Register for our New Keystone Business Development™ Webinar
When we talk to clients in the IT and Biotechnology industries, the most common question we are asked is “Can you help our company get to the next level?” What they are really asking is: “How can we boost our Business Development efforts?”
We have a great deal of expertise in creating Web2.0 PR campaigns that support Business Development initiatives. We build integrating campaigns that incorporate social networking for prospect list development, targeted emails, PPC campaigns, natural search engine optimization, content development, media relations, special landing pages and blogs, inbound linking, and webinars.
We have created a new one-hour webinar called Keystone Business Development™ that presents innovations in the application of Web2.0 PR to produce revenue momentum.
If you are interested in signing up for the webinar, then please provide your email address in the above Email Address box. You will receive an email with instructions on how to view and participate in the webinar.
I will be a Workshop Facilitator at Federated Press’ 5th Annual Gaining Public Awareness: Government Marketing Conference, which will be held in Ottawa on December 4, 5 & 6, 2006.
My three-hour interactive workshop is entitled How to Apply Social Marketing, Viral Marketing & "Tipping Point" Concepts to your Public Sector Marketing Strategy. Here is the description:
Social marketing is the use of commercial marketing techniques with programs designed to influence a target audience’s behaviour. The goal is to improve their personal welfare and that of their society. It is an approach that public sector marketing and communications professionals have been applying, with much success, to encourage certain behaviours and attitudes in Canadians. Moreover, viral marketing is any strategy that advances a message through a quick succession of individuals, creating exponential growth in the message’s influence and exposure.
Throughout this conference, you have heard about various social marketing techniques, the growing use of viral marketing, and how Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” concepts can be applied to social environments. But how do you put it all together and take those insights back to the office?
This workshop will illustrate how these non-traditional concepts can ultimately contribute to your overall marketing program within your organization.
- Identifying your audience: whom do you need to reach? - Segmentation of your audience, based on predisposition, motives, values, and lifestyle - What changes are you seeking to achieve your organizations goals? - Which target audiences should you attempt to influence to meet your objectives? - Using appropriate marketing strategies and tactics, including positioning, message development and delivery to reach your audience - Leveraging from partnerships to enhance your credibility and facilitates access to target audiences - Implementing your advocacy or community development initiatives - Defining measurements for assessing the impact of your initiatives - Ongoing monitoring and evaluation to modify and improve your program
Robert Weisman has written a great piece on the Boston VC pursuit of promising Web2.0 companies. Some informative quotes from the piece:
"Unlike the dot-coms of the late 1990s, many of which counted on the proliferation of online eyeballs to overcome shaky business models, Web 2.0 companies aspire to profits, cash flow, and recurring revenue. Their embrace of new technologies and open-source software like Ajax, enabling the creation of richer Internet interfaces, has dramatically lowered operating costs. And they have sought to spice up static content with interactive and multimedia technologies -- like weblogs, wikis, or podcasts -- that enable two-way conversations.
Google is the poster child for Web 2.0
What the Web allows you to do is have second-to-second information about user interactions. Every click is information, and that information can drive your business.
.... the hottest field in technology today: the second wave of Internet start-ups known as Web 2.0."
Web2.0 has enabled the banal to be scattered across the globe consciousness. Great content is required to get noticed and make an impact.
"Banality in the mouth of a failed businessman or an unpublished novelists sounds banal; in the mouth of David Rockefeller or Phillip Roth the same words acquire the weight of oracle." - Lewis Lapham
"Drearily commonplace and often predictable; trite: “Blunt language cannot hide a banal conception” (James Wolcott).
If you stop to take a moment and look at the myriad of consumer content out there, from social networking sites to photo sharing, online video and others, you can begin to boil it down to some pretty basic fundamentals that we, as marketers, can learn from. Consumers want to be part of a bigger community. They want to be informed [with information relevant to them] and entertained. Not interrupted.
Somewhere along the way, marketers realized that if they couldn’t reach a mass audience on TV they could reach them through other methods in their daily lives, be it coffee shop or beauty parlor. The result? ‘Cut through the clutter’ has not only become one of the most over-used phrases today, it has also become somewhat of an oxymoron. As you begin to brainstorm those great creative ideas think to yourself: Are you engaging the consumer in a natural and organic way? Or forcing yourself into their lives? Are you just adding to the clutter?
Words are only painted fire; a book is the fire itself.
Mark Twain
Orthography: The science of spelling by the eye instead of the ear.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
Ideas shape the course of history.
