It was — and, just barely, still is — a nearly magical process that has been an integral part of my life since before I can remember, thanks to a father who was also a keen shutterbug.

If all this means very little to you, chances are you were born after 1984, when Canon introduced the world’s first digital camera, and taking pictures is for you a cold and disposable affair of rearranging electronic bits on a piece of memory circuitry somewhere.

But for those of us for whom picture taking and print making are that warm, analog and ultimately high-fidelity alchemy between silver-halide and light, yesterday’s announcement by Eastman Kodak Company that it is discontinuing its 74-year old Kodachrome brand of camera film is another — and nearly the final — nail in the coffin of analog photography.

I have been an avid photographer ever since I grabbed my older brother’s little Instamatic and whipped off five or six frames before realising it had film in it. Man, did I get whupped for that. In high school, the year book editor, still a good pal notwithstanding, had to forcibly lock me out of his office because I’d use all the film stock he had. When I worked on the Halifax Daily News, I once overheard our parsimonious owner call up our film supplier to find out how much the masses of black-and-whilte film I had shot the day before actually cost him. (The paper bought its film in 500-foot rolls; the seven or eight 36-shot rolls I had used cost no more than a couple of bucks but he still thought it excessive.)

My older son, who studied photography as part of his fine arts courses at Canterbury High School this past semester, asked me if I had any black-and-white negatives he could use to practice his new-found darkroom techniques. He asked me in a tentative way that suggested he doubted that not even I, grizzled and ancient thought I might be to him, could possibly possess an artifact as old and archaic as a negative! I introduced him to to three very large Rubbermaid bins containing nothing but black-and-white negatives, and he happily selected a tidy shot of a container pier in Halifax that he promptly printed back to front.

My ability to crank through three or four rolls at one sitting when my two lads were so much smaller and so much cuter eventually drove me to buy my first digital. I traded in my top-of-the-line 35mm Nikon gear and bought what was then an advanced - and expensive — point-and-shoot. Every time I pick up that little digital and can’t wrap my hands around the lusciously ergonomic body of that Nikon F4 and manually rotate a lens into the precise focus and framing I’m seeking, I regret the trade.

BUT — I used some of my trade-in cash to also buy a new body for my medium-format film camera and when I want to take real pictures, like an iconic Seine River-framed view of Paris’s most recognised landmark or a sunset shot of the hill-top cathedral in Cobh in County Cork, Ireland, both pictured here, I load that sucker up with colour transparency film and go to town. I, and an ever-shrinking band of film fanatics, believe it is simply not possible to capture a real picture unless silver and other chemicals are involved.

In a terrible twist of irony, however, it is now impossible to make a print from a colour transparency — except through the garish Cibrachrome process that I have never liked — without going digital. Today, I must hand my transparencies over to Jim Lamont, a phenomenal print-maker and incredibly accomplished landscape photographer, who runs my trannies through a sophisticated drum scanner that creates massive 25-meg files from which he then painstakingly makes and frames flawless, gallery-quality prints for me that are weighing down the walls of my house.

Kodak is still making film, including the Ektachrome colour transparency I love so much, but I wonder for how much longer. Already, if I want some, I have to get it shipped to me from Montréal or Toronto because no-one in Ottawa stocks it any more. It will be a sad, sad day when it, too, goes the way of the Kodachrome, a faithful witness to history over eight decades.

Technorati Tags: Kodachrome, photography

• There’s a sense that the worst is behind us, according to key executives who presented at the RBC Technology Conference. Focus companies included Bigband Networks, Brocade, Ciena, JDSU and Sigma Designs. We noted various encouraging trends dependent on the end markets. The consumer segment seems to have led while we are also seeing firming trends in the enterprise. Service-provider-centric companies seem to be lagging, although specific names are noting improving order trends.

• Ciena CEO Gary Smith highlighted that although carrier customers remain cautious and are still budgeting month to month, sentiment has improved and orders show encouraging trends. Orders turn into deployments and, subsequently, revenues and Ciena has already endorsed sequential revenue growth for the current quarter. New products like CoreDirector II should also contribute to revenue growth in early 2010.

