Tech blogs not just talk? a technology marketers' worry

Abbot Laboratory's Omnilink Biliari Stent, does it belong in a blog?

A technology marketer in a medical device start-up just gave me his opinion about blogs: "they are just talk, and if you are going to talk, you need someone really good to do it." He gets about an offer every two weeks to get a blog started. But his company does not see potential for professionally written articles from a 23 year old blogger that cut his teeth on commenting in political or Internet gambling blogs. His web design and SEO provider has made a pitch for blogging, the result was disappointing at best. The image of the blogger simply does not fit the serious business of selling medical devices to doctors. In his words "doctors over the age of 50 do not read blogs". I wanted to say: "executives in fortune 500 do read Clayton Christensen's and Jakob Nielsen's blogs" and they take them seriously. Imitating Bill Clinotn's famous political election slogan: "it's the topic stupid" was on my lips. But I didn't say anything at that point. I wanted to go back to my office and gather examples to "prove him wrong".

Once I started gathering lists of "serious blogs" I realized that it's not going to be useful, not to me or to him. Not only to this potential client, but also to anyone in his company. There are two ways of looking at communication. These are more basic than marketing communication as a whole. The failure in the image of blogs falls into these two categories:

• The media itself: contextual association in what the medium itself represents. This is what Marshal McLuhan defined as: "the medium is the massage". TV is for entertainment, you didn't put medical ads on TV in the US in the 1950's, you didn't do it even in the 1970's. You don't put serious professional communication on blogs, it's a waste of time.
• The content: what Bill Clinton's campaign adviser James Carville coined "it's the economy stupid". You focus on what you want to say not where the message runs. On TV for Americans presidents never talked about serious subjects, but Carville made Clinton do it!

Who is "right"? If you are a start-up medical company you worry about your effectiveness. If you don't get it "right" the company will suffer, maybe even get hit so hard that you will not be able to recover. But why focus on small medical start-ups? This issue is global. Big medical companies, technology companies, consumer companies, they all have to worry about their communication effort. What about independent consultants, with even more at stake, much smaller budget?

Marshal McLuhan still echo after all the years, history of medium repeats?

If you are going to communicate and market effectively you need BOTH! YES BOTH! The medium has to be right to be effective at all, this is what everyone who starts out thinks. The medium is definitely stereotyped, which is what Marshal McLuhan observed in the 1960's. Does this put blogs in the world of "just talk"? Just political commenting and deep technical conversations? This seems to be the case in the mind of traditional corporate marketers*. But if it's just talk, why do serious thinkers use such trivial medium? Well, here comes Carville's observation in the serious political arena of presidential elections: the message itself is MORE important. Why is this the case? Because you need to get your message out PERIOD! Even on TV news that has the image of entertainment more than information you need to use it as if it was "serious medium". Carville and more and more media experts understand that there is no substitute to getting the listener's ear and eye. Even if you don't fit into the medium's stereotyped mold.

This leads us to the message itself. If you want to communicate a message, if you want to make sure someone clearly understands you, how do you go about doing it? In the days of Marshal McLuhan you had to do it on TV and pages of magazines. Today it's the Internet. Obviously there is attention paid to messages on the Internet, specially the big company's messages about technology and business. I am not going to convince anyone that Ariana Huffington will get serious about the economy or unemployment, or that bloggers will stop writing about spiders, socks and Lego construction. But that does not matter, if you ignore the medium's stereotyped image (blogs are for just talk). That's what I call 'falling into the stereotype trap'.

The stereotype trap is what Carville clearly saw in the early Clinton presidential campaign. The TV reporter asks you a question about anything, and you answer it. You have to, you are on TV! That's what TV viewers want, that reporter knows what will get ON TV! -- When I write it here it sounds a little sarcastic and maybe silly. But this is exactly what small medical equipment marketers are doing with blogs. But they are in good company, take a look at Microsoft's blogs.

Microsoft has a "community Blogs" page with introduction: " Blogs are Web pages which are updated frequently, written from the point of view of an individual, written in an informal tone, and usually expose an RSS feed for syndication. Use the directory below to find blogs about Microsoft technologies written by Microsoft employees. These blogs will provide you insights and opinions about using Microsoft technologies and software. " Sure enough reading through the blogs they are very technical "insider" articles by individuals. They probably replaced newsletters and articles with blogs. But you will not find "serious business" information here.

