By Josh Cline
Ever since the search-engine giant Google acquired Waze this week for $1 billion reportedly to bolster its planned makeover of Google Maps (and likely to prevent competitors from gaining the app’s crowd-sourced data on live traffic conditions), the mobile-app industry has enclosed itself in a bubble of inflated expectations that is filled to the bursting point with entrepreneurial delusions of grandeur.
In my 25 years as a PR and media-relations practitioner, it never ceases to amaze me how many companies don’t completely understand the “pact” of cooperation that’s required once they sign on with a PR firm. Perhaps it’s because the company has no previous experience with how PR works, or maybe it’s because it is not explained properly enough. But please know from our perspective, this can’t be stressed enough. Once you hire a PR firm, it’s critical to work with them in building the foundation of a successful campaign.
By Josh Cline
For the past 15 years, I have worked for more than 100 companies, mostly in the emerging business and start-up technology worlds, helping them to reach their utmost potential. From my years both at large agencies and working in-house, I have learned the keys to success. People who know me well will recognize the short examples below and the crucial lessons they teach on how marketing and public-relations professionals at agencies should act.
Note: This is the second part in an ongoing series. Part one and three.
By Samuel Scott
In the first part in this series, I introduced how I have been using holistic, integrated marketing to build and market a personal, hobby website of mine at night entitled Buffy the Vampire Slayer Online that aims to sell advertising and merchandise. (Yes, it is a website of the 1990s cult-television show because I have been a fan ever since I first saw it in college.)
By Samuel Scott
Note: This is the first part in an ongoing series. Part two and three.
If you are using a social-media marketing strategy without a corresponding content-marketing one, you are most likely wasting your time. As different parts of the Internet increasingly affect and influence each other in marketing terms, it is also increasingly important to use an integrated strategy that incorporates these numerous factors.
The following is sixth in a series of posts about high tech marketing strategy based on Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm
In order to win the battle for customers and revenue, you must define the battle.
One essential component to building a market is positioning.
Positioning is the image or identity in the minds of their target market for its product, brand, or organization.
Despite common misconception (and Wikipedia’s own entry), positioning is not a process but rather the market position itself.
The following is the fifth in a series of posts about high tech marketing strategy based on Crossing the Chasm.
One of the most important functions of marketing isn’t viral and it isn’t advertising and no, it’s not creative slogans. Rather it’s in the fundamental 4Ps taught in every Marketing 101 class: Product.
In order to win the marketplace, you must wire the marketplace. According to Moore, “For a given target customer and a given application, create a marketplace in which your product is the only reasonable buying proposition. That starts… with targeting markets that have a compelling reason to buy your product. The next step is ensuring that you have a monopoly over fulfilling the reason to buy.”
Unless you have been living under a digital rock, you probably know the increasing importance of social-media marketing to your business both today and in the future. However, it is important to know that social media is not a panacea – it is not a magic bullet that will get you a quick million dollars in sales in return. If it were, then every business would be successful within weeks of creating a Facebook page or Twitter account.