• Our read on F5 was encouraging, and the stable environment may provide for product revenues to start growing again. Recent F5 potential customer meetings in NY pointed to a more positive tone. F5 has a major operating system refresh (TMOS v.10) and CEO McAdams said initial feedback from customers was favorable.

• Brocade pointed to the overall health of the business and the relative strength in storage spending. Brocade has the added benefit of gaining market share, according to CFO Richard Deranleau. Brocade remains very pleased with the reception with its new Ethernet partner IBM and partnership benefits are expected in fiscal Q4.

• JDSU may see a full recovery later than some, in our view, yet CFO David Vellequette reminded investors that the March-April period marked an improvement from the January-February period. That said, inventories are lean, down to 4-8 weeks in optical components from 12-16 weeks just 18 months ago.

• Sigma Designs CFO Tom Gay pointed to modest improvements in visibility, healthy subscriber growth at AT&T and the resumption of international IPTV projects in 2H09. Positive themes on video growth were echoed by Bigband’s CFO Castonguay who pointed to opportunities in SDV and digital ad insertion.

• Samsung’s SVP of strategy Justin Denison reiterated the company’s market-share goals and its dominant position in the US in terms of units. Samsung is keenly focused on touch, which grew 10% in 2008.

Technorati Tags: RBC Capital Markets, Bigband Networks, Brocade, Ciena, F5, JDSU, Sigma Designs, Samsung

This is not a political blog; if it was, I’d be rhapsodizing this morning about my old pal Darrell Dexter’s extraordinary victory in leading the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party to victory in yesterday’s general election in that province. But as a former political reporter in Halifax, let me take a moment to congratulate Darrell and his team for achieving something a generation or two of progressives in Nova Scotia despaired they’d ever see. It’s a whole new day in Nova Scotian politics.

No, this is a blog that concerns itself with technology and the marketing of technology. So how the heck does that intersect with Minister Raitt’s frank and open conversation that was inadvertently recorded and then released into the unwilling hands of a Halifax Chronicle Herald reporter? And, more to the point, how does this put me unexpectedly in the company of the likes of Blatchford and Teneycke?

Easy. Minister Raitt’s most controversial utterance was the word “sexy,” which is how she characterised the issue that the supply of medical radioistopes used in a broad range of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures is rapidly dwindling in this country thanks to a spill of radioactive heavy water that has shut down the reactor in Chalk River, Ontario, that provides the lion’s share of the world’s requirement for these most perishable of commodities. Any fair and reasonable reading of her comments — only a handful of words from more than five hours of an accidental recording have attracted any attention — would conclude that Raitt was not calling cancer or the isotope shortage sexy but, rather, stating it for what it was, an issue that was attracting a lot of media attention because it had the elements “radioactive” and “cancer” associated with it. This was Teneycke’s wholly reasonable take on the issue when I heard him interviewed on CBC yesterday morning.

The whole so-called “Raitt-gate” is a sorry symptom of how our media and politicians go for the cheap and easy when a more nuanced and sophisticated analysis is called for.

The Great Canadian Isotope Crisis of 2009 has its genesis in the very expensive failure of an imaginative and technologically advanced initiative launched by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, which operates the NRU reactor that is currently the main source for medical radioisotopes in Canada, and Ottawa’s MDS Nordion, which processes the raw isotopes into the compounds used by hospitals and clinics around the world to diagnose and treat a range of cancer, cardiac and other conditions. AECL practically invented the modern era of nuclear medicine and MDS Nordion, which was spun out of AECL in 1991, is still the world’s leader in the field.

Recognising that the aging and increasingly unreliable NRU was causing its customers to be uncomfortable about the security of supply of a perishable commodity that sees half its volume disappear in just hours or days through radioactive decay, MDS Nordion contracted with AECL to design and build a pair of reactors that would be the very first in the world exclusively devoted to the production of medical radioisotopes. Unfortunately, something went wrong on the way to full commissioning of the new reactors, dubbed MAPLE 1 and 2, and the project was essentially abandoned by MDS Nordion and mothballed by AECL.