Microsoft BI (Business Intelligence) department has a blog. The landing page needs a formatting fix but once you go to an article the blog takes a traditional look with Tag cloud, archives, blog roll on the right sidebar. So here you will find a bit of serious talk about Microsoft's business. Maybe Microsoft is not a good example of blogs for business.

Let's look at what the software industry calls a more "progressive" company. Red Hat is the company which popularized open source software. They essentially "packages" open source and made it useful to the common technology geek. Get a Red Hat Linux "distribution" and Linux works just like windows. Here there are few sections of their web site which are essentially blogs. Red Hat Magazine is a blog. Red Hat press section is a blog and they call it "News Blog" at the home page.

Taking a look at Adobe's blogs, they seem to be much like Microsoft's. Lots of technical blogs for each product and a many personal blogs. Some blogs I would say are more "strategic" or high level. Take a look at the security blog, here is technical information but not just for the pure technologist. But than again Adobe can be considered an old stogy institution in comparison to real Web2.0 companies.

So, let's look at Google! Sure enough google has a blog section with directory for lots of blogs. Just an an example take a look at an article Helping Healthcare Providers Become More Efficient. Maybe this is not useful for the big 50+ medical professional but it is certainly useful to the people who look for solutions. Maybe in the medical profession the solutions come from the bottom not the top. But how are you going to get to the top? I think that google's official blog answers this question. Google's main blog is a mix of news and business articles. I am not sure that this will sway a serious business user but probably 1/3 of the articles could fit into a serious business blog for google.

I should probably do a series of blog surveys to see who is "in" and who is "out". Or more accurately who is "serious about business" and who is "just a tech talker". Sorry for the sarcasm but I do not have a way to categorize this better. If you do, just drop me a line.

The moral of the story? Blogs are not just for "marketing light" - Blogging falls into the category of what content will deliver your message. If you look at the Internet as the medium of today's business, blogs are just one channel (or format).





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* There is another view of traditional corporate marketers which comes from their traditional suppliers. A big web design, SEO, or even hosting company is not going to offer blogging if they do not have strong writers, strategist, and researchers to support this service.

How, Why, and What about bringing old sk00l to blogging

One of the questions that I hear all the time is how to "educate" or "convert" an old marketer into a Web2.0 model (as if people were cars or computers). It is similar to the question of "when is business going to get back to the good old days when technology ruled high and every company was growing? (i.e. making money)". To me it seems that these questions avoid the simple observation that things change. They change all the time and not always for the better (i.e. for everyone). Blogging platforms like blogger and WordPress were suppose to make writing content on the web easier and reading it much much easier. Well it did and it DID NOT! Which is what happens with every technology change. (I did not say "technology innovation" or "improvement" on purpose)

The idea behind blogging was: just find a blog platform you like and start publishing what you want. You got freedom from the traditional publishers, no cost of publishing and distribution, no censorship... hey this is great!!! As an isolated vague idea in space (before we actually had massive amount of blogs) this sounded too good to be true. (so did nuclear power - free energy for everyone) But this is not exactly what happened, not because people didn't know how to write, edit, research, promote... not because people didn't have something to say, opinion to voice, ideas to float... all the things that newspapers and trade magazines do very well. Whatever your profession, from technologist to business, from scientist to retailer, from car mechanic to pen collector, you may know how to do your work but you usually don't know how to explain it. Most professionals also do not have the experience to write well, write consistently and to do it week after week, year after year. Most professionals are not interested in writing that much or in that much detail. So for the most part, even though we have the "technology" for blogging, that is just one aspect of a blog that makes it useful. Blogging and wikis can be just about the writing. Essentially if you write well and have something important to say people will eventually read it. But all the functions which publishers of newspapers have invented, from soliciting good writing, editing, design, and eventual promotion and advertising; end up to be just as crucial for bloggers and wikis. So in the end a good writer with something to say still needs help editing, still need motivation to get out the articles in a steady flow, still has to have a decent design... all these things. Even promotion and advertising and "distribution" (RSS, index sites) is crucial.

