I tried out this startup company’s service today and it worked very nicely. At first I was not sure what it might bring in addition to web presentation services such as GoToMeeting or Webex, but it soon became clear.

While GoToMeeting still has no smartphone app, which I consider as pretty weak, Webex has that too. MightyMeeting’s approach is to upload your presentations (the limit is 20 MBytes per presentation) and then run it from there. So it is the SaaS version of these two other web presentation tools.

What are the advantages of doing that? The biggest advantage I see is in being able to run an online presentation simply from your iPhone, iPod Touch, Android or other smartphone and not having to be at your laptop or PC. Of course you can run it from there, too. While it is also possible to run a presentation and advance the slides from your smartphone while your laptop is connected to an LCD beamer, I was not then able to select a full-screen view, which is not ideal of course as you always see the border of the program and the browser. The program is in beta so I hope they add full screen view as well in that operation. One can expect that they will add better usability and communication features such as VoIP (a basic chat function is already supported) over time too.

This tool is free right now. No idea how they plan to commercialize it. One approach could be to come out with an enterprise version that they charge for the same way the others do. MightyMeeting btw won the last event of Founders Showcase run by TheFunded in Silicon Valley where every 3 months about 200 entrepreneurs and VCs come together to listen to pitches from very early stage companies and then vote for the best one that evening.

How innovation is handled is of course quite different depending on which country you live in. To try out new things in China or India is so much more the norm than in industrialized countries like Germany, France, UK or - where we are based - Switzerland where long time existent processes demand to be followed and the need to do something new is not seen daily. There is probably only one place in the West where that might be different and that is Silicon Valley in California.

The success of any company largely depends on how much better they can bring new or improved things to the market. This is not a sole function of product management and R&D in product and service innovation though but actually of everybody in a company since there are so many touch points with employees, clients, partners, products, services etc. that can be improved and lead to competitive advantages.

In fact I am convinced that the future in about just any industry in light of the strong competition from Asia and here of course in particular China is how well one can motivate and leverage each employees know-how and skill towards a joint goal: innovating better and faster. Innovation has to be seen in a broader sense here encompassing all company functions but of course products and service innovation are key since they pay the bills.

But as it turns out in day-to-day business these improvements, ideas or innovations are difficult to collect and often even difficult to create in many in particular big companies. So how could one revive or jump start an internal process that leads to a culture where people love to come up with new ideas? Before being able to answer such a question I collected some of the reasons why it is difficult for so many companies to innovate, here are some:

• there is simply no time set aside for employees to collect ideas or even communicate them
• there are no or only hardly achievable incentives defined in case someone has a nice idea
• how decisions and new products/services are created is a non-transparent process and only clear to a few
• hierarchical barriers make it difficult for lower ranked employees or departments with less visibility to communicate ideas up, one might simply not listen to them
• innovation is in the hands of a few so called experts and not a grassroots motivated approach
• being wrong with an idea does not mean that was bad, in contrary it needs to be made clear that it is much better to be wrong many times trying than not proposing anything at all, unfortunately too many companies are still not encouraging to try out something new
• there are no software tools available on companies and made part of every employee’s work tool that foster an innovation culture

This is a very small list. A bigger (50) and more comprehensive, also with a positive angle, list you can find here: 50 WAYS TO FOSTER A SUSTAINABLE CULTURE OF INNOVATION.

Ooops - you might wonder how this headline goes together with our very own services for social communities? In fact it goes very well, as the point I want to make here more or less concurs with this article in Business Week back in May 2009. Gene Marks, who is a bestselling author for small business topics, makes this point there:

We’ve been misled as to the benefits of social networking sites. Many of us are finding that these tools do not live up to the hype, especially for small business. Once we start digging deeper, we’re finding a lot of challenges. Are you thinking of using Facebook, Twitter, or the like in your business? Before you go any further, consider the following myths:…

Most of the marketing departments who start using social media marketing think that they need to get onto Facebook and Twitter first. Actually, there is a much better way, which also makes use of the social community advantages for your market ecosystem: private social communities. Of course many might also mistake social media marketing with Facebook, StudiVZ or Twitter only and see - rightly - no point for their target audiences engaging. Marks also makes this point here (which I also agree with except that I don’t like the examples he has chosen):

Where, then, should a small business owner go online? Often the best social networking sites are specific to business owners. For example, Intuit’s (INTU) social media people are on their own small business community. Another good one is Bank of America’s (BAC) small business community.

The reason I think these are not such good examples is that they start out with the idea to create “small business communities” when in fact there is no such thing as people looking for small business advice but they are looking for accounting, investment, IT, etc. advice. Both do that in effect, of course, but should change their headings I think.