Without the MAPLE reactors or some other new and reliable way of manufacturing radioisotopes, this crisis is merely the first of many — the second if you count the dustup in late 2007 and early 2008 that saw the Harper government fire the head of the Canada Nuclear Safety Commission because she was refusing to let AECL restart the NRU until a couple of CNSC requirements were met — that will inevitably become a permanent situation when the NRU becomes so old and unreliable that it must be decommissioned.

The real issue here, then, is how Canada is allowing its world-beating advantage in nuclear medicine slip away through turf wars and political hay-making. Rather than ask the tough questions about why MAPLE was abandoned and where the heck MDS Nordion is going to source its isotopes when NRU goes dark for good, the brains on both sides of the House of Commons and in the press galleries overlooking the House would rather focus on the simple. In short, they’d rather drive a minister to a tearful apology than figure out how to prevent Canada from losing one of the Avro Arrows of this age.

It’s enough to make anyone weep.

(Full disclosure: MDS Nordion was a PR client of mine in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and again a few years ago when one of my assignments was to develop the never-implemented communications strategy for the official opening of the MAPLE reactors. I’m pretty sure I have not abrogated any non-disclosure obligations here as I confirmed that all the details in this post can be found in publicly available documents.)

Technorati Tags: Media, reporting, Lisa Raitt, Christie Blatchford, Kory Teneycke, AECL, NRU, medical radioisotopes, MDS Nordion, MAPLE reactors

Francis
May 22: An outbreak of positive news in Ottawa
May 21: 10 tips for marketing in a downturn
May 12: StartUpCamp Montréal a fun and effective networking event
May 7: Citizenship is more than a client-service relationship

Leo
May 29: Social media for business: Same old common sense still prevails
May 11: Make like a duck: Paddle hard, paddle often

Chris Biber, president and CEO of SearchingWorks, started off the evening by reiterating that social media, be it Twitter, Youtube or a blog, is simply another set of tools in the marketing toolbox, while marketing itself is simply the “consistent application of common sense.”

It all begins of course, by taking the time to research and understand your customers. Who are they? Where are they? What interests them? And what are their needs and expectations? The same basic foundation that’s always been a requisite for an effective marketing program. The difference now, of course, being that social media allows for a much more candid and informal two-way flow of communication between company and customer.

But this is a conversation that cannot be dominated by a “me, me, me” approach. While companies and brands can make themselves part of the conversation and attempt to direct it, they can’t expect to control it. Nor will their audience respond favourably to anything that is blatantly self-serving or promotional.

Rick Radko, president of R-Cubed, drawing on his software-engineering background, took a different perspective and focused on the application of social media as an internal, rather than external, communications tool set. From online tools for document sharing and collaboration, to wikis, Rick talked about how “Enterprise 2.0″ is becoming the norm for organizations with teleworkers and remote offices, to keep staff in touch and part of a common corporate culture.

In particular, Rick touched on using a wiki to keep staff informed on everything from new corporate directives, to who down the hall is offering to car pool. It’s the digitization of that ubiquitous cork board that adorns staff lunch rooms everywhere, plastered with pushpins and dead-tree notices.

Lastly, Natasha D’Souza, founder of Virtual EyeSee, talked about the distinctions between the social media release, versus the traditional news release, an example of which she offered for a recent Mother’s Day event she held. As her example illustrates, the social media release tends to be less formal and directly addresses the intended audience. It also moves up the contact information and incorporates multimedia elements to support it, from pictures, to video and links to other relevant sources of information.

Two things in particular struck me about the structure of a social media release and how she used it.