The other technologies of what O'Reilly observed as Web2.0 are even more foreign and remote to people (just today, this will change and quickly). While Wikipedia has revolutionized organization and gathering of information on a large scale, wikis are very hard to run well and even harder to edit and attract content. This is what has made encyclopedias of the past so expensive and fairly rare in people's homes. Encyclopedia is something libraries pride themselves of having. If you look carefully at encyclopedias of the past notice that they actually are not too prolific. While they gather a great deal of information they are hard to publish, took a very long time, and in the end did not catch as a popular format. Let's not forget their cost, when the format did not "catch" they essentially became expensive. I think this will be true for the web as well. That does not mean that wikis are immediately limited in use. Actually, just like other forms of digital technology wikis will probably become more popular in other forms not necessarily encyclopedias.

New Internet technologies make certain things very easy "technically". This is essentially true with all technologies. This is what many business executives see immediately, the "new way to make money". But the next step in the use of a new technology is the real life application. Technologists know this very well. A base technology without applications and users which benefit from them is not going to be profitable. Business people do not always build in the cost of developing applications or managing outside companies to build them. These two factors: slow momentum of usage and ideas for new uses of a technology are both "good and bad". The good side is opportunities which blogging, wikis, and social networking has given us. The bad side is the people left behind. Essentially we can not change these qualities. The interesting observation which a few of us asking that question AGAIN and AGAIN and... "when are people going to upgrade themselves to Web2.0" and again avoids the change factor.

But what do some of us see that the others don't? After all, some "older folks" blog and some "young guns" still design brochures to be distributed by the old mail system? Besides the ability to "imagine the future" here are a few observations of what make some people understand Web2.0 and some don't:

• Seeing the full picture of how an interactive site works, either over time or over a series of articles not in time.


• Seeing good examples of content, design, subject matter, or organization (editing, arrangement) - essentially anything that is complete and already been used by people.


• Seeing examples that are understood and clearly relevant. If you are a business professional only new business blogs will help you understand how this could help YOU.


• Direct involvement in a blog site, writing, editing, use, definition, review, specification for a project.


• Pressure, explanation, challenge, need or anything that will make you think and imagine a blog (this usually comes from peer pressure, a friend or respected personality, competitive examples).

Think carefully on what made you use the first computer, the first real professional tool, the first time you ordered a book or a gift on the Internet. These seem small but changes in people specially when it comes to something that will change beliefs and understanding comes small steps. So I do not ask any more "how are people going to be upgraded to Web2.0" and I usually don't answer it... now I will just send them to this article... uuuffff... one step forward... :-)

Simplified Traditional Technical Marketing

Apple's iPod used dancing silhouettes which is a big campaign. This is a product that needs marketing as much as anything...

Learning a bit of traditional marketing is useful for technologists. From the side it's not always clear what marketing is all about. The traditional definition is: "definition and management of the Price, Place, and Promotion of a product". In the technical world this also means defining the product (essentially telling engineering what the "package" will contain). It also means defining the three P's by understanding the market and the competition. This is true with more traditional consumer products but in the technology world it turns out a little different and crucial to understand.

This sounds simple enough but as a famous advertising executive once said: "learning marketing takes a year, practicing marketing takes a lifetime". This is because our work is highly competitive and the market conditions shift daily. The most important function of practicing technology marketing is bridging between the internal world of the technologist and the external world of the consumer (or market). This is more of a role and an attitude than just skills and experience. Marketers need to play the "devil's advocate" in front of the technologist when making a case for a more user friendly design. In front of a customer the marketer plays the "technologist". This puts the technical marketer in the middle ground and he/she needs to know both worlds well enough to influence them both. A big part of the work is translating from the "use model" to the "technical model".

Technical marketing can be views as the "story" about the product. To tell a story about how a product works means building a model of some sort. It also means knowing who will hear the story (customers) and what other stories the audience hears (competition). I use the "story" analogy just to illustrate the more abstract ideas quickly. The story is actually called a few different names as the marketing "process" moves from before a product is designed all the way to end-of-life.

The first part of a product's marketing "story" is planning and definition. Here a marketer defines the product in enough detail for engineering to design and manufacture a product. Basic product definition starts out with the description from a user perspective than engineering adds their core technology functions. These are algorithms, data structures, physical components (such are hardware, circuits, etc.) At this point of a product definition there is still no customer or competing product information. Once the basic product definition is done and engineering buys into the product the marketing team starts a customer and competitive work. The definition bridges the core technical specification with the main uses of the product. One of the best ways to define a product is by using "mock ups" or "demos" in front of perspective customers. Software products start out as screen shots and demo screens. It is very hard to demonstrate a software product's functionality, but sometimes it may be useful to do some engineering and get a "dummy mock up" which actually shows some function. Hardware products like ICs (integrated circuits) are tested in front of customers mostly through preliminary specifications. A customer that sees a specification of the "next big thing" usually will give the marketer good information about how he/she would use the product in his own design. This also includes the drawbacks and missing functions which will make the product usable as it comes out the first time.

