Today Alltop launched productmanagement.alltop.com and Rocket Watcher made the cut of the 25 or so blogs listed there. In addition to getting some traffic driven to this site, I get to put this nifty little red badge on my site that you see below my photo over on the right. Whoop-dee-doo! How did this happen!? [...]
So you run product marketing for a release 1 IT product and your target vertical is financial services. Nice timing! Too bad about that global market meltdown thing. It’s possible that your CEO/Project Executive might be making some noises about revisiting that decision. Here are some things to think about. Consider this before you bail [...]
I’ve spent most of my career working on Version 1 products so I’ve done my share of product naming. The only thing I’ve learned is that few people actually know anything about how to do it well and in the end you are generally picking the least offensive name from a collection of crappy names. [...]
It’s been a lousy couple of weeks for everyone including folks in Marketing, particularly PR and Communications folks. Investors are freaking out and employees are anxious and distracted. Perky press releases about your wiz-bang new product just aren’t getting anyone’s attention right now. Go figure. I’ve read a lot about what companies should be doing [...]
Over the weekend I wrote a very intelligent and thought-provoking piece on communications and the whole Steve Jobs had a heart attack thing but then today at work we got talking about building a brochure for one of the products I am working on which lead to a couple of hallway conversations about brochures. This [...]
I got a response to this post via email which can be summarized as “Why does differentiation for tech products always have to be around technology? Most successful companies I know had me-too technology but a laser focus on their segment”. Good question (you could try commenting on the blog next time – huh, bub?) [...]
Marketing is a mis-understood function. Sometimes Marketing is the only thing you need to be successful. Other times Marketing is evil and ruining everything. Sometimes it seems like both are true statements. Take cloud computing as an example. Last week Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle corp. was quoted as saying: “…we’ve redefined cloud computing [...]
Why aren’t you running a customer advisory council? A customer advisory board or council is a great way to gain market insight, attain feedback on strategy and direction as well as build deep relationships with key customers. Here are some tips I wish someone had shared with me before I ran my first one: 1. [...]
I has a discussion last week with a friend of mine that's starting a company. His product has some really innovative technology that came out of a university research project around managing, storing and retrieving data. We ended up spending almost an hour trying to answer the question "What is it?". Which of course is [...]
I was at Interop/Web 2.0 for meetings this week. I also walked the expo floor talking to startups and attendees. It struck me how broken the whole “conference” thing is. Vendors want leads but tradeshows are a notoriously poor source of qualified leads. At every company I have worked at, when we actually tracked leads [...]
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Is a startup with a defined product for a specific market really more valuable than a startup without those things? It depends on what you know about your market.
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The results of an experiment where a hand-drawn doodle outperforms a professionally designed ad. tell us what worked but not necessarily why.
Industry Analysts: Can You Buy Coverage?
Industry analyst firms like Forrester and Gartner Group won’t write about you just because you pay them. You should be happy they don’t.