Naming Things

Finding New Marketing Channels

Our friends at
EyeVero Marketing Communications Group have come up with another winner I
believe for Exploriem.org’s newest event– Tech Links to be held in November
2012 during Entrepreneurship Week.

Naming things is very
important. Long before we built it, we called SBP, Scotiabank Place where the Ottawa
Senators play, the Palladium. The interchange and road providing main access to
SBP are still called Palladium
 Drive. In fact, City of Ottawa calls MCFs, Major Community
Facilities, in their OP, Official Plan, ‘Palladiums’.

It’s like Elves in
Tolkien’s LOTR– upon arrival there, they spend the next few thousand years
roaming Middle Earth naming things. Your company, project, plan, product or service
has to have a good name and these days you probably need to have not only the
dot-COM address but also your home nation TLD (Top Level Domain), your Facebook
vanity URL and a Twitter handle that is hopefully identical to your name. You
only have have a few tenths of a second to grab someone’s attention so make it
happen with a strong name and brand.

Tech Links will be an
event attended by large, small and medium-sized tech companies; they’ll
cross-pitch each other, not for capital or investment but for cross-marketing
platforms. The key question to be answered is– ‘Can we integrate their product
or service offerings into our platform and vice versa?”

The idea is find to
large company marketing channels for SMEEs (entrepreneurial tech startups as
well as medium sized firms) and the reverse too.

It wasn’t more than a
few weeks after Microsoft introduced Kinect for XBox that someone had hacked
its source code. In the past, MS might have siced their lawyers on the poor guy
but instead they immediately saw an opportunity and issued a Kinect Developer
Toolkit instead, a short while thereafter. Would MS have reacted the same way
if there was no iPhone and App Store? Probably not.

But imagine how great it is for Apple to have hundreds of
thousands of smart developers working for them for free. Actually, that’s not
right. They pay Apple
for the privilege of working for them– Apple has had several million apps
developed for their iPhone and iPad at a negative cost since iTunes takes
anywhere from 30 to 40% of those revenues.

So large companies
can pitch smaller ones at Tech Links and smaller ones can pitch larger ones;
it’s a cross-pitch event where these tech enterprises can find strategic
marketing and technology partnerships.

@ProfBruce, Ottawa, Canada,
2012