Blackberry personal communicator is marketed mostly through "channels", these are the carriers which provide the phone service.


Once the product is well designed and tested in front of customers the engineers can get to work. At this point the marketer needs to start preparing the "channels" and the "market" for the product's introduction. Channels are a sales term for the distributors, representatives, and direct sales force. I will talk more about the sales process in another article, but need to talk about marketing's role here. This is a combination of the "promotion" and "price" aspect of the work. Most technology products are not promoted with advertising and public display the way consumer products are marketed. They use channels of distribution to promote products. New products usually need extensive support and training to get users started. This is the role of the channel. Sometimes technology marketers will have technical people who are called "application engineers". These technical marketers develop demos and training material to help early adopters start out with the new product.

The final part of this article is an introduction to a product launch. This is about one third (1/3) of the way in the marketing process (of a technology product). In the "marketing mix: price, place, and promotion" an introduction of the product to the market all the pieces have to be ready. The price is usually set by a competing product's price, the ability of the market to sustain a price over time, and the need to recoup the engineering cost of development.
The place is the "channels" and means of getting the product out to the end customer. In traditional consumer marketing a place sometimes is the most crucial part of the marketing mix. In technology companies that usually means who the first and than the end target is. For example, Intuit the producer of Quicken (a personal accounting package) marketed their product heavily to stock brokers in the early stage of their promotion. The idea was to hook them and use them as a "reference" to get to the end consumer. Stock brokers were a relatively small market, but highly influential with their customers. Once the stock brokers started keeping their client's accounting on Quicken they could influence their customers to use the application as well.
Finally the promotion is how a new product will be introduced to the consumer. When you buy a new computer from HP or Dell you will get a bunch of "free trial" programs like virus protection, Quicken (personal accounting), and maybe a trial to Microsoft Office or a graphic processing program for your photos (Photoshop by Adobe). This is one form of promotion which is relatively low cost. The only cost to the marketer is the management of a relationship with Dell and HP. Microsoft does this with their higher end Office suites. When you buy a low end package they let you try more applications (like Access database and Visio charting).

This article used the traditional "marketing mix" model. For the most part, technology companies use this model initially to get started. Once I explore the other functions of the marketing "process" (I will also refer to this at the "marketing flow" ), we will go into more into specific areas of technical marketing which are unique to the field. But it's always good to know the very basic traditional techniques.

Think bigger: learning from Amazon to market with Web2.0

Fring is a new service which gathers all your phone contacts and adds VoIP to your cell (with WiFi)

With all the talk about Web2.0 technology not many product developers have developed the "marketing side". It seems that in the new era of technology innovation, marketers are lagging behind (this is not new). By this I mean that the work on popularizing and dissemination Web2.0 technologies is far behind 'what the technology can do'. There are almost no examples, case studies, tutorials, possible use ideas... all the "stuff" that accelerates the use of new technology products in the world of Web2.0. This situation is actually a huge opportunity for us marketers. Not just in marketing, but in marketer's ability to move business forward (connecting products, vertical uses, corporate "behind the fire wall" use, etc.). This is what I see when speaking with technologists every week. They are extremely focused on the "bits and bytes" / "features and benefits" the stuff they read about in old marketing books. There are so many things to develop using new technologies that technicians must focus hard. But in the focus on 'how to do it' they miss 'what to do with it'! This is not a new phenomena, this happens every time we get a technology shift which changes all the rules. Lots of people see the big picture, this is what Tim O'Reilly called Web2.0.

As marketer I first zoom in to look at the technology. Than I try to develop very specific product ideas and figure out what to do next. The first step is "who is wants this? How are they going to use this?" O'Reilly's Web2.0 covers too many specific technologies to use as examples. Let's look just at the popularizing of user contribution. The most common technology which is changing the way we work is called by the developers "user content". This is contributed articles, comments, links, video and audio clips, and now even chat and phone conversations (see the
Fring service and Google phone service). Blogging started this whole trend when 'Blogger' became a hot application. At about the same time, Amazon has started to develop reader's reviews in a big way. The page for a book became more than a catalog, now readers have newspaper and magazine reviews, comments from readers, comments from people in the area of interest. Eventually Amazon even created a forum for discussion about books which did not exist in a popular form on the Internet. Today this does not seem like such an innovation, this phenomena of innovation which quickly become part of the daily convention. If you look carefully at your expertise and the markets you know, you could probably see similar opportunities of turning old services into Internet services.


