Blogmatic

Something akin to the vanity search is the #1 search. The idea for this post came from Dan Dickinson in Montreal whose blog I recently discovered. The idea is to find five Google searches where your blog is the first item found. Blogmatic posts were top of the list for each of the five search strings below. These tend to cover most of the themes I blog on and therefore was reasonably happy with the result.

Competitive Intelligence Cycle
TheCodeFactory Ottawa
Rogers Home Phone Market Share
Kanata Centrum Coffee
Product Life Cycle VHS

How did I find my number one searches, that is the Google search magic ingredient secret to Blogmatic.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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I have watched with great interest the huge success of Steve Colbert for president on Facebook. What struck me as truly remarkable about the speed with which his facebook group grew to a million wasn’t the facebook part of it but the role TV had to play in establishing the 1,000,000 mark.

Other presidential candidates like Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton organically grew their facebook groups and it took several months. The big difference with Mr Colbert Report was announcing the group on TV and being able to harness the power of TV and Facebook together. A cross pollination of media so to speak. This is where I believe the true value of media is migrating. Using the broad reach of TV to tip the facebook epidemic Mr. Colbert is the master Maven, commanding two media at the same time and being able to measure the reach of his message.
Apply these same concepts to consumer marketing and you have a powerful new weapon to inundate unsuspecting consumers with your message in a matter of days. This probably brings new meaning to “The Medium is the Message:” this has been apparent in other forms too like texting to vote for the new American Idol and so on. Facebook brings this to a whole new level. The spectre of advertisers gathering vast amounts of facebook demographic data quickly raises its ugly head. There may actually be more value in the facebook business model by harvesting group demographics than in the community itself. Anyway I digress into some Orwellian world.

The time to a million also reinforces in my mind that TV as a media is far from dead and in fact the internet helps to make it just that much better. Where previously TV was primarily one way with the advent of facebook or other slick internet tracking tools you have a very powerful way to measure the results of your advertising and marketing programs. TV is far from dead, but the traditional programming will likely change significantly.

If only those annoying TV reality shows would finally go away.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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I am working on a very cool competitive analysis for a client right now and I feel like a detective searching for clues where the suspect has done their best to cover their tracks. As I mentioned in the about me I love going through financial statements, press releases and annual reports to get information on markets and competitors. Anyway right now I am reviewing this competitor that has struggled for the last few years.

In the years when the company under review are doing well the numbers and charts presented in their annual report were all based on absolute numbers and why not, going from $75M to $90M in one year is pretty impressive. However, when the tables turn and revenue starts to decline all of the numbers become relative. In the downward direction going from $90M to $85M is a $5M loss but, when you think of it in terms of percentages it is only a 5.5% loss, that doesn’t sound so bad. This number usually gets whittled down even further because the business decides, well those inter-unit transfers we included in last years revenue aren’t really relevant to this years results so we will just remove them. All carefully and subtly documented in the notes to the financial statements. Therefore the real 5.5% loss becomes a 1% loss which is almost break even and hey, when you think of it we still have sales in excess of $85M on a narrowing loss.

If you are reviewing a company’s financials and they speak with clarity in absolute terms this is usually a good sign. Absolute clarity tends to mean “nothing to hide”. If the company speaks in relative terms with a lot of fluffy and confusing language they probably have something to hide. When financial statements are written by senior management trying to put a positive spin on a bad situation you can usually tell. 

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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There are a couple of irrefutable properties related to the product life cycle. The one I would like to talk about today applies primarily to consumer goods but also to some enterprise products. That is that the time to one million units on a successful product has been shrinking for decades. Marketing and distribution have improved a whole lot since the Second World War. The chart below summarizes the time to one million for a number of different products (in years).

Xbox ………………………………….. 0.1
Nintendo ……………………………… 0.5
DVD Player……………………………. 1.9
CD Player……………………………… 2.7
Big-Screen TV………………………… 4.2
VCR…………………………………….. 4.6
Color TV……………………………….. 8.8
** Source Artisan Entertainment SEC filing 333-30722 filed on 2/18/00

The time to a million with software and downloadable products will only continue to shorten the time to a million.
Next product life cycle topic “Trickledown” and not the Tragically Hip version thereof.

Have a great weekend.
Ian Graham

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Andrew Patricio shares the secret ingredients of a winning business idea. Andrew is the founder of BizLaunch in Toronto. You’ll discover where great ideas are born, hear the latest business trends, identify best businesses to start and learn how to tap into your business passion.

I know Andrew personally and he is a great presenter with a passion for entrepreneurship. If you are looking for some ideas on how to start up your business check it out.

