Web Ink Now has a great article and analysis of the gobbledegook that passes for marketing messages. They’ve done an analysis of over 50,000 articles during the first nine months of 2006. Not only have they identified many of the most ridiculous terms, they’ve ranked them (or stack-ranked them, as a former employer would say) based on frequency.
Marketing / Product Management
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Outside Reading: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager
Jeremiah Owyang, a Silicon Valley Community Manager writes about the difference between product managers and product marketing managers.
Marketing / Product Management
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Marketing: Promotion, Education, and Inspiration
More great stuff from Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users. Kathy contrasts the traditional budget-busting marketing promotion approach (one of the classic 4Ps) with a nickel-and-dime approach to inspiring and educating users and customers. We’ve talked about the importance of persuasion in the new Ps. Kathy’s stuff is right on the money for this one.
Marketing / Product Management
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One-Page Marketing Plan Template
Kelly Odell posted a single-sheet marketing plan template, after being frustrated with the massive templates that others have promoted in the past. John Sviokla recently wrote about how the 4-P’s of marketing are changing to the 5-P’s of marketing. Marcus Ting-A-Kee found John’s essay and wrote about it yesterday. Guy Kawasaki suggested that Kelly adapt his template to John’s new approach. Kelly chose to mix the best of both worlds. We add our own spin at the end.
Marketing / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Market Segmentation or Senseless Mistake?
A grass roots campaign has been started by Peter Provost to get Microsoft to include unit testing support included with all versions of Visual Studio 2005 (VS). Currently, Microsoft is only including it with Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) versions of VS. This looks to be a great example of a killer feature in a product providing so much surprise and delight that people are demanding that it be universally available. This is also a great example of market segmentation by Microsoft. The irony is that there is an open source alternative that makes the opportunity cost very low, and yet people are still clamoring. Let’s see why.
Marketing / Requirements / Software development
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We must sell the software first
We write a lot about value-driven prioritization of software requirements. It’s easy (when defining requirements) to forget that we have to sell the product before anyone gets any value from it. With internal use software for large companies (like enterprise software, intranets, erp systems), “sell it” means “get high user adoption rates.” High user rates are key to getting ROI when process-improvement is one of the targets of the software.
Marketing / Testing
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Software Testing Series: Top Three Measurements of Quality
The three most important things to understand about the quality of your software are the three things most relevant to your business and your stakeholders (and arguably, your boss).
Top three measurements of software quality
1. How do people perceive our quality?
2. How big of a problem is our quality?
3. How bad is our software, really?
Marketing / Process Improvement / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Software requirements specification
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From MRD to PRD: The key to defining a spec
They key to writing a great spec is knowing how to specify software that mets our customers’ needs. It can be a daunting task. First, we have to define what our customer needs. High level requirements are just requirements that are too vague or high-level to be directly actionable. “We […]
Austin TX / Marketing
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Announcing Alkali Marketing – A little marketing for a big reaction
Lauren Arbittier Davis recently started Alkali Marketing, a boutique marketing outsourcing company here in Austin. I’ve personally worked with Lauren over much of the past decade, and couldn’t be more excited about her company! When Tyner Blain is ready to build awareness (beyond our current viral approach), Alkali is who […]