A translation of The Koran on Amazon, an example of user contributed content.

In explaining the ability of use of user comments take a look at Amazon. One of the best ways to see how technology is used is by picking a simple example. Search for 'the Koran' on Amazon. While this might be a slightly charged topic it is a simple example of what information one will find on Amazon. Go half way down to the 'Most Helpful Customer Reviews' section. Today (October 12, 2008) the following was displayed: "144 of 153 people found the following review helpful: // An Important Read, July 14, 2003 // By Benjamin (USA) - See all my reviews..." with a 6 paragraph review. Than there was another review "97 of 121 people found the following review helpful: // Not Bad, but there are Better, October 4, 2001" with suggestion to go to another translation. Finally there was a third customer review. Notice that Amazon did not participate and seemingly did not even pick the reviews. They seem to come via popularity "voting" by readers. Here is excellent information which would take a great deal of editorial writing to gather and would not be as wide audience. Also notice that Amazon let's anyone "vote" on the review which makes it easier to put the most popular review right at the first page. If you want to see all 77 reviews there is a link at the end of the three on the main page. Here you will find lots of people who write in detail about the differences in translation and even sources where you can get more information. Also, lots of opinions. This is even better than a newspaper's op-ed section. It gives a potential reader the ability to see what readers think about the book. I would suggest the you dig further into how Amazon organizes reviews and ratings of reviews and think about ways to make your own information useful to your audience. While selling books is not what most technology marketers do, we need to be just as good in our own information organization and presentation. We don't have any more excuses when a site like Amazon is so good at it.

Not to beat a dead horse, take a look at a different book all together: Ernest Hemingway's 'To Whom The Bell's Toll'. Here there is an additional section with 'Editorial Reviews'. This is pure marketing and even in this classic book comes directly from sources who are simply interested in selling you the book. But, this is also a bridge to the pre-Internet (certainly pre-Web2.0) days where newspaper and magazine reviews were the source of information about a book. Amazon at least takes the position of showing just a small part of the editorial review on the main page. If you go to the page dedicated for the editorial review there is much more information and even the first chapter of the book. I don't think that Amazon needs to work that hard selling Hemingway to Americans, but still this is an excellent resource for readers. Finally at the bottom are the three "Most Helpful Customer Reviews" which one is from an author with some background on how this story affected him during the Vietnam era. The other reviews are also good and I presume that American high school students could use these reviews to develop their own ideas on how to describe the book and the ideas in the story. In this book you will find 263 reviews. Imagine as a technology marketer if you can get 263 opinions or reviews for anything you market. OK, this is Hemingway's most monumental piece of work, but I would still put this as an example of what we can strive for in our own work. No piece of software needs 263 reviews but a dozen would be great. No chip needs even a dozen but five would be excellent.

Well, I hope Amazon can help you and many others understand that simple function of user contribution. In the case of books its reviews. There are other excellent examples like Red Hat's knowledge base. But that will have to wait for a future article.

Do it now - or kiss it good bye... learning from crashes

Osborne 1 "luggable" PC - crashed before takeoff to the IBM (DOS) wave [circa 1981]


I was reminded of a few personal crashes in life from the recent Wall Street crash (the one started by the Lehman Brothers closure). This phenomena of a sudden surprise from "nowhere" is not something unique to the tech business. But for us it is something that happens more often. The financial crash in US banks seem to happen every decade or so. Someone thinks of some scheme to sell you something. Someone tries it out and it works. Everyone else copies the first guy, and the party begins. A few months or years later, some wise guy suddenly notices that this is a scheme. Then some event causes a crash and it all ends in tears.

