As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are the Financial Post, The Globe and Mail, ReadWriteStart, Business2Community, Social Media B2B, and CopyBlogger.

‘Secret sauce’ behind Waterloo’s success

How do you build a more entrepreneurial culture in a semi-colonial, don’t-rock-the-boat country such as Canada? That’s the question being tackled by the founders of Startup Canada, an Ottawa-based volunteer movement launched three weeks ago. They’re undertaking a cross-country tour to sound out business owners on how best to unleash Canadians’ entrepreneurial potential. Author Rick Spence brings us up to speed on the movement’s recent achievements.

Starting up? Avoid these three common mistakes

Author Abbie Steinbacher shares her experiences as an entrepreneur, and says that as different as each startup may be, the path to success always involves making smart decisions. For those of you toying with the idea of becoming an entrepreneur, she shares three common mistakes to avoid.

The next billion-dollar startup will address a basic human need

If you’re creating a startup and you want it to go big, the first test to apply is: Does it address a fundamental human need? As yourself, would you buy and use your own product in your every-day life? That’s the filter. Steve Blank shares tips for building the next billion-dollar startup.

12 reasons why blogging is the #1 B2B marketing tactic

B2B companies that blog are able to increase awareness, credibility, search engine rankings and leads — all while linking marketing efforts back to business goals. Author Douglas Burdett shares some great statistics supporting the argument that B2B companies should blog.

4 ways to use storytelling for B2B social media

B2B companies that embrace social media to connect with prospects and customers need to understand storytelling as a means for communication. No one wants to hear about your products. They want to hear about solutions to their problems. One way to get there is by sharing compelling stories. Author Jeffery Cohen offers suggestions for B2B marketers still struggling with this change in marketing focus to a customer-centric model.

3 components of a content marketing editorial calendar that work

Content marketing editorial calendars are critical for any content marketing program to be successful, but most businesses don’t use them. Content marketing is not a short-term campaign; it’s a long-term strategy to attract, convert, and retain customers.You can’t have a long-term strategy without some tools to manage it all. And one of the most effective tools you can use is the editorial calendar. Author Joe Pulizzi breaks down the components of the best editorial calendar and explains why they work.

Technorati Tags: Financial Post, The Globe and Mail, ReadWriteStart, Business2Community, Social Media B2B, CopyBlogger, Startup Canada, Rick Spence, startup, entrepreneur, startup mistakes, Steve Blank, blogging, B2B marketing, B2B social media, storytelling, Jeffery Cohen, content marketing, editorial calendar, Joe Pulizzi

My day yesterday? Twelve straight hours of startups, speakers, schmoozing and social media as I took in both FounderFuel’s second demo day and The C100′s AccelerateMTL. With what I am sure was more than a wee bit of coordination, one event followed the other in the beautiful and historic Monument-National theatre building at the very heart of this bustling city. The juxtaposition of a 120-year-old building with the youth and energy of the startup entrepreneurs was not the least bit jarring, although the canned pre-event PA announcement asking us all to turn off our pagers and cell phones was clearly meant far more for a theatre-going audience than for this crowd bent on tweeting every great line to the outside world.

And there were lots of great lines.

The day kicked off with the spring cohort from FounderFuel, an accelerator program that takes in about 10 young companies twice a year (There were 11 in this cohort.) and puts them through an intense three-month program of mentorship, tough love, presentations and long days of work all intended to make them investor-ready on demo day. That day dawned yesterday.

I have been a mentor at FounderFuel for both cohorts so far and was a bit more actively involved in this one. I saw all the companies in their far more raw state on mentor day in March, and spent a full day with them a couple of weeks later, talking about marketing strategy and counselling them on messaging and positioning. I continued to work with a couple of the companies as they honed their pitches heading into yesterday’s big event.

With only one clear exception, every company had changed its core messaging by yesterday. Some had changed their entire offering. In every instance, it was a change very much for the better, with most now much better at articulating how their application creates real value for identified customers or users rather than simply explaining what their app did and how cool that was.

Many of the FounderFuel companies will exit the program with a fresh injection of cash courtesy of a $150,000 convertible note from Business Development of Canada, and all were, of course, pitching the audience of investors for seed rounds of between $400,000 and $650,000.

The 11 companies are:

• Appifier: Converts WordPress blogs into iPhone and iPad apps in less than a minute.
• HealthAware: A booking engine that helps consumers find health professionals while delivering up new patient referrals to doctors, dentists and others.
• ooomf: A marketing platform for app developers.
• ShopAround: Lets shoppers browse the mall before leaving home.
• Centerside: Creates personal web pages that adapt their content depending on who’s viewing it.
• Live Rides: A community marketplace where drivers and passengers can find each other to share the cost of drives.
• PayPhoneApp: A mobile wallet that gives merchants the data they need to engage better with their customers.
• TenScores: An automated platform to let even small adwords users optimize their programs.
• Epilogger: Aggregates social media feeds about events, creating powerful marketing and analytics offerings for event organizers.
• NoteSolution: Crowd-sourced note-sharing for university students.
• Prestopolis: Lets small and local retailers publish online catalogues to social media sites.

