http://jctm.ca Marketing projects and thoughts about effective marketing Fri, 27 May 2011 18:30:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Happy New Year! As pointed out in a previous post, blogging in a consistent and timely manner is a lot of work. Which brings us to this post. I won't be blogging in 2011 because I'm taking on a university course that will require a big committment. This on top of a ... http://jctm.ca/blogging-in-2011/ Sometimes the same question comes up from several sources, which makes you wonder if there is something in the air or if it’s phases of the moon. This time, the question was PR. More specifically, how can a small company get good value from PR? You could refer to the now-famous ... http://jctm.ca/good-value-pr/ When times are bad, companies will often look for new revenue sources by expanding out to different markets. For businesses that offer expertise, such as website development or IT administration, this could mean offering a different type of expertise that is complementary to what they already have, or going after ... http://jctm.ca/small-website-challenges/ Taking time off from blogging in June, July and August. Back in September! http://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://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://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://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://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://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://jctm.ca/smarterbudget/