My first crash in the tech world was the Atari EPROM game event. I was at GI Micro in NY and you would not believe how quickly the place emptied out. But I was young and thought that this was "just this place". That gives away my age. I also remember the PC hardware crash. That was not fun to watch. There was a mini crash with printers, the dot impact kind which ended up with Epson taking the market and dominating it for a few years. When the laser printers came out you should have seen the dot impact printer crash. These technology waves are going to be with us and are pretty much the modus operandi. Just like a stock price will plummet when investors fear is stirred into a frenzy, technologists need to figure out what to do before and after the crash. It does not matter if the crash is due to financial, technology, market, or a combination of other factors. Once we crash the landscape changes radically and the nimble to change will survive.

These general observations of drastic change or a real crash are nice to talk about, but what is more useful is specific examples to what we could do about it. Crashes come to technology as financial changes, as see today with Lehman Brothers, Merill Lynch, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Lehman Brothers was one of the largest technology deal underwriting and negotiation firms on wall street. They have been doing it for a long time. Lehman was also a big Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) firm, which is one of the most used form of selling start-up companies. We will have to get used to smaller, newer firms, and maybe a smaller end market for new company stock. This will also affect spin-offs and acquisitions. But that is not the end of the world. Technologists are not going to stop inventing and creating new products.

Lehman Brothers' web site description of their technology financing expertise

In the mean time, the financial markets which "feeds" the technology sector will have to recover. Just like the Dot-Com bubble, it will take a little time for investors to gather back their trust in speculative technology investments. This will not take long, there is another Google and Facebook lurking somewhere, maybe not even in the US, but the money and know-how are still in New York's Wall Street and California's Silicon Valley. We technologists need first of all to take a good look of what it would take to ride out a period of financial drought. That does not mean stop developing, actually the opposite. Just figure out how to do things with less outside money. Maybe smaller steps which enable technologists to bring in revenue while they develop. Maybe more deals with larger partners, even outside the technology sector. Maybe even other ways to work. Remember, the Osbornes, Compaqs, and Apples of the early 1980's didn't have the big financial infrastructure that existed in the 1990's. Maybe that is a better way to start. Maybe without the eager speculators with "easy money" we will do things better and smarter. What do you think?

The business of technology: marketing, sales, support, promotion

Yahoo, a one time technology giant, is going through changes...

The business of technology is not discussed enough in terms of a "profession". Actually discussing business people in technology is not the problem, it's the work itself as a technology business professional that seem to be the culprit here. The technical aspect of technology has simply outpaced and ran over the business issues. There is not enough respect and balance to the none purely technical aspects. Because technology companies do not emphasize the areas which are not purely technical. When the business starts failing or simply starts slipping the technologists put in more effort and push the business people aside. This occurs even more in the planning and early stages of a product's market life. My observation over the years is that technology-business needs more professionalism. This means more training, more visibility, more tools, more standard processes, and more management. We simply do not know how to do things well enough and we are not able to convince anyone to give us the resources to develop our profession. So we need to do it ourselves "in our spare time".

You may want to disagree with me and say that there is plenty of "stuff" out there. There is plenty of material on finances (profits, investment), strategies (product position), and use of general business practices in the technology sector. But for all that technology business has done to our world there is very little specific work in writing, analysis, theories, practices, etc. JUST FOR TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS! Some of this can be attributed to the newness of the technology sector. But that could be said in other areas as well, such as international trade, travel, and leisure. The financial world has expanded for the most part due to the technological advanced in communication, data management, promotion, yet you can find many times more publications in that area than in the technology business world. I don't know why technologists do not want to invest in better business, but it seems to me that we simply need to sit down and roll up our sleeves. We know some things that are missing but we need to deeply study what has been done (both right and wrong), analyze what is going on today, and plan for the future. This is true on the micro scale with companies and trade organizations which represent a single product or a core technology. But more so in the macro scale in the way technology is influencing and shaping our social behavior, the economic state of our countries and regions, and finally the human experience both of the technology workers and the general population which uses technology.

I want to clarify a few things about my observation and the point I am making. There are many business fields which affect technology (specially in management). There are many books and theories about business and trends which are related to the technology world. The attention to change and the speed of diffusion of new ideas has interested business researchers and analysts for a long time. The same is true in project management and a new area of management of time and resources in small projects which is different from product management. There are many areas in finance which deal with resources and how to manage investments. But very few have researchers and practitioners have researched the actual work of technologists as "investors". Technologists control investments in product development, basic and applied technology research, marketing and promotion, and many other areas related to the product or service they product.

