Communications Insight

I was so sorry to see the news earlier this week about the sale of BusinessWeek by McGraw-Hill.

Of course, I’ve been a career-long subscriber and reader, and worked with many, many of the excellent journalists at BW.  I do consider BW to be one of the very best business pubs, week-in and week-out providing thoughtful analysis and commentary on breaking news. Often uncovering stories that others do not report.

Well, I guess desperate times means desperate measures. We can only hope that BusinessWeek finds a good home. That some publishing company will see the value of the brand and scoop it up, invest the money that is needed to bring it to full life on the web.

If you haven’t checked it out, the BusinessWeek Exchange is worth exploring. I blogged about it here. It’s a combination community/crowdsourcing service that ties in with BW editorial. This attempt at providing extra value in web content is very well-done, IMHO, and hopefully will be of some additional value to BW prospective buyers.

Miquel Helft, technology reporter at the New York Times, wrote a nice summary of the progress Microsoft is making with it’s new search engine, Bing, published in today’s paper. http://tinyurl.com/kmrspf

Personally, I’ve been a fan of Bing’s from the first time I saw it debut at the All Things Digital conference (sponsored by the Wall Street Journal) in late May. I absoluately love the Bing home page–the stunning color photography almost takes me to a new place and is such a visual relief after the monotony of the Google screen. That alone, irrespectively of the more useful search results, was enough to get me using Bing.

The hardest part for me, and probably for legions of others, is breaking the Google habit. When I need to do a search, I just automatically start typing  the G-word. I’m conciously trying to change that behavior and start with Bing.

I do like the Bing search results better. I find that they are more tuned to business use; there is less stuff to wade through. I also like the organization of sub-listings, and the breakout in the left-hand sidebar. Overall, I find my searches are more efficient and productive with Bing, which in my business is a  big deal. I’m all about efficiency here at Team Julie!

P.S. Yes, I’m using Bing to find the links for this post…

Today I was fortunate to attend a great panel discussion hosted by Churchill Club and PRSA Silicon Valley. The topic was “How PR Can Succeed in a Down Economy”.

There were about 150 attendees; mostly corporate communications folks with several of the major agencies represented and the typical smattering of vendor attendees.

 Panelists included Andy Lark from Dell, Peter Shankman of HARO,  Mark Hampton of Blanc & Otis, Steve Astle of FICO, Arati Shah of PR Week and Karen Kahn of Sun, or Snorkle as she put it.

The mood in the room was quite upbeat. Whenever a group of communications experts get together you can expect a noisy room and today was no different. There was a lot of excited jabbering going on before and after the program.  I talked to quite a few agency execs who noted that they are experiencing a slight uptick in new business activity; that’s a good thing and an indicator that marketing purse strings are loosening.

The panel itself was interesting with, as you would expect,a  substantial amount of airtime devoted to discussing social media—how to best manage it, who within the corporation should be involved (just PR or everyone or somewhere in-between), and how to measure (no good ideas for that).

The only complaint I heard was that the panel was too focused on large corporations with very large marketing budgets. The audience would have liked to have heard tips and techniques employed by the little guys. Also, heard comments that the panel was too enterprise -centric; would liked to have had a consumer tech player represented. All good ideas.

All in all another excellent program! Good times had by all.

Hi–I’ve been exploring both of these services, trying to get familiar with how to use them and how they might be helpful to me and/or to my clients.

I joined the WSJ community several weeks ago and at first was enthusiastic, then haven’t had time to go back and really work with it. Just recently joined BusinessWeek Exchange.

Are any of you actively using either of these services? If so, what’s your experience with them? And, do you recommend for others? Any stories to share?

Soon I hope to have time to do a comparative look at both of these.

Thanks! Julie

The other day I was talking to my very smart client, Chloe Jackson, over at WaveMaker. WaveMaker has an easy programming environment for app development for the cloud.

Chloe has been with the company for several years and is very well-versed in all things-cloud related. She and I started talking about companies that are recession-friendly and of course, that lead to a discussion about how marketeers today can really take advantage of SaaS tools and services to cut their own costs and stretch their dollars.

Five ways to do this are:

1. Blogging. Blogging is incredibly time-intensive but incredibly cheap. Especially these days when we seem to have more time than money, blogging to build brand community is a no-brainer. Chris Keene, the CEO of WaveMaker, is a great example of a CEO who has done an excellent job of using his blog to build a following. Some of his techniques are worth mentioning: he only blogs when he really has something to say, his post are short, well-written and full of good conent, and he’s timely; his posts are tied-into what’s au courant.

2. Use Social Networks. Of course, everyone is talking about this and that’s because their is truth behind it. You can get the word out about your brand, your cause, your company through building presence on Facebook, Twitter and the like. You don’t want to do it in a way that amounts to spamming or posting annoying advertising-like information, but you do want to be there in a clever, humorous, helpful way.