The afternoon session was the second Accelerate program brought to Montreal by The C100, a group that connects Canadian startups and entrepreneurs with Canadian ex-patriots working in technology companies in Silicon Valley. With a couple of keynotes, a panel of CEOs and a Q&A session, the program was thick with personal stories and great counsel.

My highlights:

• Taleo founder Martin Ouellet shared hilarious anecdotes about starting his company in his living room “because I was not even rich enough to own a garage,” funding its earliest days with money that should have been paid in income taxes to Revenue Canada, and having to haul six friends in at short notice to fill office chairs because his first big potential customer, which had been told the company had eight employees, was coming by for a due-diligence visit.
• Potentially topping Ouellet was Beyond the Rack co-founder Yona Shtern. Since no brands would let the startup company list their wares, the founders used to (with permission) plunder friends’ clothing stores overnight, photograph the merchandise, and get it back on the store racks by opening time. Then, every time they sold a piece online, they’d have to go to the store, buy that item off the rack and ship it. All went well until a piece they had just sold was being tried on by a customer when Shtern’s co-founder went to the store to buy it. Putting his company’s interests against his own wellbeing, the guy told the customer that the clothing item made her look a bit fat. She didn’t buy the dress so Beyond the Rack could fulfill for what was only their fourth or fifth customer.
• I missed a fair bit of Zuora founder Shawn Price‘s keynote but did catch his emphasis on working only in companies with the potential to massively disrupt markets. Doing so is a bit of a high-wire act, he acknowledged, telling us, “Innovation = experimentation. Experimentation implies failure.”
• Copious founder and former Facebook marketer Jonathan Ehrlich challenged us to question conventional wisdom. “You don’t need to be first. You don’t need experience. You don’t need to be in the Valley.” He also counselled entrepreneurs that no matter what they do, they’re going to be wrong. And so will their investors, advisors, mentors, bankers and board members. Be ready to be wrong, he said, and have a clear sense of your own vision. “If you don’t have a sense of what you want and where you’re going, everyone’s advice sounds good.” Finally, he said, every business has one dominant metric that means success. Find your “magic number,” he said, and then focus everything on achieving it.

I caught up for a few minutes towards the end of the day with Phil Telio, founder of the International Startup Festival which will have its second outing in a cruise ship terminal on Montreal’s historic Old Port from July 11 to 13. Phil reminded me there is a fantastic lineup of speakers, whose presentations will be divided between “inspirational” and “executional.” The festival has also bought out the entire house for one evening at Montreal’s world famous Just for Laughs festival so there will be mirth along with the business. (I’m going to hold you to that plus-one for my spouse, Phil! See you in July.)

All in all, a great day in Montreal, where there’s a lot more going on than student protests.

Technorati Tags: Montreal startups, FounderFuel, C100, AccelerateMTL, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, startup, Appifier, HealthAware, ooomf, ShopAround, CenterSide, Live Rides, PayPhoneApp, Ten Scores, Epilogger, NoteSolution, Prestopolis, Taleo, Martin Ouelette, Beyond the Rack, Yona Shtern, Zuora, Shawn Price, Innovation, Jonathan Ehrlich, technology marketing, marketing, commercialization, angel investor, VC, accelerator, incubator

Update, May 24:

As you can see from the comments at the end of this post, people have suggested that the comments in this post attributed to Gary Vaynerchuk are not representative. In a Twitter conversation I had with Gary, he told me that the blog post on which I relied for this post misrepresented his presentation and certainly misrepresents his social media philosophy. I’ve invited Gary to weigh in here, and we certainly hope does. Please read this post in this context.

I read a blog post today that annoyed me, the content for which came from a presentation Gary Vaynerchuk gave to more than 600 small businesses and local chamber and association leaders at America’s Small Business Summit on Monday in Washington D.C. His said that small business owners must get on social media right away or else risk getting run over by the “wave” of innovation. It wasn’t his call to small business owners to get started on social media that raised my red flag. It was his sense of urgency, that small business owners should get on social media immediately without asking the right questions and laying out a sound strategy first. This is the ill-advised leap-before-you-look mentality that saps budgets and kills new marketing initiatives before they have had the chance to properly develop.

His advice?

• Don’t worry about what you’re going to say; just get started and build from there.
• Don’t focus on trying to win new customers, but instead on treating your existing customers well so you can keep them and inspire them to endorse your business.
• Don’t obsess about ROI. There’s a certain amount of serendipity in word-of-mouth marketing, and the numbers don’t always tell the full story.