To make the same point less controversial sounding he could have asked “when to use public social media services and when to build your own?”.

To give you my opinion right away: I can’t imagine that Motorola and Verizon will by addressing some of the possible shortcomings of the iPhone ecosystem make their own Droid launch a success. Product management is more complicated than looking at  the market leader, writing down all its product specs and then simply bringing out a product that shows better features. This strategy succeeds only in a commodity market. But Apple and the iPhone, app store, iTunes ecosystem is NOT a simple product only but a thought-through end-to-end user experience product & service offering. The Motorola and Verizon folks have obviously still not understood this otherwise they would not have launched such a desperate campaign merely addressing - mostly - features. The strongest point was the openness of Google’s Android platform but also here they did a quick-and-dirty job. Not surprising knowing how desperate Motorola is these days to finally get back on track with a successful mobile phone after its long-time-ago success of the Razr.

But if you want to tackle Apple then you must take them on in a completely different way. And I think they are vulnerable because any company who is arrogant will miss opportunities or simply not do the best job possible. History has shown that over and over again. Unfortunately the Indian or Chinese style of product management, comparing spec sheet features one by one is not enough to make an impact. This has to be done differently…

Ever so often I take out some older DVDs to watch them. Last night I picked one of my favorites, Out of Africa (from 1985, 7 oscars), with Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Klaus Maria Brandauer. I asked myself then why is this such a great movie. Obviously great actors and one of my favorite actresses: Meryl Streep,  who plays a baroness from the “small country next to Germany”, Denmark. Bored, feeling trapped in a men-ruled world, she decides - strangely - to break out of it all by marrying “her lover’s brother” and following him to Kenya where the British were operating a colony at the time.

Here a list of what I think makes this a great movie and what you can learn from it if you are in product marketing and also trying to run a campaign that gets attention, makes a difference and will be remembered:

• Something unknown: Africa and what to expect there are as interesting for the audience as for Karen Blixen
• Story: clearly a great story is told in this movie, and in addition Karen Blixen is a great story teller
• Adventure: going to Kenya at the time was clearly a big adventure and I suppose one of the main reasons, next to the bad weather in England, why they went there
• Love: great love story, no great movie without that
• Freedom: flying above the endless colorful African grasslands and mountains must be a fantastic experience; I always enjoyed flying across the flat land expanding from the Silicon Valley to the Sierra Nevada in a small plane, but to do this in Africa must be even more stunnin
• Beauty: beautiful actors and landscape as mentioned
• Drama: love alone won’t be enough, only the opposite makes it like a real life story
• Women in work life: clearly Karen Blixen is in her time what many working women are in business life today: independence-seeking, competent, hard working, fact-oriented, apolitical, detail-observing, listening, good communicators, tough but fair…, an interesting subject for many, not only women

Enjoy the weekend.

Kenya picture, courtesy of Ben Heine.

LinkedIn, the professional contact social network, is somewhat in the shadow of its much more visible rivals Facebook, Myspace or - recently - Twitter. For business users LinkedIn is in my opinion the strongest public social network tool I can think of. I also tried out XING, its German rival, but dropped it after finding little other than job seekers in it. LinkedIn on the other hand becomes a very very strong tool once you have 100+ or so contacts as you can then get in contact via InMail with many people that you might want to do business with. And with every new contact you sign on the network grows exponentially. What most people don’t know is that LinkedIn was started also by a German: Konstantin Guericke. Recently LinkedIn has been trying to also include more social communication features such as e.g. a status line on what you are working on.

I think they could easily also include more of what Facebook and Twitter have to offer and with that get the network growing some more. One key difference is that LinkedIn are far less willing to share their API with developers; this may be a benefit in some ways but it does limit the ways that LinkedIn can be tied into the user’s life. Another way they might expand is that they could start a LinkedIn Junior or something like that to attract younger folks as well. But whichever way you look at it, LinkedIn is a big success story and all the folks who have been involved deserve a lot of respect.

