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.

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.  

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.

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.

And this art is one that Avangate does so well.  Not only does the team behind the scenes at Avangate have years of experience dialing up the conversion percentages, but we also have the tools to do it.

If you want to learn more about how the team drove IObit's revenues through these practices, and learn how you too can accomplish this goal, check out the latest case study here.

Turn shoppers into customers and win big smiles ;)

These meetings and projects are always fun.  We've all invested time, in many cases, years on these products / platforms / partnerships.  We know the space, and some brilliant ideas and left field thoughts are all being thrown against the wall.

Here's one that seems obvious, become a software affiliate and run your own ads to fill your ad inventory.  It doesn't matter if you sell used Beanie Babies, write a blog on fiber optic splicing or rant against the world.  One sale can make you $25.  What other ads offer that upside on the action conversion?

Here's how- Signup for Avangate's affiliate program by clicking this link.  Register for the top promotions, create little banner ads for the products or use the ones the affiliates provide, and put "Buy Now" links in your ad space.

Excess inventory put to good use.

USE THEM.  You have professionals dedicated to doing pitches on your payroll.  This doesn't mean you shouldn't have your product managers, development leads or other execs on the line.  Whom ever you depend on to close your big deals should be leading the pitch.  

It is after all a pitch.

The majority of consumers are imaginably confused by a dozen different names for the same piece of malware.  The majority of the key (aka damage inflicting) viruses I've encountered while doing operations and security were typically detected by heuristics or behavior based mechanisms.  The real nasty ones, those were caught purely by behavior.  

In late 2002 I was chasing an operational problem that started as CPU cycle spikes and proceeded to bandwidth degradation.  My network monitoring was able to watch the virus scan thousands of internal IPs in seconds and crawl from vulnerable device to device... I unplugged the uplink, isolated the VLAN, and contained the virus.

The AV and IDC heuristics caught it allowing us to stop it.  As a security professional I started my research with activity based discussions, not by Googling names.  When you push the security envelope and run operations such as those by the major banks (I personally have experience with many, none of whom come close to those of Fidelity out of Boston), you have to defend against threats invented moments before they hit your front door.

Even the US govt figured this out a few years ago and here's a few comments on the Einstein Program.  Threat mitigation starts with behavior detection and more.  Focusing on unification of threat behavior research and information would allow the thousands of researchers to collaborate... virus naming only seems to support marketing.