I thought we had finally moved past this trial-and-error approach to social media, that all the content written on the importance of having a strategy and proving ROI had finally ushered in at least somewhat of a standard for social media operations among marketers.

Clearly, I was mistaken.

Flip this backwards advice 180 degrees and you’ll be heading in the right direction towards a successful social media marketing program. Care deeply about what you are going to say on social media and have a plan, focus your energies on winning new customers, and obsess over return on investment. Without a sound plan and proof that your activities are working and generating revenue, you could be throwing your money into a wasted effort with potentially damaging consequences to your brand.

To be fair, I understand that social media is still a relatively new area for marketers and while we have established best practices for our activities, many could still use improvement, especially in the ROI department. But I think we know enough by now by way of measurement to determine if a plan (if there is one that outlines clear goals) is on course for success. Small businesses don’t have large marketing budgets to waste and marketing, especially social media marketing which requires a long-term strategy, ain’t cheap. Every dollar must count. It is destructive to tell them that they shouldn’t worry about a content marketing strategy. It is unreasonable to tell them not to obsess over ROI. This is their livelihood we are talking about here. Social media is an investment. If they don’t hold their marketers accountable and see return for their dollars, which comes from attracting leads through their channels and converting them into new customers, they are going to be the ones who will have to suffer the consequences.

I want to think that Vaynerchuk, who is a high-profile social media marketer, was advising small business owners to relax and have fun with social media. If that is the case, I couldn’t agree more – social media is fun and marketing too heavily will push people away. But there is such a thing as too relaxed, especially when we are dealing with small budgets. Retaining existing customers and turning them into brand champions is also great advice, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of losing the focus of attracting new customers. It should also be noted that Vaynerchuk did have a fourth point, which was completely inarguable: Don’t ignore what people are saying on Twitter. It’s a great source of information about what consumers like, think and do.

As a brief disclaimer, I didn’t attend the summit and pulled this content from SmartBlog on Social Media, so if there are any clarifications, please do share them in the comment section below. I look forward to starting a discussion.

Technorati Tags: small business, social media marketing, small business advice, Gary Vaynerchuk, America’s Small Business Summit, social media, social media innovation, social media ROI, content marketing, SmartBlog on Social Media

This is the conclusion of a two-part series. Part one introduced patent searching and how inventors can use the “prior art wall” to their advantage.

Whether or not a prefiling patent novelty search establishes that the road is clear for you to attempt to obtain patent rights, there is tremendous value to be obtained by just carrying out the search. In my last post, I explored this premise and started down the path to demonstrate how you can conduct a search of documents that are online at the U.S. Patent Office.

To recap, I shared tips for searching with key words using this page on the U.S. PTO website. As an example, the search was focused on an improved garden rake. Documents relating to rakes were located by initially entering the words “rake” and “handle.” I also suggested that searching can be conducted using the classification system available in the U.S. PTO website, which is what I will explain here today.

Classification searching

There is an index page on the U.S. PTO website that gives access to classification manuals. The documentation surrounding classification is extensive. There are around 1,000 principal classes and within each principal class there are many hundreds of subclasses and sub-sub classes. It is difficult to learn about classification through entering the classification system directly.

Conveniently, every issued patent has a reference to its principal class included on the cover of the printed patent, or on the HTML page for the patent at the U.S. PTO website. In part one, we used keyword searching to locate a relevant patent — U.S. patent 7,987,658, called “Multi-purpose garden tool with pivotable gardening head.” Clicking on this reference takes us to an abstract that describes a garden rake.  There is also a link to images at the top of the screen. (Viewing these images requires a TIF reader, which can be downloaded by clicking the red “Help” link in the yellow bar above the black space where the pictures should be on the “Images” page).

This patent can be used as a root to switch to “classification searching” by clicking back to the patent’s abstract. All U.S. patents are classified according to the focal point or novel feature of the invention. Searching down the screen of our gardening rake patent, we find that it has been classified primarily in U.S. Class 56/400.19. (And it has been cross-classified in U.S. Classes 15/144.1; 16/900; 294/53.5; 56/400.04; all of these other classes would be relevant for an expanded search.)

After a deeper search on the U.S. PTO website, we learn that U.S. Class 56 relates to “HARVESTERS.” Additionally, subclass 400.01 under Class 56 relates to “hand rakes” and subclass 400.19 is a sub-subclass under subclass 400.01 for inventions wherein the novel feature is “adjustable, folding or take-down.”

In this exercise, we need only note the principal class, 56. Using the browser’s “back” button to return to the “Refine Search” box on the search page, we can amend the search string to read as follows:

rake and handle and (claw or hook) and ccl/56/$

(Open and use the “Advanced” red link at the top of the screen if “Refine Search” is not available through a back button from the screen for US patent 7,987,658.)

