. What can we do to prevent our ideas from crashing and burning? How can we become bulletproof and take our good ideas with us? This is the central question posed in the book “Buy*in” by John P. Kotter. This little gem provides practical advice, verbal shields and effective diffusion methods that help you defend a good idea from those with their own agenda.  Using a fictitious public meeting for a library technology proposal as the example, “Buy*in” introduces you to a...

In times of economic uncertainty, many businesses wonder if enlisting an ad agency to create a brand for their product is worth the time and expense. My response? It all depends on how successful they want to be, and for how long. Print ads come in two varieties, the branding ad and the sales ad. Branding ads are those that try to position a company and its product in a specific niche. If successful, they should identify with a particular target market and reach out to those to whom the brand is intended. The sales ad works off of the brand positioning and makes specific product or service offers to a well-defined audience. Both types of ads are important parts of selling a product or service, but I would argue that the sale can’t come before the brand. In my experience, too many companies try to jump immediately to the sales ad without spending the time building a brand. As consumers we see these ads every day. Unfortunately for the advertiser, few actually catch, or keep, our att...

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...