3. Comment, comment, comment. Another easy way to get your “voice” to be heard is through the ability to comment on others’ blog posts. I encourage my clients to comment whenever they see a post that is relevant to their business and I advise them to post real content, again, not fluff, or annoying promotions. The tone should be informative, not defensive; helpful not snarky.

4. Learn about new ways to interact with the media. We are all aware that the “traditional” media outlets are transitioning to the web, and as they so, they are investing in ways to interact with their readers. Both the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek have, over the last several weeks, rolled out community-based forums. At BusinessWeek this is called Exchange and it’s a place where you can exchange ideas with other readers, editors, and the at-large BusinessWeek community. I highly recommend getting involved in these communities. Again another great way to stay connected and it’s “free” except for your own time investment.

5. Lastly, explore and find SaaS based tools that help you in your job. Services like Basecamp from 37 Signals, LegalZoom and many others, are much more affordable than traditional desktop-based applications or outsourced services. And, their “scalable”, meaning you only use and pay for what you need today. That’s a great benefit for a limited marketing buget.

Do you have any tips to share for SaaSy, recession-proof marketing?

Apparently last year Pepsi reportedly spent over $1 million dollars to redesign its logo, hiring the Arnell Group to do so. Yesterday, Gawker, made public an internal document, supposedly written by the design team to explain/justify their redesign.

The 27-page document, which very well could be an Internet hoax, explains how the logo redesign is based on such things as magnetic fields, feng shui, the Renaissance and indeed, calls it “breathtaking design”.

Hmmmm…creative writing 101? What do you think?

Hi There–Welcome Back! For those of you who follow this blog, you may have realized that it has been a long while since I posted. Why, you may ask?

I’ve been in the process of upgrading and updating my blog design, and (drumroll) here it is!

First, I want to thank the great design team of Kaushik Patel and Hetal Soni at Aloki Design Studio. Kaushik and Hetal have done an absolutely amazing job and I’m thrilled with the results.

I learned about Aloki Design Studio from Wasim Ahmad, vice president of marketing for Voltage Security, one of my clients. Aloki has done a lot of very good work for Voltage, and you can see the results of that at their website and their blog, Superconductor.

As in any good design project, we started by setting objectives. My number one objective was to create a blog where I could also combine the content from my website. That meant the blog needed to have more than just a homepage, it needed to have sub-pages where visitors could learn more about me and the work I provide for clients.

Second, I wanted a cleaner, more professional design.

And lastly, I still wanted the blog to be on a very easy-to-use blogging platform so that I could easily manage the content myself, after Kaushik and Hetal had completed the design phase.

With these objectives in mind, we decided to go with the Wordpress platform. It is capable of having nested pages so I can easily combine my company information with the blog, and it is very easy to use.

The next step was the design itself. For this, Kaushik ask me to look across the web at blogs that I liked and to think about how I might want this blog to look. Then we had a great phone conversation where we discussed my input. From there, I crafted an email with my thoughts on the structure and organization of the blog.

From this input, which took minimal time on my part, Hetal created several rough designs. There were several that I liked, so I did some quick “focus” group testing with a few of my knowledgeable marketing guru friends. The consensus is the design that you now see.

Once the design was determined, Hetal and Kaushik did the work entailed to create the blog and then, after a few rounds of checking everything out, we were ready to go live!

And, I couldn’t be more delighted with the results. Please let me know what you think!

I’m trying to remember what it was like in the dot com bust. Somehow I don’t remember the market falling this far, this fast. Or, am I just conveniently forgetting? I talked to my accountant and he is in the market actively buying. He thinks it’s a great time to scoop up some deals. I said, you are brave!!

I generally don’t like to veer too much into personal likes/dislikes on this blog but I just saw an amazing opera from the San Francisco Opera company. I’ve been an SF opera subscriber for years; I love the combination of wonderful music, beautiful vocals and the storytelling of live theater. And, we are so lucky to have a first-class opera company here in SF. Each season there is typically a new, “modern” opera as part of the subscription package.
This year we are so lucky to have the World Premiere of Amy Tan’s “The Bonesetter’s Daughter”. I have not read the book and had no expectations for the production. To my delight, it was superb on so many levels. The story is beautiful and the music and lyrics are simple but at the same time very engaging. The sets and costumes are wonderful. I love the way they have integrated traditional Chinese opera into the score–it makes adds richness and a sense of history. Here’s what the SF Chronicle opera reviewer had to say.
I think this is an opera that any music and/or theater lover will become totally immersed in. Unfortunately there are only two more performances scheduled here but I am certain that this opera will be produced by other companies.
If you have an opportunity to see it, do it!