Blog

It’s not easy for a b2b tech company to break through in a media environment that spends such an inordinate amount of time reporting on the big tech companies, scandals, and, well, big tech companies involved in scandals. Editorial teams continue to shrink and very few dedicate resources to product news anymore. Real-world customer stories stillRead more

I recently binge watched Amazon’s new take on Tom Clancy’s CIA-analyst-turned-field-operative, Jack Ryan (played by John Krasinksi, formerly John Halper in “The Office”). Early in episode one, when the higher-ups at the C.I.A. strongarm Ryan to strap on a SIG-Sauer P226 and hop on a plane to fight terrorists in Yemen, he delivers his takeRead more

I had the opportunity to attend my first Content Marketing World in Cleveland a few months back and I was really energized by the quality of the sessions, the closing keynote by the inimitable Tina Fey, and also just the sheer number of attendees. So many content marketers, all eager to share best practices andRead more

I had the chance to catch several interesting sessions at the bigger-and-badder-than-ever SaaStr 2018 in San Francisco last week. I was pleasantly surprised to see and hear content coming up more and more in the panels and conversations. Pixar and Prezi talked about the power of visual storytelling. Various CMOs on different panels talked aboutRead more

It took longer than people expected, but the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) came down hard on Theranos yesterday — banning the company and its CEO from owning or operating a medical lab for two years. As I’ve written before, this is an important story for Silicon Valley business and marketing leaders toRead more

Unicorns aren’t dead yet, though some would like them to be. Others claim we’re now in a “post-unicorn” world. Whatever the future holds, the class of $1B+ private companies continues to expand and contract weekly – providing a valuable microcosm to understand today’s tech trends and startup dynamics. To that end, we’re launching the first complete study thatRead more

Silicon Valley continues to be in the news for the wrong reasons. Theranos is the leading culprit – though not the only one – and it’s important for Valley companies to track what’s happening in the broader communications environment. Crises rarely just impact one company. They tend to drag down a category of like companies (at leastRead more

Unicorns are a phenomenon. Over the past 18 months, they have gone from mythical creature to tech meme – spawning greed and envy for global entrepreneurs, investors and recruiters, while feeding the tech media engine with endless news stories, leader boards and Fortune cover stories. The “unicorn” concept was coined in Nov’13 by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, and refers to privately held start-upRead more

Impressions are definitely not what they seem. At first, they were used as a foundational unit of measure for publishers and advertisers, who built an entire economy negotiating to buy impressions by the thousands. They evolved into a lingua franca of marketing measurement, providing a comparable way to evaluate reach (impressions) and efficiency (CPM) acrossRead more

As a long-time content marketer and public relations guy, I was intrigued — and conflicted — to see this headline yesterday: PR is 80% more effective than marketing Skipping past the headline capitalization issues (“Is” should be and “than” should not), half of me screamed “yes” and half of me sighed “oh no.” Then the data junkieRead more