First, is the volume of supporting content that can be added, in terms of pictures, video, links and so forth. In the good ol’ days of tree slaying, a comprehensive package such as this was called a media kit. Is the social media release, in its fully realized form, in many ways not simply the digitization of this traditional public relations tool? (Editor’s note: Actually, long before the term “social media release” was ever coined, savvy PR practitioners have been offering their contacts multimedia-rich content. And we’ve been hosting or delivering that content via electronic channels for decades. The web has made it easier for practitioners to do it all themselves but there are still some media formats — broadcast-quality b-roll, for example — that you probably don’t want to host yourself.)

The second point came when one attendee asked Natasha how she distributed this social media release. And this is where another classic and intrinsic element of marketing and PR came in. She researched the influential bloggers in the Ottawa area who would be interested in her Mother’s Day event and contacted them to pitch the event and direct them to her release. Proving once again that they’ve yet to come up with a social media tool that is a suitable substitute for hard work and old-fashioned solicitation.

Technorati Tags: public relations, marketing, social media, blogging, Twitter, wiki, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0

• Halogen Software marked it’s 26th consecutive quarter of YOY growth: May 20th/09!
• Protus hit 83% YOY growth!
• Bridgewater sales rose 64% YOY!
• Dragonwave numbers improve!
• March Networks expects 4th quarter revenue growth!
• Enablence raises $13.8MM US!
• Espial “revenue soars” in Q1!

Is this a harbinger that the good times are here again? Maybe, maybe not. But it certainly is, as Andrew points out, cause for celebration. Congratulations to each of the companies involved and thank you, Andrew, for putting it all together.

Technorati Tags: Good news, Ottawa, technology, Halogen Software, Protus, Bridgewater, Dragonwave, March Networks, Enablence, Espial

1. Do as much marketing as you can afford

We’ve written a lot about the merit of maintaining your marketing spend through an economic downturn. There is still business to be written, markets to be taken and customers to be won. And a downturn, when many of your competitors may well be going quiet, often represents an unprecedented opportunity to grab a much larger share of voice.

2. Recalibrate your strategy and recast your budget strategically as opposed to simply cutting x% across the board

The OBJ reporter kept trying to get me to name the “one thing” that companies should do in response to a downturn. I resisted being so binary since a downturn represents doom to some but incredible opportunity to others. And even for those for whom it’s a challenge, an across-the-board response is rarely the right one.

At times like this, strategy becomes more valuable than ever. Know where you’re trying to go, the best way to get there, and how you’re going to know that you’ve arrived. Cut those marketing tactics that won’t help get you there and re-invest the money in the tactics that will.

3. Negotiate pricing

All the vectors you use to communicate to your marketplace are feeling the pinch right now. There is no better time to play hardball on pricing, or to negotiate added extras that usually cost a lot more. Most media outlets will cut their line rates or give you valuable extras like a free newsletter distribution, web conference, white paper distribution or even additional insertions. Trade show organizers may agree to a bigger booth space for the same price or throw in sponsorship opportunities or show guide advertising that in better times might cost you thousands more. Even if your supplier must hold the line on fundamentals, see if you can’t snag some of the valuable extras.

4. If you have channel or other partners, consider pooling budgets and activities to make your dollars go further

Can you share a trade show booth with partners? Can you initiate a co-op advertising program that sees you put up some of the cost while your channel partners put up the rest? Is the opposite available to you — are you a channel for an OEM with a co-op program?

5. Do not abandon measurement

If marketing is seen as the easiest thing for companies to cut during a downturn, then measurement is seen as the easiest thing for marketers to cut. After all, it doesn’t really contribute anything, right? Wrong. Harken back to tip No. 2: If you’re not measuring, you have no idea where you are or what got you there, you don’t know what’s working and what isn’t, and you simply can’t be strategic about your marketing spend. When times are good and there’s budget to spare, you might be able to afford to have some things work a little less effectively. When times are tough and every dollar must produce a result, you need to be measuring so you know which tactics are delivering and which ones aren’t.

6. Be transactional if there’s an immediate opportunity

As I’ve already noted, a downturn means different things for different companies. If there is good business that can be immediately secured, be highly transactional in going after it. Alter all your messaging to “Buy now,” and focus on tactics, like advertising and direct marketing, that communicate transactional messaging best.

