http://www.jctm.ca Marketing projects and thoughts about effective marketing Tue, 03 Aug 2010 22:01:55 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Taking time off from blogging in June, July and August. Back in September! http://www.jctm.ca/taking-the-summer-off/ A new client has asked me about the effectiveness of social media as a marketing tool. Should they blog, or tweet, or Facebook? What delivers the best bang for the bucks? First of all, a pet peeve. It’s still about reaching your target audience. It really bothers me to read articles ... http://www.jctm.ca/socialmedia/ A client recently experienced the value of brand marketing – the kind that makes a small business appear larger or more influential than its size would normally warrant. When we first took his company to market several years ago, he had just bought the business. For long-term planning purposes, I asked him about his ... http://www.jctm.ca/brandvalue/ This is a very brief post, what a crazy busy month. But I have to write about this. One of the highlights of the month for me was writing a feature story for the Microsoft Research website about the amazing work their Natural Language Processing (NLP) group did for the aid ... http://www.jctm.ca/hc_translation/ It’s always a pleasure to work with bright, motivated young marketing professionals. The only thing they are missing is experience, and sometimes this leads to poor planning and missed deadlines when they discover yet another situation where the classroom fails to reflect real life. Given recent discussions with some colleagues ... http://www.jctm.ca/studyofacasestudy/ It’s U.S. Thanksgiving and the holiday season is coming up. So speaking of Thanksgiving I wanted to take a break from project-talk. It’s been a bad year for everyone, but when we say “bad”, many of us mean no European vacation, fewer dinners out, and no more impulse purchases. For those ... http://www.jctm.ca/bad-year/ For many companies, fall is a time to start looking ahead as their fiscal year comes to a close and planning begins for the next year.  I’m sure everyone is glad to leave behind 2009 but despite encouraging signs from some sectors of the economy, most companies are still very ... http://www.jctm.ca/smarterbudget/ Today I’m thinking about workshops, and what they can tell you about the success or failure of a project.  A former colleague approached me recently about running some technology deployment workshops for his current employer. The goal of these workshops is similar to those we had collaborated on before: to ... http://www.jctm.ca/workshops/ When you win a customer in Hawaii, it's like having your promo theme handed to you on a silver platter! When I found out that Dynacore Equipment's newest customer is based in Honolulu, it seemed pretty clear how we could leverage this at the PCI Conference (PreCast Concrete Institute) in September ... http://www.jctm.ca/dynacore-hawaii/ Normally the feature stories on the Microsoft Research website don't make it off the website.  But everything in life is timing, and this story about the Gazelle browser received major coverage from blogs and industry pundits because speculation about Google chrome is rife and therefore anything coming out of Microsoft, even ... http://www.jctm.ca/quoted/