Thurs. Nov. 8, 2007
6:30 – 8:00 p.m. 
Bell Canada Building - Lecture Hall
160 Elgin Street
Ottawa, ON K2P 2C4
 

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As I mentioned in an earlier post Apple is one of my favourite large enterprise companies and their recent Q4 results have reinforced that sentiment. Mac Sales set a new record with quarterly sales of 2,164,000 units. Overall results were impressive with revenue of $6.22B and net profits closing in on $1B. Apple is on track to exceed $20B for the first time in corporate history.

Why the resurgence in MAC sales? I am guessing you can sum it up in one word “Vista”. (check out the last paragraph from this previous Blogmatic predition)If the issues with Vista continue to cause users grief expect to see the trend in increased Mac sales continue for the next year or two. The pain threshold and new learning curve associated with using a MAC have been overcome by Vista. I am sure that there is more at work in the sales resurgence than dis-satisfied Vista users; however, I expect Vista Migration is a key contributor to the growth.

Mac Guy lands a crushing blow on the chops of the nerdy PC kid.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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I met someone recently that claimed to be able to judge a persons character within the first five minutes of meeting them. The idea is that they are such a good judge of character that this is all the time they need to make an accurate assessment of someone’s personality.

The jury is still out on this one for me. Frankly what you get in the first five minutes of meeting someone is a first impression. If you think that you are going to capture all the subtle nuances of a person’s personality traits in the first few minutes then, in my opinion, you are deluding yourself.  In fact the Macbeth type person, those that appear fair but are in fact foul are often the one’s that are best at covering their true personality. It takes time to really get to know someone which is why there is a 3 month probation period when hiring a new employee and three or four interviews in the hiring process.

If there are any budding physiologists out there I would be interested in your thoughts on how long it takes to do an accurate personality assessment.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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Your personal frame of mind will have a huge impact on how you perceive others, or how you think they perceive you.
My daughter actually inspired this post when she reminded me of a conversation we had some time ago. While at diner one weekday evening I innocuously ask her “How was your day at school today?”

She replies “Why who called you?”

Immediately my parent senses start to tingle. “Why would someone be calling?”

“Oh there may be an assignment that I forgot to hand in.” Ah ha the cat is out of the bag.

My Daughter was feeling guilty about not handing in her assignment. When I asked her a fairly routine question she immediately assumed that I knew something and because she was racked with guilt.  Her perception of my question was way off base and framed from her perspective rather than mine. Anyway an interesting anecdote I thought I would share.

Have a great weekend,
Ian Graham

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CAUTION: the post you are about to read may not be suitable for researchers, bureaucrats and policy makers.

“Researchers will use cutting-edge modeling and statistical software in a collaborative multidisciplinary environment to deal with the complex problem of determining how innovations can be used most effectively. This research will lead to the development of new tools to support decision making and policy planning, and will identify the best techniques that businesses and organizations could use to make the most of innovations as they are developed.”

Summarized in a word FLUFF!

The above paragraph (above the word fluff) is how your research and innovation dollars in Ontario are being spent. I can see the planning that went into this now: Lets get a bunch of scientists together to develop a “Model” to help shape policy making decisions determining how innovation dollars can be spent more effectively. If you wave the BS detector wand over the paragraph above it will go into the red in so many places. Let’s make a short list of detected words:

“Cutting Edge”

 “Collaborative Multidisciplinary Environment”

“Determining how innovations can be used most effectively”

“Best techniques that business and organizations COULD use to make the most of innovation”

What a totally vacuous project with no tangible objectives or measurable results. How much of these research dollars will be commercialized and create wealth for the Canadian Tax Payers that are funding this research.

You don’t use computer models and simulations to determine the effectiveness of innovation you use people and results. It really can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it.

Argh!
Ian Graham

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Something miraculous happened the other day when I was driving in the car and listening to the radio. I heard Gordon, Bell Spokes Beaver, use the “H” word. The “H” word would be home phone. Rogers has been saying home phone for well over a year and done a great job at taking a chunk of Bell’s most profitable cash cow business line. I will take a look at subscriber numbers again soon, but don’t hold your breathe.

Bell is starting to recognize the value of their home phone business and Frankly (no pun intended Mr. spokes beaver) this is good news for them. In fact Bell has a far superior home phone service to Rogers. Bell uses traditional leased line service for their home phone while Rogers uses VoIP service, in my opinion a less reliable and lower quality service. Bell should be beating up Rogers on Home Phone and why they have waited so long to jump on the home phone band wagon is beyond me.

Rogers has been having their way with Bell in the Canadian Clash of the titans and fighting all the battles so far on their turf, and winning too. Bell finally has a service offering that they can make some hay about so let’s see if they can capitalize on their new found home phone.
The battle for home phone supremacy has finally started lets see where it leads.

Cheers,
Ian Graham

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