Companies are desperately trying to get your attention. I’m sure you’ve heard or read that you are bombarded with somewhere between 300 and 3000 advertising messages per day. So marketers are faced with the problem of creating a message that resonates with you so you’ll remember and hopefully purchase their product.

The thought du jour is to create communities around your brand. Ideally a brand community creates loyal customers who feel that they are part of something special. They’ll evangelize for you and interact with your brand more frequently if they feel part of a community of say… something like Mac enthusiasts.

Ford Motor Company has a banner ad running on Allmusic with the tagline:

“The American people love the truth, and they love an underdog.”

This is how potential community members are introduced to the Ford Bold Moves community. Here’s Ford trying to build an online community around their big comeback. I applaud the attempt but remain skeptical as to its effectiveness. First of all, the headline today is (rss feed from Yahoo): “Ford reportedly plans more job cuts” — job cuts don’t make me feel warm or fuzzy.

I watched the current vlog episode and was pretty disappointed. It plays more like a rough-around-the-edges commercial for the new Shelby super fast car than an actual glimpse into this troubled company. Enough commercials guys, show me what the top brass is going to do to fix the mess you’re in. Show me the fights in the boardroom. Give me drama. I think that will increase your chances of making this Bold Moves thing work.

Technorati Tags: Ford, BoldMoves, marketing, community

Last week my business partner Reg and I decided to shut down our consulting firm 3Simple.

So I’m unemployed and exploring my options. A new adventure begins.

Technorati Tags: 3Simple, consulting, entrepreneur

For all of you out there interested in entrepreneurship and venture capital there comes iinnovate, a really excellent podcast hosted by my friend Matt and someone whom I’ve never met (but am certain is an excellent person) named Julio. Their first episode features Andy Rachleff and is full of good, solid DIY content.

My favourite part is when Andy states that entrepreneurs are born, not made. Enjoy. And congrats to Matt and Julio. Oh and thanks to Andrew for the link.

Technorati Tags: iinnovate, innovate, entrepreneurship, vc, venturecapital

How is it that some people can update their blog daily with interesting bits of information? I just don’t have the time right now to write about much other than what’s going in this business.

I’m in the process of cold calling potential clients. It’s often thankless work that can be tough on the soul. If you’ve never done it before, the first five calls will be very painful and then you’ll start to develop a groove. Here’s the little I’ve learned about the process in the last two weeks:

• celebrate your little victories because otherwise you may get discouraged
• try to learn as much as you can about the person you’re calling before you talk to them (most importantly, find out what pains them)
• set reasonable goals and hold yourself to them
• get a pitch that resonates with you — something that makes you excited — that genuine enthusiasm will go further than a perfectly worded but uninspired pitch
• get it out of your head that you’re bothering people — if you can’t make their business better, then why call?
• do your research ahead of time so you can get in a rhythm of making calls

That’s all the advice I’ve got so far. I’m no expert at this — in fact — I’m not even that good at it. But, I’m taking the advice of my last post and doing what has to be done and not doing what I want to do.

Technorati Tags: coldcall, coldcalling, pitch, sales

I was chatting with Josh, the creator of Feeling Bullish, a community site for investors and arm-chair stock analysts. Check it out. Anyhoo, he went to see one of the Entrepreneurs in Residence at the University of Toronto who had this advice for those of us starting a business (paraphrasing):

Don’t do what you want to do. Do what you have to get done.

For someone who is supposed to be cold-calling all the time, that’s exactly what I needed to hear. I’m totally knackered and can’t write much more now.

Random bits: Josh pointed me to dojo — which is a comprehensive Javascript toolkit. Good tutorial here.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, feelingbullish, investment

“Zidane is probably the best player there has been in the past 20 years.” - Italy coach Marcello Lippi

This is the man responsible for whether or not we Torontonians have hours of seemingly endless honking on Sunday evening. That’s a lot of pressure for one man to bear. All those who value serenity are pulling for Zizou.

Whoever put these things together has some weird musical tastes. Watching the clips I heard crooning from Bryan Adams and Cyndi Lauper. (Cyndi Lauper? What are these Europeans thinking? )

Technorati Tags: zizou, zidane, TGIF, worldcup

If you want to learn more about marketing and meet some pretty cool people, you should come on down to Casecamp tomorrow. What is Casecamp? Here’s what their site says:

CaseCamp is a marketing unconference open to anyone. Presenters share case studies of their work, with the goal of creating a commons for discussion, learning and networking.

The latest edition is tomorrow — July 7th at Jamie Kennedy Kitchen in the Gardiner Museum (across from the ROM) in Toronto Ontario Canada. Festivities begin at 18:30.

Technorati Tags: casecamp, toronto, unconference

Good evening.

Tonight was another excellent edition of the phenomenon known as democamp. For those of you too lazy to click the link, democamp is basically a bunch of software (and occasionally hardware) geeks gathering in a room. Five people volunteer to demo their latest creations. Each volunteer gets about 15 minutes and, at the end, everyone has drinks and mingles.

domainer.com

First up was domainer.com which is a custom web server and content management app designed specifically for managing a whole lotta domains. To paraphrase the presenter, domainer treats domain names as the atomic units of web development. It’s pretty basic right now but has a solid user interface. One interesting feature is how it deals with themes. The programmers have chosen to decouple structure from look and feel which is tough to explain in words so I won’t even try. In sum, it’s a solid app that will become more intriguing as more functional components are added.

feelingbullish.com

Feelingbullish.com is a site for investors seeking honest user-generated financial information. The Internet is littered with messageboards and forums containing low-quality information from unknown sources. Feelingbullish attempts to solve this problem by providing a community where all users become stock analysts. Users then develop a reputation based on the votes of other users and an analysis of their success. I think it’s a great idea — and one that I wish I had thought of.

paruba.com

Paruba.com is pretty much the exact site that my business partner Reg talked about building last year. (Check it out Reg.) It’s a place where you can create lists of products that you like from around the Internet. (Think del.icio.us and flickr for e-commerce.) The theory is that these products say something about you. You can browse other lists or grab items off any site on the Internet. The UI is slick and the whole thing looks really easy to use.

Two interesting insights from the presenter about taking on a project that is outside of your core business: (1) if you try to do things in your spare time — things don’t happen — you have to invest in a project to make it go and (2) you won’t get things done until you feel the pain — turning down paying contracts will motivate you to complete your pet project.

the glove

An excellent presentation injecting a little hardware into the ol’ democamp. Cameron Browning demostrated a 3-D visualization tool for file structures. It was entertaining — check out the link for more details.

Damian Conway and Perl 6

The final presenter was Damian Conway. For those of you who don’t know Mr. Conway check this from his bio:

Currently he runs an international IT training company – Thoughtstream – which provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia.

Most of his time is currently spent working with Larry Wall on the design of the new Perl 6 programming language and producing explanatory documents exploring Larry’s design decisions.

Damian was great. First of all, he got around the whole no PPT rule by tweaking VIM to act as his presentation software. Very clever indeed. Next he lead us through a brief tour of Perl 6. I understood about 32% of what he was talking about at the time, but failed to write any of it down. Just put “Perl 6″ into your Google alerts or something.

For those in Toronto, I encourage you to go check out Damian tomorrow July 5th. He’s speaking at 6:30 pm at 40 St. George and the topic will be “Fun with dead languages”. Should be a hoot.

This post is long enough. But lastly I just wanted to say again that meeting people is the best part of democamp. For some reason the vibe is so relaxed that it just makes for good conversation. Thanks to the organizers.

Technorati Tags: democamp, torcamp