I hope you’re healthy and holding up well in the COVID-19 lockdown and seeing the same demand I’m seeing for COVID-19 product messaging. Having been around the block with a number of such projects, here are nine tips for making such messaging work best. Go easy on the “We hope you’re safe and the health […]

In the past I’ve argued for the value of sharing more, rather than less, of your consulting smarts in your thought leadership content and case studies. Yet I keep running into resistance when I ask for examples of how my clients work their magic with customers and specifics of the challenges they’ve overcome for them. […]

In the six years since I first visited Red Hat’s user show,  open source software has become the default choice for enterprise applications and the cloud infrastructures on which they run. This year’s Red Hat Summit provided a  good look at how the open source vendor’s products are evolving and being marketed as it prepares […]

Whenever a buzzword gets hot, you can expect lazy marketers to start pasting it on every product or service in sight. When two buzzwords get popular at the same time, expect double the hype. So it is with the two hot high-profile trends of security and artificial intelligence (AI). Security is a big deal because […]

News flash (or not): Too much of our marketing content stinks. Who says? More than 250 global technology decision makers surveyed by Forrester Research. 57% said “most of the material is useless.” 66% said “vendors provide me too much material to sort through” 60% said they get most of their information from other sources. What’s […]

Between waves of new technology and political and economic jitters, 2019 will be an extremely noisy marketing environment. Getting and keeping the attention of IT buyers will be harder than ever. Here are three of the biggest IT growth areas I’m seeing from my work with clients, and suggestions for practical messaging that will lift you […]

There’s a lot of talk about the need to make marketing content funny and edgy enough to rise above a sea of “me-too” blather. Yet too many of my clients continue to play it safe – too safe, to my mind, to accurately describe the real business problems they help their customers solve. If, for […]

With winter coming, it’s time to think about soups. Not as in savory stews, but in the unsavory slop we dish out when we carelessly talk about “transformation.” Blending the various definitions without thinking dilutes the message and leaves prospects confused, rather than wanting to learn more. More than seven years ago (yikes!) I first […]