The search result is as follows:

Results of Search in U.S. Patent Collection db for:
(((rake and handle) and (claw or hook)) and CCL/56/$): 56 patents.

This is a result that is a manageable size.

By the way, the search term “ccl/56/$” stands for “current class/56/any subclass,” where the symbol “$” serves as a wildcard for any of the subclasses under Class 56 — harvesters. When using class as a search term both a class and subclass must be specified. A search using the term “CCL/56/400$” returns 39 hits, with all of the hits qualifying as relating to “hand rakes” under subclasses 400.01 through 400.21.

It’s now time to decide what the invention is that we are searching for. For the purposes of this exercise it could be anything that involves a rake with a handle and a claw or a hook. Perhaps the invention is a rake with a handle that includes both a claw and a hook pointing out at e.g., 45° from the backside of the rake. But that doesn’t matter.

The purpose of this exercise is to show the rich opportunities to learn that can arise by looking at the now truncated list of 56 or 39 patent references related to the search terms that have been employed. This is a very quick way to understand the business of gardening tools. Every one of these patent references has a generous number of drawings and an elaborate description as to which features are important. What a way to get smart fast in the field of your invention!

And here is a bonus. Return to the Refine Search box, which reads, “rake and handle and (claw or hook) and ccl/56/$,” and copy this string. Then go to the top of the search screen and click “Home.” This is not Home for the U.S. PTO website, but Home for the searching tools. On the right side of the Home screen, divided into three parts, is a column referring to “Applications.” This refers to pending applications rather than issued patents. So far, only issued patents have been searched. Under Applications, click “Advanced Search” and paste the above string in the box that is presented under the word “Query” and click “Search.”

The result is a list of applications filed at the U.S. PTO since 2001 that contain the terms of the search string, vis:

Results of Search in AppFT Database for:
rake and handle and (claw or hook) and ccl/56/$: 25 applications.

Every one of these applications is well worth looking at if you are curious to see what other people are doing.

The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate that patent searching is not just about patenting. It is also about making better inventions! If you want to be a great inventor, don’t leave reviewing the prior art to some professional. Do it yourself and become wiser for it. Any questions?

Technorati Tags: David French, intellectual property, IP, patent law, patenting, patent searching, patent, patent novelty, US Patent Office, patent classification searching, product management, product development, invention, inventing, startup

Joi Podgorny, who presented at Social Media Breakfast Ottawa yesterday, is an expert in dealing with children and other sensitive information online. In fact, she has nearly 5 million kids to watch over as the director of community engagement for National Geographic’s online kids game Animal Jam. As a marketer, community manager and creator of branded entertainment for children, Podgorny is under enormous pressure to ensure her product is as entertaining as it is safe.

Imagine, just for a moment, babysitting 5 million children. It seems like an impossible feat. Now envision what it would be like if those 5 million kids were situated across the United States, Canada and the world, and your only means of watching over them is through their activity online. On top of it all, the legal regulators who oversee online child safety are watching your every move. This is what Podgorny deals with on a daily basis. She deeply cares about the wellbeing of these children. But at the same time, she must ensure they are having fun and interacting with the game regularly. On top of it all, she’s got to prove to the parents that their kids are safe and benefiting from the game. How does a women who openly admitted that she should tattoo on her arm “never trust a nine-year-old” achieve such tremendous success in such a competitive and highly regulated industry?

Success for Podgorny amounts to following the rules without fault, knowing her market intimately and having a sound strategy in place, the details of which she discussed during her Social Media Breakfast presentation and in our interview that followed. As a former mathematician, her social media strategy for the kids’ media properties she oversees is meticulous, granular and purpose-driven. She has a plan for dealing with both the parents and the children involved and manages her team with an eagle eye to ensure all activities are law-abiding according to the children’s online privacy and protection act. As can be suspected, she admitted that she never really stops working.

Listen to our conversation that follows and let us know your thoughts and concerns. I will loop Joi into the conversation to answer your questions. We hope that this will spark a meaningful discussion.

Technorati Tags: sensitive information online, social media marketing, marketing to children, children on social media, Joi Podgorny, Social Media Breakfast Ottawa, National Geographic, Animal Jam

By Leo Valiquette

Back in November, Peter Hanschke blogged about the need for the lean and mean startup to beware the million-dollar cheque. In that spirit, I have an anecdote to share which illustrates that the mere prospect of such a windfall can also do significant damage.

At a time when early-stage ventures, particularly those in Canada, are thirsting for capital, be it traditional VC or an angel round, it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that a startup should be wary of a nice fat cheque.

But as Peter explained, for a startup that has taken a lean and frugal approach to market that relies on iterative product development and using a Minimum Viable Product approach, a sudden windfall of cash can have all sorts of negative consequences. The most obvious of these is that the product, which has until now been developed with only those features and functions that have the strongest market pull, gets bloated with all sorts of additional bells and whistles that dilute its focus and send the sales and marketing teams running in too many directions.