Recently I have been hearing in various places that print news were recovering, triggering comments of relief (from the newspapers) that predictions that everything was heading online were obviously not correct. I had a smile on my face when I read that, and it reminded me of a short-term assignment I had more than ten years ago with Bertelsmannn BMG in Hong Kong, where I had to plan for a data center for their AsiaPac countries. BMG was already thinking then about distributing music over the Internet and for that purpose went into the Internet access business. They formed a joint venture with - at that time market leader - AOL and even built their own country-wide access networks in Germany, as well as buying providers in other countries. Of course they did not realize that the Internet is a shared medium and it therefore did not make too much sense to buy it like a print or CD manufacturing plant.  Back to Hong Kong: as the data center did not seem to make economic sense at the time I suggested to them that I help with setting up an online music sales operation testing the waters in the AsiaPac region first (at that time dial-up was still to be found everywhere). Despite their investment into the AOL joint venture and into whole country IP networks (in Hong Kong we had the option to buy Hong Kong SuperNet, the city’s first and largest ISP) they looked quite puzzled about my offering and had one question only: how do we protect ourselves from illegal pirate downloads and distributions? My response was that there are technical methods even if not all can be protected, but most importantly we cannot sit and wait until it happens anyway. So still they turned the idea down and I moved on as well…

By now we all know what happened: a fruit company from Cupertino sells more than 50% of all music online and is taking the profits. Not only Bertelsmann BMG but all the other music labels lost the race to a company that had no idea about the music label business and its distribution at all.

So while the music industry shift online is done and one company dominates it, I am convinced we will see the same in the print media. And it looks like it might be the same fruit company eying for it. Read I. Cringley’s latest article on this, providing more background info. Interesting to read that he had the exact same experience in the print publication industry (in 1994 already) that I had in the music industry. History repeats itself, it seems, telling us that if you wait too long someone else will come and take that opportunity.

While there are some signs of recovery, it seems a slow moving process and many companies are still having a hard time planning their budgets for longer than just a few months ahead. Also the question comes up what to do in marketing. Will people even be open to what you do? Or should you save that money entirely?

Tools that I feel will still work are:

• video casts of products, your company; insightful interviews of your customers (needs someone doing the interviews who understands your business otherwise will be worthless small talk or high-level surface scratching); and something that you can try out as well are animated presentations with spoken text. This is easier to do as you don’t need video interview skills.
• virtual events: as VMWare and others have shown, you can increase the audience by 3-5x with a virtual event site that gives every participating company their own space. When travel costs are being cut, that seems the way to still have people engaged even if they might not physically attend the event
• interactive sites, if you are able to hook your target group with interesting discussions on hot subjects in your product market this should draw attention; and if you manage to get many to even leave comments, you have achieved the best one can expect from a product marketing tool. These social community sites require very careful and skilled planning, though. Also cultural aspects inside and outside your company need to be taken into account. You cannot just buy a community software tool and set it all up in a week. While technically possible, it will definitely not fly. Still, many software vendors try to make you believe a community is just another simple collaboration tool like chatting or project collaboration. But it is simply not so!
• fun sells: it requires a bit of courage to use fun elements such as cartoons but, if you do, it will draw attention. It’s important that the fun is linked with what you do and not simply a general cartoon or joke
• webinars save people the time and expense of attending a seminar but, as with e-newsletters, I feel though there are many webinars offered, maybe too many? The beauty is nevertheless that you need only one participant and it is still worth doing as also on your side the cost is minimal. So I would try them still. Maybe you get some initial prospects. Be aware though that you need to do a personal invitation as well, which means more than sending out a general e-mail to your e-mail list!
• banner ads: if you want to make them effective then you need to spend a good amount of money making them very big and displaying them on highly trafficked sites where you expect your target group to go. A small banner ad next to half a dozen others will not be worth the money you have spent.

Tools that seem to have lost its magic:

• e-newsletters, I get much less than a few years ago when everyone sent out a newsletter and really expected that people would read them. I think they don’t unless you have something super interesting to say. Also if you do it it needs to be done very well incl. the design. The standard e-newsletters are not good enough. There are better ways now too such as RSS or community sites to do the same or even better.
• e-mailings, I think with RSS e-mailing campaigns have lost their raison d’aitre. Still there are many out who still spam the inboxes of their target groups. More annoying than effective I would think unless, again, it is a personal email but that is hard to do.

Update: and a more generic slide on Marketing 3.0 from Phil Kotler.

This video here was also posted on Techcrunch yesterday. While it is intended to be funny, I think it contains a bit of truth. Question now is if this is done totally on purpose as sort of unconscious brainwashing of everyone listening to this or if the Apple folks simply don’t know any other adjectives than:

great    easy    awesome   incredible    amazing

Or, and that is certainly a good part of it too, they are highly passionate and excited about their own work, which is one of the best sales and marketing attributes you can have.

This long time discussion is still open, as viewed on Bazaarvoice’s blog and classic post by Pete Blackshaw from whom also comes the table below. He thinks marketers are still in control - I guess he simply has to.