7. If there isn’t an immediate opportunity, go long

It’s far more likely, however, that your customer’s buying cycle has stalled; it almost certainly has lengthened. So if your customers have hunkered down waiting for the storm to pass, there’s no point in blaring the hard sell at them or offering them discounts and other incentives to immediately do something they’re simply not going to. Does this mean you, too, should hunker down and draw the blinds until things blow over? No, it means your messaging should shift to support longer-term objectives such as awareness building, thought leadership and marketplace education. Tactics like media relations, trade shows and white papers that establish your authority and expertise are a better use of your resources if this is your reality.

8. In all communications, employ story telling that emphasizes how your product or service saves money or drives additional immediate revenue for your customers. Speak to the pain they’re feeling in a recession

Whatever the economic conditions, your marketing and communications messaging should be all about your customer, not you. You should always be speaking to the pain your customer feels that your product or service solves. In a recession, your customer’s pain is almost certainly all about revenue — making more of it or keeping more of it. Make sure you’re speaking to this.

9. Be overly attentive to your existing revenue base

“Love the one you’re with,” says the old song, and that’s never more relevant than in a downturn, when new customers are hardest to acquire. Your current customers are keeping you in business and it’s almost always cheaper to maintain and build business with existing customers than to find new ones. Lavish your existing customers with love, look for low-cost ways to improve the value you create for them, and communicate, communicate, communicate — let them know you love them.

10. Effective relationships never expire, so keep talking

Keep talking to everyone in your value chain, including suppliers, service providers, channels, influencers and, of course, customers and prospects. Even if they can’t use your services or you theirs just now, keeping those lines of communication open and full of useful information will serve you very well when the economy recovers.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, media relations, recession, downturn

Because it constitutes my main business-development strategy, I am a relentless networker and let me tell you, there are several things that sets this event apart from many others I attend.

First is the energy in the room, which derives perhaps from its staging at the terribly hip Société des arts technologiques, located at the very epicenter of arguably Canada’s hippest city, or maybe from the funky lighting, house music and well-patronized bar. Granted, the noise level is not the most conducive to meaningful conversation, but even this somewhat hearing-impaired old guy managed to get by okay.

Or maybe the energy is simply organic to StartUpCampMontréal itself. With more than 400 attendees, Thursday night’s crowd was a cross-pollinating mix of about 70 gurus (the term its organizers use to indicate the more experienced business and investment people who help the presenting companies hone their pitches), 250 entrepreneurs, 50 students and 30 others.

Second is the format, which is a bit of democamp-meets-dinner-speaker. Five companies, selected by a jury of gurus, each presents for five minutes followed by questions and answers. This, the fourth edition of StartUpCampMontréal, saw about 30 companies apply for one of the five slots. The company presentations are book-ended by a pair of short, lessons-learned-style keynote speeches from entrepreneurs who bring some from-the-trenches wisdom to the night.

Third, the organizers work hard to make this a thoroughly interactive networking event. Phil Telio and Vincent Guyaux of Embrase are the main hands behind StartUpCampMontréal, although they have attracted a lot of other helpers. From the perspective of this sponsor, they settled on a brilliant tactic to encourage attendees to connect with us: they gave us a stack of drink tickets and then pointed each of us out at the beginning of the event and encouraged attendees to come and cadge a free drink from us. I can tell you it started a lot of conversations for me.

One of the things that impressed me most at the previous StartUpCampMontréal, which we also sponsored, was the open and receptive nature of the audience. Maybe that, too, is a Montréal thing because at most other venues, I’m the guy nosing into a group of people with my hand out in friendly introduction; here, it was the other way around. Several people approached me simply to thank me for our sponsorship and three became solid business leads. One of those leads came up to me again at last week’s event and then insisted on introducing me around to everyone he knew there. It was phenomenal.