My story isn’t a clear-cut example of this, but the same lessons apply. This venture, let’s call it BigContent, was developing a unique library of content which it would make available through a subscription model. It was incubated with a nest egg the founders had put together from a previous venture. In fact, it was their experience with that previous venture which provided them with the idea for BigContent, as well as the initial proof of concept. From a marketing standpoint, BigContent’s founders were doing exactly what they should to identify, define and validate a strong market opportunity which BigContent could exploit.

Executing BigContent’s business plan didn’t require external financing. The founders were wholly committed to bootstrapping the venture through to positive cash flow. BigContent proceeded to develop its library of content, a distribution model through which to deliver that content and a strong roster of subscribers. Everything was proceeding well toward a soft launch of its service.

And then a Big Name VC comes calling without an invitation.

Well, what startup on the eve of its launch is going to slam the door in a VC’s face? At the VC’s behest, launch plans were put on hold. BigContent’s founders revamped their business plan to reflect the addition of external financing. A VC round may not have been necessary to BigContent’s get-to-market strategy, but it would certainly have accelerated the process and made for a bigger, bolder launch.

Big Name VC made lofty promises, even said it would bring one of its compadres to the table. Meetings were scheduled, then cancelled. After several months of song and dance, the VCs said a polite “No thank you” and moved on.

The damage was done. BigContent’s lean and mean go-to-market strategy was in shambles. One of the principals had also resigned from the company. Months later, the team is still trying to get everything back on track for a launch, as per the original business plan.

I don’t intend this post as a knock against VCs, but this story does demonstrate that both parties to a deal must always beware. The onus is on the entrepreneur to have a clear understanding of where their business is going and what it will take to get it there. There is always more than one route to a destination and the choices which lie along the way seldom fit easily into the “right” and “wrong” columns. If there’s a moral to this story, perhaps it’s the importance of staying the course when in the midst of executing a plan in which you have confidence.

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: financing, investor, startup, entrepreneur, VC, venture capital, business launch, business plan, bootstrap, get to market, market validation, minimum viable product, MVP, product development, iterative

Demonstrating a marketing program’s success is key to maintaining a happy client. Do good work and prove how it contributed to the client’s goals – seems like a simple enough equation. But managing client expectations throughout a social media marketing program can be tricky. This is because these programs typically require a huge amount of small work spread out over a long period of time and over a large number of channels. It can be tough to maintain the faith at the outset of a program while communities are still being developed. Without a strategy and regular communication, it will be challenging to convince your client to see past the masses of tweets and status updates and understand that all of your wee daily efforts add up and support larger goals that will provide a return on investment.

As an outsourced community manager, it’s imperative that I maintain regular communication with my clients and demonstrate that I am using their dollars wisely. While my clients can see all my activity online, it’s my responsibility to articulate how each of these activities are contributing to their goals and show that the program is on track for success. I really have two management responsibilities – managing my client’s online presence as well as their expectations.

Here are some tips that I employ to maintain good client relations throughout a social media marketing program:

Make sure the strategy is sound and detailed at the outset

As mentioned, you can’t prove return on investment if you don’t have a clear understanding of what it is your client is investing in. Social media provides lots of opportunities for businesses, including the ability to increase influence, provide customer service, foster customer loyalty, boost awareness about a product or service, bridge relationships with industry influencers and form partnerships, garner media attention and attract leads. What does your client want to do, how much are they willing to invest in pursuing these initiatives, what exactly will you do to carry out their requirements, and what can they expect as a result of their investment? The more precisely you can identify your activities and establish a time frame with specific objectives, the better you will be able to manage your client’s expectations.

Your client has every right to know exactly where their dollars are being spent every step of the way; to maintain good faith you need to articulate how those dollars are being invested. Your strategy should therefore mark clear checkpoints that indicate where the program should be at established time periods to assure them that your strategy is on course.

You can make predictions by examining your client’s online marketplace. How successful are their competitors? How engaged is the community that is interested in their space? What are analysts saying about their industry? Is the media particularly interested in that space right now? Does your client have a powerful story that will attract interest? Social media should be regarded as an element of a full marketing program. Whether the marketing team is in house or outsourced, you should be able to collaborate with those people to determine realistic social media marketing targets.

Track your progress and communicate that progress regularly

Carrying out a successful social media marketing program requires frequent communication. In my opinion, social media managers should be regarded as communications liaisons, connecting company representatives with their interest groups online. Communication runs between the account owners and their managers and between managers and their communities. It doesn’t matter whether social media marketing activities are carried out in house or if they are outsourced, communication is imperative to success.