Let's get right to the issue. If we need to get business practices and tools developed for technology it will take resources and most of all time. Once we figure out what needs to be done and what can be done someone will have to put in some free time to get started. I am going to look at areas related to technology and see what we can buy, borrow, and steal. I also have interest in taking some technology management tools and practices and molding them to the business side. What has been done recently in project management is interesting. There is also a great deal of material in product management from recent work. Some material from what I have seen can be used as-is, maybe a few changes in terminology. But most material and tools I have seen needs to include more specific technology material.

Well, I hope this makes sense to some of you. Also, I hope some of you who are not as familiar with the great business starvation in the tech sector will come and read about it in the future.

Develop a good presentation with blog and Web2.0 (digg, reddit)

Digg results for "DSP"

A good presenter needs a good presentation. There is no way of getting aroud the subject. If you don't have an exciting presentation you are going to give a boring one.

Yesterday I saw a bland presentation. We all know that a great presenter can spice-up any topic. But in the technical world this is not enough. I noticed the the most important aspect is how the presentation fits the topic. This means, if you set the topic as an "application examples" people are going to be expecting and interested in that topic, doing anything else will throw off the audience. This means give a presentation that has good content, has a good flow, gives new information (remember this is tech!) AND is exciting.

One of the best way to do this is by searching on blogs, wikis, and web sites. Than take a look at Digg.com, Stumbleupon.com, reddit, Technorati.com and other "social bookmarking and sharing" sites. Here you will find top stories and sites which have at least gotten votes. If you are doing something complicated remember that it's VERY HARD to keep people's attention without doing something that involves them. In the talk I went to see software demos which worked but did not show anything beyond symbol boxes, dialog boxes, and menus put people to sleep. The truth is, most engineers are not excited about watching someone plopping boxes on a blank page, no matter how good the program works.

Thinking about this issue on the way back I would suggest to any presenter to do the following:

• Highlight clearly what is new and exciting about your presentation.
• In marketing and sales they use to talk about "features and benefits". This is not enough in today's world. Show someting that is interesting to the audience. If you show a design, show how it is done, assume a wide range of knoledge and ask what people know and what they want to see.
• Do not go into a "script" that is longer than 5 minutes. If you are going to show a "how to" imagine that you are on a TV cooking show. When the chef is done kneeding the doug he "magically" pulls out a fully finished cake. They don't do it on TV just because it's TV, they have lost lots of audiences on shows and they know how to make thigs "move along".
• Pick one, ONLY ONE, main message. Don't try to show 5 things. Even if you have all day, leave one impression. Even if what you want to say is not super exciting. Three "messages" are too confusing to people who are not familiar with the topic.
• Put in something "sexy" that is not 100% related to the technical topic. Show a new product (iPhone, digital camera, etc.)
• Finally, be flexible, if you hear snoring from the back of the room, move to the next section.

Once you got a presentation, if you are going to make it to an audience of 50 people, test it! Make it better and TEST IT AGAIN! if you don't have time, go over it yourself and let someone else go over it. You will never think that your material is boring or trivial. Nobody does. So you need to figure out how solicit crituque on your material. Remember, this is not your presentation ability, it is the MATERIAL! Anyone can sit in front of your slides and talk to you on the phone. Good luck and make your presentaitons count.

A super inpirational [TECHY] talk - Randy Pausch on life

An opportunity like this only comes once in a few years, maybe even once in a few decades. An example of a really inspirational talk by a G E E K ! NOT A MARKETER! not a salesman! A real technologists and in addition a college professor. If you are a technologists or an engineer turned marketer here is a great example of how to talk and get not just interest but respect and admiration.

See on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Summary: Randy Pausch was a VR (virtual reality) professor at Carnegie Mellon. This puts him in the Uber-Geek category in my book. In 2007 he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and as the tradition in academia goes he was asked to give "the last lecture". This is a tradition of retiring professors imparting their last bit of wisdom to their students. But this is the last bit of tradition and sentimentality in this story.

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Randy Pausch although an accomplished technologist talked more about his life than what he has done in life technically. The sub-title to his talk is "Achieving your childhood dreams". He does mention quite a bit of history about his career mostly in personal terms. If you are a technologists and you give talks this is one of the best examples of how to "sneak in" personal and emotional material to technical subjects. I will not mention more about the talk, see it for yourself.
Next time I will look at some of the techniques and observations about the lecture and some of the other talks from people mentioned so far. Please e-Mail me if you have a favorite speaker or a lecture about technology or marketing of technology. Thanks...