We already have one superb client from Montréal, Xsilva Systems, whose suite of Mac-based retail tools is winning with high-concept retailers in both the bricks-and-mortar and online economies. It’s a city I’m always happy to spend time in, and not just for the incomparable smoked meat at Schwartz’s. Judging from what I saw Thursday, it’s fertile ground for us.

What about StartUpCampOttawa?

As a final note, I don’t know why Ottawa doesn’t have a similar event. We have camps galore, and an active and inter-networked start-up community. Next week’s Founders and Funders dinner is also a pretty good way for entrepreneurs and investors to come together, albeit a whole lot less structured than StartUpCamp. If there are others in Ottawa interested in exploring how we can bring this event here, I’d be delighted to hook up with you. And Phil Telio, the main organizer of Montréal’s event, has repeatedly expressed to me his interest in also helping make it happen here.

Technorati Tags: StartUpCampMontreal, networking, entrepreneurship, startups, inmedia, Embrase, business development, Montreal

Surveys can be used effectively to position a company, but not if the company is perceived simply as a sponsor of an external survey. Francis cited the example of one IT consultancy that, on inmedia’s counsel, did away with its external survey of CIOs and instead realized much better media traction from publishing the results of an internal census of its own IT experts. The spotlight was shifted from a group of faceless CIOs to the consultancy’s own knowledge keepers, positioning the consultancy as an authoritative subject matter expert rather than a mere survey sponsor.

As the editor of a business publication, I saw almost daily news releases plugging a survey that, on the surface at least, provided profound insights into one issue or another of relevance to the Ottawa business community. However, the appeal factor quickly evaporated when, upon closer inspection, it was revealed that said survey was sponsored by a major credit card company or software vendor.

This made the objectivity of the data presented, and the conclusions drawn from it, immediately suspect to me. After all, the sponsoring organization would not go to the time and effort to promote survey results that didn’t support its own sales and marketing efforts, now would it? It was this obvious vested interest that made me reluctant to devote even a couple of hundred words of coverage with an online news brief.

When trying to come up with ingenious and cunning ways to engage with the media, there is, once again, simply no substitute for taking the time and effort to understand:

1. Who are the media that are relevant to your organization? Which ones have the clout to move your market and a focus that includes the products and services that you offer?

2. Who on staff specifically covers your offering or the specific markets that you target?

3. What kind of content is the publication looking for and how can you provide it? When you pursue potential customers, you position your product or service as a solution to a problem. Attracting the interest of the media is no different. In Francis’s example above, by putting the spotlight on its own internal thought leaders, this IT consultancy was conveying the value it could provide to a publication in search of expert opinion and insight on pertinent issues and topics.

Answering these questions takes research and the patience and persistence to secure that all-important first conversation with an editor. This is relationship building based upon your ability to offer something that is relevant and valuable. Prove that you’re useful, and your foot is firmly wedged in the door. It is not about flogging today’s news release, though that does present a good excuse to pick up the phone.

Don’t operate under the false assumption that following this process faithfully is a magic bullet that guarantees results, or that great things will happen over night. It still takes time.

For one client, I have been working to place a leadership piece with a key publication since February. The editor held on to the draft we submitted for almost two months before coming back with requested revisions that essentially gut much of the article’s original focus and content. But he’s still interested. With another magazine that lies at the pinnacle of this client’s wish list, I have been touching base with the editor every few weeks for the past three months and finally hope to garner a firm commitment in June when work commences on a signature fall issue.

Invariably, great results are the result of this kind of furious paddling below the waterline, rather than something like a sponsored survey that can fall into the category of gimmickry. The sooner you take to the water and get to work, the sooner those media clippings will begin to add up.

Technorati Tags: public relations, marketing, media relations, pitching

Francis
April 2: Whaddya mean it’s a brave new (social media) world?
April 7: Entrepreneurs hunger for education
April 9: inmedia clients go 2 for 2 at OCRI awards
April 15: Four legs good, two legs bad
April 22: Linguistics prof slags ‘The Elements of Style’

Leo
April 3: In the flesh