For social media managers, the success that comes from maintaining good communications in both directions is twofold.  First, when communications is smooth between account owners and managers, social media communities thrive because they have the benefit of receiving the most current information and having direct access to company representatives.  Second, the social media success you see as a result of proper management will put you in higher standing with those people who pay for your work.

Have a conversation with your client about how often they want to be updated on your activities and successes. I provide my clients with metrics every week or every month depending on how closely they want to monitor my progress (see social media measurement for more details on what I include in my reports).

When you send them your report, be sure to explain what has been accomplished. Was there a surge in followers and likes as a result of a particular initiative? Did your client receive a record number of mentions? What drove that level of engagement? If something didn’t work, tell your client about that too, but be sure to communicate what you learned as a result. They will be far more understanding if you maintain open and honest communications throughout the extent of the program. Bad things happen and sometimes these things are out of your control. Being able to identify what went wrong gives confidence to your client that you are effectively steering the program’s course.

Encourage the client’s participation

I’ve found that allowing clients to participate in social media activities gives them a better understanding of what’s required to build and maintain social media communities as well as the results that can come from certain activities. Familiarizing your clients with the social media space helps them to understand your job and all that is required to grow a presence online. Understanding the full scope of work as well as the individual activities that go into running a successful social media program helps to ground their expectations and instill a greater appreciation for the work you do.

For example, because LinkedIn only allows individuals, but not companies, to participate in Groups and Answers, I encourage my clients to participate through their personal accounts on behalf of their companies. I’m here to write and edit their responses as necessary and can even post their responses if they provide me with their login credentials, but I try to convince them that they will be better able to establish a thought leadership position by showcasing their own knowledge.

In one case, a client saw more than 100 responses to his Group discussion. He was “chuffed” to see such a positive reaction to his work and the experience helped him understand the benefits of the platform. I also encourage clients to participate in social media by posting Facebook status updates and tweets when they are feeling particularly inspired. Again, I’m here to review, edit, add comments and post if necessary.

How are you managing your client’s expectations for your social media program?

Image: Totally how to

Technorati Tags: Social media marketing, client expectations, social media strategy, social media management, social media measurement, community management, return on investment, ROI, marketing strategy, client communications, outsourced social media, outsourced community management

This is part one of a two part series. Part two will be published next week.

I recently had an extended discussion with someone which resulted in the conclusion that there is more to patenting than just getting patents. We started with a discussion of the business value of a patent and then addressed the business value of patenting. Here is the concept.

If you are going to start the patenting process, it is absolutely essential that you do some searching.  Searching is essential because you can only patent an aspect of your own idea that is new.  There is no point in filing a patent application if you cannot identify a feature that is new. So a patent novelty search is about searching for bad news: defining the boundaries of the forbidden territory that you cannot claim because it is delimited by the “Prior Art Wall.”

My conversational partner had previously taken coaching from me on how to do his own patent searching. He remarked how amazed he was at the amount of valuable information he learned when he carried out a patent search for the first time. Reviewing the efforts of other inventors helped him clarify the problem he was addressing — he got to see his own initiatives in the context of the alternate solutions that others had proposed. He observed that prior inventors are, in a sense, available to act as consultants to coach you in respect of your own invention. He experienced his first dose of competitive intelligence in the field of his invention.

I liked hearing this because it is a “good news” aspect of the patenting exercise. Whether or not a prefiling patent novelty search establishes that the road is clear for you to attempt to obtain patent rights, there is tremendous value to be obtained by just carrying out the search.

For novelty purposes, blocking prior art can arise anywhere, from any source. However, we search at the patent office amongst issued patents and pending applications because the records there are highly indexed. Here is a link to the main website at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office – U.S. PTO. And here is a link to the best page to start searching using key words. Note that this is the page for searching issued patents. There is another page for searching pending applications.

Searching at the U.S. PTO is preferred because the records there are full text as of 1976. Searches at the Canadian Patent Office can only address the words used in the Abstract or the Claims associated with a patent or application. To start searching at the U.S. PTO, simply choose two words that are closely related to your idea and enter them as search Term 1 and Term 2. The fields for the two search terms can be left at the default “All Fields” for now.

Demonstrations search

Let us assume you have an improved garden rake. In such a case, two words to enter might be “rake” and “handle.” We can defer limiting the search to documents including the word “garden” since you always patent structure and there may be rakes that have a similar structure used for other applications.  Entering these two terms gives you the following result:

Results of search in U.S. patent collection db for rake and handle: 3,199 patents

This is far too many documents to look at.  But beneath the above report and above the list of the first 50 references is a box that starts with “Refine search.” In that box we can add to the initial search terms to produce the search string “rake AND handle and (claw or hook).” I am assuming that these are all features of our inventive rake concept. Entering these terms gives results as follows:

Results of search in U.S. patent collection db for ((rake and handle) and (claw or hook)): 485 patents

This is still too many documents to look at. However, looking down the list of the first 50 hits we see that U.S. patent 7,987,658 has the title, “Multi-purpose garden tool with pivotable gardening head.” Clicking on this reference to open it, we see an Abstract which describes in a complicated way a garden tool   (note that it does so without using the word “garden”). Do not spend too long reading the Abstract. A quick activation of the link “Images” takes us to a page where we can see the drawings if we have a TIF reader (if you do not have a TIF reader, you can download one for free by clicking on the red “Help” link in the yellow bar above the black space where the pictures should be on the “Images” page).

