Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 4:31PM Our team at Avangate maintains one of the best lists of free press release sites on the Internet, and its available here. The next time you are looking to push your topic, announce a new feature or product release or maybe a company change, consider doing it for free.
Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 2:56PM  | I recently drove about 1200 miles north on Interstate 95 from Florida to the northern tip of New Jersey. One thing this trip does not lack are outlet stores... and there are some great ones along the way. I was thinking about the outlet concept and wondered why this wasn't done for software. |
Sunday, March 14, 2010 at 7:41AM Geoffrey Moore does a great job explaining how innovation can separate you from the heard and also how it can be a purely fruitless investment. The line between good enough and over developed has been crossed by every entrepreneur, learning from your mistakes and being able to find "good enough" is what makes us a profitable, and good product managers.
In this presentation Geoffrey Moore dives into how innovation makes successful companies and how it can separate you from the herd. There are a few gems in there, my favorite (I'm paraphrasing): Best in class is a sucker's bet. It will get lots of applause, but no-one will pay you.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 2:58PM The antivirus market is a very congested space, and getting your product recognized amongst all the noise is truly a marketing challenge. In this battle, the vendors must often displace an embedded product, usually one that comes pre-installed with the computer. AV vendors often find themselves fighting against powerful, entrenched companies such as Norton and McAfee, companies with multi-million dollar budgets.
In the battle for desktop space, these vendors have to be creative and willing to take chances to out flank the massive marketing budgets of their competitors. One of the more interesting moves I've seen is Sunbelt Software's use of Twitter. Today only (March 2nd) you can take advantage of their promotion and receive a free license to the new product, just click here.
Not only does this allow them to gain desktop share, but it also generates a list of customers and performs some serious web marketing. Each Tweet increases web placement and the likely hood of the product being found, adds another follower to their fan base, and ultimately educates the market.
The overall cost of the promotion is based on the percentage of that base that WOULD have converted (not all free adopters would buy remember). The return is desktop space and installs for a subscription product, SEO and a whole lot of free press.
Casey S. Potenzone
If you are interested in seeing how well the promotion worked, and how many people took advantage, check out this real-time twitter search result.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 4:34PM This year I once again served as a judge for the SIIA CODiE awards, and I'm proud to say that all my favorites have made it to the finals!!! For the first time I was given the opportunity to judge the "Best Solution by an Emerging Company" category, and I was truly impressed. I also judged the "Best DRM Solution" and was able to reconnect with several friends from my previous space.
Before I give you a quick highlight, some advice for ANY software company competing in an awards: YOU HAVE SALES PEOPLE, USE THEM. When you have a huge opportunity, who do you send? This is who you should send to do your demos. If you want to bore the judge to death, put your engineer and product managers together and rattle off a few thousand features.
At the end of the day, the process is really no different then a sales call. Put your best sellers in front of the judges, not necessarily your smartest.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010 at 12:09AM I'm in the process of organizing and scrubbing my personal contact lists. So far I've imported databases from Outlook, GMail, Facebook, Linked-In and a variety of other contact lists that I have connections to. This lists includes people from just about every industry and professional level. A brief sampling includes the likes of Michael Milken, the CIO of the FBI, various tech CEOs and CTOs, a mishmash of bankers, VCs, programmers, etc. etc. (and of course friends, I have at least a few of those).
Next, I cross referenced everything through Linked-in and updated the job profiles data. After cleaning all the data I pulled out a subset of 5,000 people who I could actually identify from name, title or notation. Of these 5,000 people, 327 of them are currently unemployed.
This little exercise allowed me to determine that my personal network has an unemployment rate of nearly 6.5%, that's a full 3.5 points better than the US unemployment rate (below, courtesy of Google). With the heavy focus I've had on startup companies in my career I honestly expected that to be MUCH higher... But then again, a bunch of them have sales and marketing in their blood, so maybe there's some "smoke and mirrors" being called into play.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 3:12PM Although you'd have to be basically be living in an Internet hole to be in this business and not aware of the problems MySpace has been suffering recently, their traffic and user base are clearly one to be taken seriously. An analysis recently published by Venture Beat, available here, highlights the traffic in percentages of US Internet population. With the US community numbering 205M, Facebook was able to capture 54% and MySpace 27%.
What I found to be truly interesting in this peace is the stickiness of the user base, proving that any organization invested in an online marketing campaign must invest in managing their social presence in order to be successful.
It also goes to the point that everyone we work with, in this little Internet world, is on the social sites, checking out our history, friends, postings, pictures, etc. We must take steps to ensure our online reputations are the ones we want people reading and knowing.