From the drawings associated with this patent we see that it really does relate to a garden rake. Locating this reference enables us to switch to “classification searching.”

Conclusion of part 1

This article is divided into two parts to give readers time to reflect on the valuable learning opportunities provided in each of the parts. The object is to demonstrate that searching at the patent office is a doable procedure that is available to anyone who takes the time to learn the relatively simple steps and protocols.

A major benefit of searching is the mind-broadening effect of seeing how others have addressed a problem, which can help you make better inventions!

Looking forward to seeing you in part 2.

David French is the principal and CEO of Second Counsel Services, which provides guidance for companies that wish to improve their management of Intellectual Property. For more information visit www.SecondCounsel.com.

Technorati Tags: Inventions, patent, intellectual property, patent law, patenting, prior art wall, U.S. patent and trademark office, Canadian patent office, patent research, patent searching

A few years back, my pal Ian Graham acquainted me with his “law of three.” If any subject or person or issue crosses Graham’s attention three times in relatively short order, he believes he ought to pay attention to it. It’s an intriguing notion that I have found plays out in my own life more often than I might expect. Graham’s law intersected last night with my colleague Leo Valiquette’s piece earlier this week about “the mocking white glare of an empty page.” Having begged off posting yesterday to finish a client project and faced with having to produce a post for today, I was struck by an article I read about Canadian movie house Alliance Films seeking to charge Canadian journalists as much as €2,500 for interviews with bold-name stars such as Brad Pitt at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It was the third article I read this week about interesting and controversial developments in modern journalism and, not wishing to be mocked either by my empty screen or by my hardacre blog editor, the idea for this post was clumsily conceived.

The first of the three issues to catch my eye was a brief paragraph in a story on Monday by the Globe and Mail’s superb public health reporter André Picard. If I was pitching a public health story in Canada, Picard would be at the top of my list; he is a knowledgeable and thoughtful reporter who provides well-considered analysis of the complex issues facing public health and healthcare in general in Canada today. My high opinion of Picard is not an isolated one; he has been repeatedly recognised for his work and it is clear that most other practitioners of the media relations craft single him out when they have a story to pitch to his beat.

The result is that he is regularly given access to reports and other material in advance of their official publication or release date. It’s a practice known as an embargo; PR people negotiate a contract, usually no more rigorous than a verbal or emailed agreement, whereby they give a reporter advance access to a story and the reporter agrees not to publish or broadcast anything until a certain day and time. (In our PR practice, we regularly employ embargoes, and have written about the advantages and disadvantages of embargoes.) On Monday, though, in a story about a new national strategy on mental health, Picard wrote, “The Globe and Mail obtained a copy of the strategy, entitled ‘Changing Direction, Changing Lives,’ under embargo but is publishing before the Tuesday release date because of leaks to other media outlets.”

It’s unusual for reporters to reference such arrangements in their stories, so I took notice. When I decided last night to include this episode in this post, I emailed Picard asking him a few questions about the specific circumstances of this embargo and what led him to break it, and I invited him to share with me his views about the ethics and practicality of embargoes. As of the time this post went up, I hadn’t heard back from him. If I do — and I hope I will because I’d like to hear from a reporter whose professionalism is unquestioned — I will update this post.

Embargoes have been around almost forever, and are likely not going anywhere soon. Reporters and PR people can debate the ethics and merits of them, but I continue to see them as useful tools, albeit tools that can be misused at times. However, there is always the hazard, both to the organisation pitching the news and to journalists who comply with an embargo, that a less scrupulous outlet will not respect agreements into which it freely entered.

The second and third issues are more central to the challenging economic model that is the news business today. Both cropped up yesterday and, again, both were reported in the Globe and, either directly or indirectly, involved the Globe. (Guess what major Canadian media outlet is my go-to source!) Mid-yesterday afternoon, the paper announced it would start charging for access to its online content, a practice known as erecting a paywall behind which its previously free content would now shelter. Other papers have experimented with paywalls, only to dismantle them after a period; others still, including some of the best-known media outlets on the planet such as the New York Times, have persisted, with the Times reporting it expects to earn $85-million this year through online subscriptions. It’s not-insignificant incremental revenue any newspaper surely could use.

In defending his paper’s move to put up a paywall, Globe publisher Phillip Crawley said it was in response to an unpredictable advertising market that has seen both print and digital sales drop this spring, according to the Globe’s own story on the subject. (The story also reported that the Globe would be asking its staff to volunteer to take unpaid vacations this summer in a futher effort to balance the books.)

Within three hours of the story going live on the paper’s website, some 500 comments had already been posted. I scrolled through dozens of screens of comments without finding a single one that wasn’t critical of the move.

I’m not sure I agree with all those critics.

Producing excellent journalism costs a great deal of money and the Globe and Mail is a lonely bastion of excellence that has bucked the near-industry-wide trend towards reducing staff, buying cheap wire and filler copy, and otherwise joining the race to the bottom. Like the Times and a few other exceptional titles such as Britain’s Guardian, the Globe has continued to invest heavily in high-quality content. In the Globe’s case, it has also preserved its many bureaus in Canada and around the world, producing original and expert reporting that is unmatched anywhere in Canada and only rarely matched anywhere on the planet. That excellence has been rewarded by generally rising subscription levels although, as yesterday’s twin economies suggest, that increased readership apparently has not levered higher levels of spending by advertisers.

Newspapers are stuck between a print rock and an online hard place. Revenues from the former are eroding swiftly; the latter has not yet delivered a replacement business model. Paywalls and other experiments will, I expect, become more common.

The sketchy economics of journalism and its often-unsavoury relationship with those from whom it gets its news is at the heart of the third and last issue, which I referenced at the top of this post. I don’t suppose I should be shocked but I still am at the proposition that a major film house would seek to charge journalists for interviews with stars at a film festival. On the other hand, such interviews rarely rise above the puerile and mundane, and so I suppose it’s difficult to classify their outcome as news. It falls more clearly in the entertainment category, and who can blame studios for wanting to charge media outlets that make money off their interactions with the studios’ talent. Then again, as already made painfully clear by the paywall issue, there ain’t much golden fleece left to be sheared from this media sheep.

The doubtful economics aside, I was struck by the irony, as was the Globe reporter who wrote the story about Alliance’s sliding-scale menu of charges for access to its stars, that perhaps the biggest victims of chequebook journalism are the very stars who are now being pimped out by their studios. Most of the tacky revelations about the lives of movie stars and other celebrities are bought and paid for by media outlets only too happy to lay often-staggering sums of money on relatives, neighbours, former lovers and others who will spill the beans. Perhaps there is some sort of justice in this but I doubt anyone will be well served when every reputable outlet declines to pony up, leaving the stars at the mercy of those whose willingness to compromise their ethics will already have been well established.

Image: Steele’s student

Technorati Tags: Alliance Films, journalism, Globe and Mail, Andre Picard, embargo, PR, public relations, journalism ethics, paywall, New York Times, Phillip Crawley, print advertising, online advertising, newspaper subscriptions, Guardian, media, chequebook journalism 

As a regular weekly feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Copyblogger, GigaOm, The Flack and GeekWire.

20 mistakes that will undermine your call to action and cost you sales

As content marketers, we spend a lot of time obsessing over increasing traffic. It’s the sexy thing to do. However, the number of leads fails to match our expectations because we don’t spend enough time creating a killer call to action. There are dozens of call-to-action mistakes that can doom your efforts to convert traffic into leads or sales. Copyblogger shares 20 of the most common.

What exactly is a tech company?

Author Om Malik says ‘tech company’ and ‘tech startup’ are over-applied labels that have outlived their usefulness. Calling practically all growing contemporary businesses ‘technology companies’ is about as useful as calling the enterprises of the industrial era ‘factory companies;’ it accurately describes one aspect of what they are (or were), but it doesn’t really capture the totality of their operation. This post is a great discussion piece. What exactly is a tech company, in your opinion?

Startup sustainability

Anyone with a stake in a technology (or any other) startup will certainly appreciate the challenge entailed in prolonging editorial interest in their fledgling investment. Once the initial flurry of hyper-activity in the news and social spheres evaporates, however, how can a founder (and his PR consiglieres) build “legs” to ensure long-term success? Author Peter Himler offers great tactics for startups to sustain media coverage.

The venture capital model is broken, and this damning report explains why

Industry watchers have been talking for a long while now about how the venture capital industry is broken, highlighted by poor returns that in many cases don’t even exceed those of the major stock indices. Thanks to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation — which has invested in nearly 100 venture capital firms across the country over the past 20 years — we’re getting an inside look into the problems rattling the industry. In a blistering 51-page report, the foundation details its own experiences, writing that limited partners such as the foundation routinely “invest too much capital in underperforming venture capital funds on frequently mis-aligned terms.”

Technorati Tags: Copyblogger, The Flack, GigaOm, GeekWire, call to action, sales, content marketing, leads, technology company, startup, Om Malik, Peter Himler, media coverage, PR, marketing, venture capital, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation