“In a hostile learning environment, entrepreneurs gain relatively little benefit by watching others. For example, if the relevant knowledge is protected intellectual property, studying the market before entering wouldn't yield much advantage. In these situations, the trade-off favors entering early. But in less hostile learning environments, where entrepreneurs gain valuable information likely to increase their success just by watching other companies, companies benefit from waiting and learning lessons from earlier players.”

Apple’s App Store was launched after massive pre-launch hype, at a huge press event and was a “first mover advantage” success. Stock charts for Apple after the launch tell the ongoing story of Apple’s successes as my colleague Nathan Rudyk points out in his blog post here.

RIM launched the second “global” App store, called BlackBerry App World. The BlackBerry App World launch profited by lessons learned from Apple’s App Store’s profile building. Walt Mossberg, author and creator of the weekly Personal Technology column in The Wall Street Journal, described his BlackBerry App World experience and summarized his article with this point:

“BlackBerry fans unfamiliar with the iPhone won’t care about some of these comparisons, of course. They will, and should, just be happy that their phones are now much richer and more versatile devices. And, in the end, that’s what counts. RIM is now truly in the platform game, which will make its products more attractive and could make its shareholders richer.”

David Pett’s recent National Post article, Research in Motion ready to ride the rapids, describes RIM successes. Jim Suva, Citigroup Global Markets analyst, maintains his "buy" rating on RIM stock and left his US$100 price target (from today’s price of $92.33/share) unchanged. Second-mover advantage anyone?

(Jill McCubbin is a conversation architect with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency.)

Bruce Cockburn is one of my favourite singer-songwriters, and if I'm having a really tough day with no end in sight his left-wing lyrical rant against right wing ideologies invades my brain: "The trouble with normal is it always gets worse." Fortunately, the clouds always clear and I'm soon humming something more happy like "I get by with a little help from my friends."

Right now, there's no end in sight for Canada's IT skills shortage. Not enough high school students are considering a career in high tech. The siren call of life sciences and (until recently) hedge fund jobs, compounded by the lingering effects of the "dot-bomb" era, has taken its toll. As worrying, the students who do decide to pursue IT programs at the post-secondary level are having a hard time surviving once they're in. Streamlined high school programs just don't give them the core skills they need, and too many drop out.

What does this mean for our economy? According to the Conference Board of Canada, a "perfect storm" of socio-demographic factors, negative perceptions of the tech sector following the bubble burst of 2002, and a significant drop in university enrolment in IT programs across Canada have combined to create a situation where more than 90,000 jobs in the information technology sector will need to be filled in the next two to four years and could potentially impact the Canadian economy to the tune of $10.8 billion, or $120,000 per job, if they can't be filled.

With Canada's highest concentation of creative class jobs, the City of Ottawa's economic development organization, OCRI, simply can't afford to let this brand of normal get worse. So last fall OCRI brought industry partners/mentors from IBM Canada, Macadamian Technologies, Nortel and Ontario Centres of Excellence to create a pilot Ottawa High School Technology Program to turn kids on to IT careers. Our company created a social-media-enabled Web site last fall, and we were tapped to do public relations to call attention to the fact that this program can and should be supported provincially, and even nationally.

So far, the PR campaign has attracted coverage from CTV, CBC, the Ottawa Business Journal, ITWorldCanada, and several other interviews are in the works with both regional and national media. Intranets from program partner companies are also going to carrry our message to thousands of employees.

So, want to help capture a $10.8 billion IT opportunity for Canada? Spread the word by emailing this blog post (see below) about the Ottawa High School Technology Program, especially to your local school board, MPP or MP. Thanks!

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency. He encourages his three teenagers to pursue IT careers to the point of distraction.)

I just listened to a CFRA AM radio podcast interview with respected automotive analyst Dennis DesRoisiers who said the $15 Billion Canada is giving to prop up General Motors and Chrysler could otherwise underwrite the salaries of 20,000 engineers for THREE YEARS to totally reinvent the automobile as we know it.

He goes on to say that the same money (which he posits could easily balloon to $20 billion or $30 billion) could build six or seven assembly plants, or up to 1,000 state-of-the-art parts plants to supply healthy versus utterly broken not to mention bankrupt car companies.

All of this with no serious debate among politicians on any inkling of an alternative industrial innovation policy. Why not give a couple of billion to my former digIT Interactive partner Ian Clifford to advance his made-in-Canada ZENN Motor Company and interest in EEStor battery technology and see what he can do to create a Canadian electric car industry? Seriously.

(June 2nd update: Or what about Frank Stronach, who has announced that he'd like to build an electric car in Canada within the next three years! He only wants a loan, but based on the current rate of car company largess and his track record, he deserves at least $4 billion cash.)

Hopefully wiser minds prevail before the price-tag on these ill-considered bail-outs doubles due to "unforseen market forces", such as, oh, steadily shrinkiing market share, zero small car strategy (even as BMW brilliantly executed the Mini and Mercedes the Smart YEARS AGO), over-reliance on gas-guzzling Jeeps and Hummers in the face of peak oil, or consumer apathy on shallow badge engineering concepts that made Pontiacs look like plasticized Chevs and Oldsmobiles look like nothing you'd want in your own or your grandfather's driveway.

Give the DesRoisiers interview a listen. Keep the bucket and sawdust close by. These car company bail-outs are nothing short of an abomination to innovation.

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency. He drives a Subaru and his wife drives a Ford.)

Betty Beard's article in today's Arizona Republic business section makes a solid case for why postcard marketing with digital campaign management is a great green alternative to the old fashioned approach to direct mail. AmazingMail's CEO Chris Lynde, one of market2world's newest clients, is also quoted extensively. Before we get to Chris, consider the following points summarized from Betty's story:

1. "Spray-and-pray" direct-mail has seen its influence as a high-volume mass-oriented response driver all but vanish with dramatically rising postal costs and consumer fatigue.
2. Consumers are demanding green alternatives from the companies they do business with, and increasingly resent random "junk mail" from organizations they have never done/don't intend to do business with.
3. The recession's provoked companies and nonprofit businesses alike (nonprofits should check out AmazingCauses!) to cut marketing costs and get smarter about targeting.
4. While digital (email/Web) channels are great marketing vehicles, "high touch", targeted postcard marketing to relevent customers and prospects is an essential tool to efficiently lead them to the digital channels of their choice.
5. With the growth of do-not-call registries and email spam filters, targeted postcard marketing that doesn't resort to "cheque in the letter" or heavily plasticized scratch and save tricks, is a straight-forward, environmentally friendly way to reach people.

Chris Lynde sums it up well in the Arizona Republic:

Electronic communication is likely to change the industry for good, said Chris Lynde, president and chief executive officer of AmazingMail.com Inc. He said that when the economy recovers, the volume of paper direct mail may not return to its former level because more services will switch to digital.

AmazingMail has a system that Lynde believes gives marketers what they need today.

It starts direct-mail campaigns by sending prospective customers a large, glossy postcard printed in a Phoenix plant. The postcard gives consumers a variety of ways to respond, including e-mailing, text-messaging or by phone.

Lynde believes that making initial contact with a postcard is still the most effective because so many people are on do-not-call registries or block unwanted e-mails with filters.

"What we recommend to our clients is they always lead with a postcard and give their customers the opportunity to voice how they would like to be communicated with," Lynde said.

Want to try it? AmazingMail's got a limited time offer that will give you 10 free personallzed postcards. Click here and go for it!

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency.)

“Back in August 2008 we reported on 18 chief executives who use the microblogging application Twitter to clue customers in on new services, help them with questions about their products, and generally get a little bit personal with customers, business associates, and the public.

Not even a year later, we bring you nearly 50 CEOs who find tweeting a personal and professional delight. Twitter's growth has been astounding...”

Twitter is a free micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Looking for more reasons to try Twitter?

“Eat like a bird, and poop like an elephant.” (Japanese quote)

Yes. This is a sound business benefit and is exactly what you want to be doing as the CEO of a thriving business, SMB or multinational. You want to “give out or give back more than you take in” – something that former Apple employee and current design evangelist, Garr Reynolds’ advocates in his Presentation Zen blog, and author, Silicon Valley venture capitalist and 88th most popular blogger in the world, Guy Kawasaki also reinforces in his How to Change the World blog. (Guy is one of the CEOs featured in Tweets from the Chiefs. Among his many ventures, he's co-founder of Nononina, the company that created the Truemors and Alltop websites.)

According to Guy, in his "How to evangelize a blog" post, giving out more than you take in is a form of marketing your blog and your good ideas, and has a boomerang effect that returns business benefits to you. It works like this:

There's a very interesting honor system in blogging. Suppose Blogger A finds an obscure article and posts it to his blog. Blogger B reads about it on Blogger A's blog and links to it. However Blogger B doesn't link only to the article; she also links to Blogger A to give him credit for finding the article.

Bottom line: if you want lots of people to link to your blog, read voraciously and find cool stuff first.

Acknowledge and respond to commenters. Only good things can happen when you read all the comments in your blog and respond to them. It makes commenters return to your blog. This, in turn, makes commenters feel like they are part of your blog's community which makes them tell more people to read your blog.

Bottom line: you should enable your readers to get to your blog in multiple ways. It's no different than distributing physical products through multiple channels.

CEOs: By using Twitter for micro-blogging and blogging consistently at your company blog, you increase opportunities to broaden your customer community.

(Jill McCubbin is a conversation architect with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency.)

Make an insanely useful smartphone device, and they will come, and they will surf.

As a fairly recent iPhone convert (awaiting some billing shock after a recent U.S. client trip where I could have likely justified a Rogers plan upgrade), I found this Fortune Apple 2.0 report by Philip Elmer-DeWitt astounding.

Elmer-DeWitt's report cites stats AdMob Mobile Metrics that say the iPhone OS has only 8% of global smartphone market share, but generates 43% of mobile Web requests and 65% of HTML usage. Other stats:

Of the 7.5 billion AdMob ads displayed on mobile devices in 160 countries around the world, 2 billion were displayed on iPhones or iPod touches

In the United States, 20% of ad requests come from iPhones, 14.8% from iPod touches (globally, those numbers are 15.1% and 11%, respectively)

Apple’s share of U.S. ad requests grew 5.6% month over month

The iPhone’s share grew 3% in April; the iPod touch’s grew 2.6

Can't wait till the next great iPhone app PR launch for one of our clients to make those numbers pop higher!

(May 28th update: And here's a recent, excellent, Macworld review of an iPhone app we launched in March, Marketcircle's Daylite Touch.)

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency.)

Over the years I've had the distinct pleasure of contributing tech commentary to both CTV Ottawa (formerly CJOH-TV) in addition to being called on by BNN, Canada's national business news network. I received an email in advance of last weekend's "Save Local TV" open house from Paul Brent, CTV Ottawa's respected Tech Now show host, saying that his station's getting squeezed from two ends – recession-driven advertising cut-backs and the increasing diet for social media that parks previously TV-oriented people in front of their computer screens while they participate on Facebook and YouTube.

The good news is that 2,500 friends, advertisers and loyal viewers turned up to CTV Ottawa's studios to express support on the weekend. The other news is that CTV stations are sustained on a steady diet of "me-too" American programming that can be accessed across a multitude of on-demand digital channels on and off the Internet.

My take is that Paul and the local news team, including community-minded luminaries like Max Keeping, Leanne Cusack, Leigh Chapple and Norm Fetterley, must be unleashed to produce what Carleton University J-school professor Chris Dornan calls "hyper-local" news and community cultural programming that's not easily duplicated elsewhere.

It's no huge secret that one of the last areas of growth in the newspaper biz is community papers. My friends Rob and Kris Riendeau at theHumm, a hyper-local community newspaper in market2world's hometown of Almonte are putting one of their biggest issues to bed as I write this. It's been the same for the last several months. No recession there.

Forget about Desperate Housewives. They'll remain desperate on a galaxy of other channels. Given what and who they know and how committed they are to Ottawa, the CTV Ottawa news team could skillfully take on a distinct hyper-local point-of-view like Ottawa AM radio station CFRA, and with on-air tie-ins to social media (recognizing that many people watch TVs with their laptops or iPhones by their sides) that engage viewers real-time in Web-enabled conversations about local issues, news and people that make Ottawa happen.

Is it a quick fix? Doubt it, but experienced local news reporters and producers could, I suspect, make it happen faster than the meetings at CTV HQ to provide the hyper-local mandate. The quick fix currently being recommended involves porting revenue (via service price hikes) from cable and satellite providers to help pay the costs of the local stations. I'm not against that either, but I'd propose that any new digital content toll attach a hyper-local mandate to the recipient stations. 

It's ironic how the hyper-digital universe is driving specialization/localization in so many spheres – the exact opposite of how large-scale mainstream media has (previously) succeeded. The change cometh no matter what.

Could this approach work to save local television? What do you think? Also check out Ottawa Bus Operator Randy Martin's "Save Local 'A' and Ottawa CTV Facebook Group" here.

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency.)

I love it whenever entrepreneurs build technology that gives other entrepreneurs a way to run circles around much larger enterprises.

AmazingMail, a new market2world client, has packaged technology into a new AmazingCampaigns online service that combines direct mail and digital marketing in a platform that within 24 hours can execute an automated, multi-channel (Web/mobile/print/email) marketing campaign that delivers personalized (versus "spray and pray") offers to as few as one, or as many as a million-plus prospects.

It gets better. If you want to "juice" your prospect list, AmazingCampaigns features include the ability to produce statistically modeled, ranked, and scored lists that respond up to eight times better than a standard list. This technology – known in the direct marketing game as "predictive analytics" – is commonly used by large enterprise marketers and came from CopperKey Technologies. To see how predictive analytics works for small business, read this 2007 article by Jessica Sebor in DestinationCRM.

AmazingMail's direct marketing CEO Chris Lynde and Marketing VP Peter Vanderlee worked together at CopperKey before joining AmazingMail earlier this year. Peter and I also go back to our agency days in Toronto in the early 90s where we serviced accounts including Dell, EDS, IBM, Microsoft and Xerox. We have continued to find many ways to collaborate as we share our lifelong passion for building technology-based businesses.

Chris and Peter have assembled an aggressive team to build AmazingMail from its current revenue base of $15 million a year, and I look forward to spending time with them next week at their Phoenix-AZ headquarters to get their business blogging efforts underway in support of their PR campaign.

Watch for AmazingMail's AmazingCampaigns service as we ramp up to a major launch at the the Direct Marketing Association's DMA09 in October. The DMA09 conference is the largest gathering of direct marketing professionals in the world and those professionals should prepare to be amazed!

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency.)

Sometimes, a tech CEO just nails it when it comes to positioning a product or service.

Last night I spent some time rewriting a client's draft customer success story. In the story, the cool hosted service was repeatedly referred to as a great/innovative/efficient TECHNOLOGY.

And then today I read FreshBooks CEO Mike McDerment's interview with start-up guru and author Dharmesh Shah, where McDerment says the operative word for his online invoicing software is not technology, but EXPERIENCE. It's a lesson too many tech entrepreneurs learn way too late. So here's an excerpt from the McDerment-Shah interview I hope you'll enjoy. It's great stuff:

First and foremost, we try to make sure we know what business we are in. While we are the leader in online invoicing, we are actually in the experience delivery business. I think business people often forget this. To remind us and guide us, we have a concept known as 4E which stands for “Execute on Extraordinary Experiences Everyday”. Let me break 4E down with some examples.

“Execute” underscores the importance of getting things done. FreshBooks is an idea factory. Everyone here is creative and full of ideas about how to continually improve the business (for ourselves, for our customers, and for our partners). Ideas are great, but execution is everything.

“Extraordinary” means exceeding expectations, and this can be more easily achieved than you might think. For example, you don’t “expect” to get a live person on the phone when you call a website - therefore it’s extraordinary when you call us and speak with a real live person. How about getting a call from the CEO of your invoicing service to go out for dinner – were you expecting that? Probably not.

As I mentioned, “Experience” delivery is the business we are in at FreshBooks. You thought we were in invoicing? We earn money because we provide extraordinary experiences to the people who use our service. This manifests itself in our application design, and the overall user experience when people interact with the FreshBooks team (both online and off). It also applies to how we treat people we work with, and the sorts of people we hire. Why? Because if your workday is an extraordinary experience, that will rub off on your work and the customers you serve.

“Everyday” is a cautionary reminder to ensure that every experience our customers enjoy is extraordinarily executed, and that means doing it every day. If someone calls us and encounters impatience when they need customer care - that shatters their extraordinary experience. When they encounter a bug in the application, again – experience shattered. Therefore, we strive for unrelenting execution, everyday.

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency.)

An example of U.S. President Barack Obama’s vision for urban America already exists less than 100 km from the U.S. border – in Ottawa, Canada. It’s the same city, and the only Canadian city, that McKinsey & Co., partnered with the World Economic Forum, has dubbed an “Innovation Hot Spring”. Innovation Hot Springs are fast-growing hubs on track to becoming world players.

Source: Juan Alcacer, Harvard Business School and New York University; McKinsey analysis

Like all major Canadian cities, Ottawa is densely populated, safe, has a strong middle class, and good public schools. Canada offers universal healthcare, an open immigration policy, and a strong social safety net – programs Americans justifiably aspire to, but do not yet enjoy. Ottawa also boasts more than 1,800 technology companies and a recession-buffering government sector due to its national capital designation.

Prof. Richard Florida, who moved from Washington D.C. to become director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto to continue his pioneering work on the role of the creative class, has confirmed Ottawa’s desirability. The award-winning author of Who’s Your City, Canadian Edition, rates Ottawa “Best Overall” for families, mid-career professionals and retirees, with close seconds for singles (behind Calgary) and empty nesters (behind Toronto). As well, at 43%, Ottawa has a higher proportion of creative class workers than any city in Canada and also beats out New York, San Francisco and London, England. 

McKinsey’s analysis of the world’s most successful innovation clusters shows that they have first established themselves as world-class players in an emerging specialty before expanding. This focus allows them to concentrate limited resources, such as labour and capital, on developing competence and credibility. When successful, the result of these first two steps is the emergence of an “Innovation Hot Spring”. This is a small and fast-growing hub that relies on a small number of companies to establish itself as a relevant world player in a narrow sector, such as Ottawa did with its Information Communications Technology (ICT) sector in the 90s.

McKinsey & Co. data now suggests that Ottawa is on its way to becoming a “Dynamic Ocean” on the world innovation map. While focus is critical for emerging innovation hubs, as they mature, they broaden their portfolios of businesses and sectors. This diversification is vital to the long-term survival of an innovation centre, allowing it to overcome unavoidable downturns that affect specific sectors and providing the impetus for continuous reinvention. New investors typically emerge in adjacent industries, or as hubs attract non-local players that want to capitalize on local infrastructure and available talent.

For Ottawa, adjacent industries to the city’s traditional ICT core include cleantech, defence and security, digital media and gaming, health and drug discovery, photonics, and wireless. Meanwhile, following the McKinsey model, non-local players including RIM, IBM, Adobe and Alcatel have taken advantage of Ottawa’s abundant population of creative class workers to staff significant R&D campuses across the city. In fact, RIM has just announced a new expansion in Ottawa for approximately 800 more hires. These global companies are attracted to Ottawa’s deep talent pool where Florida’s data indicates that 25% of the population aged 25 and up have at least a four-year degree, and Statistics Canada indicates one in nine employees is a scientist or engineer.

Then there's the lifestyle draw. A city that Mercer Human Resource Consulting ranks among the least expensive in Canada for cost of living, Ottawa also offers rich culture and recreation options that Richard Florida says attract the creative class. With over 50 festivals throughout the year and a vibrant nightlife, Canada’s Capital is home to a variety of National institutions including the Museum of Civilization, the Museum of Nature, the Museum of Science and Technology, the National Art Gallery and the National Arts Centre.

If you're a sailor, skier, climber, hiker, mud-seeking 4x4 trailblazer, jogger or golfer, Ottawa is in the midst of a giant outdoor playground featuring mountains, beaches, camping, skiing, golfing and hundreds of freshwater lakes, over 850 parks, 300 kms of biking trails and over 200 kms of cross country ski trails to enjoy. I know I do. You can too.

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency.)

I blogged about Oracle's US$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun being a portent of sunnier days in tech, and that industry veterans including John Dvorak smell a bottom in tech markets. Now, another rumbling from the Apple ecosystem.

As I pointed out the NASDAQ's holding its own so far this year while the DOW's down about 10%. Yet 90% of respondents in “the Apple market ecosystem” polled in a MacTech Magazine survey believe 2009 will be “almost as good as or better than 2008″, and 62.8% reported feeling good or great when asked about the Apple/Mac segment.

“The MacTech team decided to survey those in the market after seeing two significant trends starkly contrasting the general U.S. economic news,” said Neil Ticktin, MacTech's Editor-in-Chief and Publisher. “It’s been easy to get wrapped up in the bad news ... but the reality is that for the Mac and Apple markets, things are strong and expected to get stronger.”

And while many mainstream media outlets across North America are under stress, MacTech’s advertising results offer a contrarian 13% increase in ad revenues 1Q09 over 1Q08.

market2world's Mac market experience matches up with MacTech's. On March 31st we worked PR on the product launch of Marketcircle Inc.'s Daylite Touch, a breakthrough iPhone/iPod Touch business productivity management application that puts an entire business in the pockets of Mac-based entrepreneurs for a fraction of the price, and a fraction of the UI hassle, of similar "enterprise" business productivity apps for the BlackBerry and other PC-biased devices. IMHO (and yes, I not only drink but help mix the Marketcircle PR Kool-Aid) Daylite Touch smashes into tiny WIFI/3G-enabled bits any reason for a Mac-based business to ever consider a BlackBerry, and gives iPhone-lusting BlackBerry users the switcher-justification they need to join the cool kids on the smartphone block.

The early sales results for Daylite Touch further tell the story that not everything goes down in a down economy. In his April 2nd blog post, two days after we launched Daylite Touch, Marketcircle's CEO Alykhan Jetha declared that "Even with sample data in Daylite Touch and a 30 day trial, we’ve broken daily unit sales records in the past couple of days."

For more proof, have a look at this year-to-date chart of the Dow, Nasdaq, Apple and Oracle. Dow, down 10%-plus. Nasdaq, holding its own. Oracle, up about 7%. Apple, up 30%-plus.

Take THAT, Mr. Downturn. Mark my words, more innovations from the likes of Marketcircle and the newly Sun-drenched Oracle are going to lead the global economy up.

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency.)

Today's US $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun by Oracle is another prophetic sign that tech is ready to rumble once again. This is a far more dynamic fit than if IBM had swallowed Sun. Together, Sun and Oracle give companies like IBM and HP a true competitor. Out of competition comes more innovation, more sales channels, and more opportunities for tech entrepreneurs to participate in the ecosystem of a newly formed I.T. powerhouse.

And this deal's not the only rumbling out there. While the Dow Jones Industrials have lost 10% on the year, The tech-heavy NASDAQ has held its own. See comparison chart below. Other tech giants like Microsoft and Cisco are sitting on motherloads of cash. Oracle's move on Sun may well motivate more deal-making and get cash moving across the tech sector.

Meanwhile, veteran tech industry observer John Dvorak smells a bottom in tech markets, saying there's significant pent-up demand for technology.

Back to the Oracle-Sun deal, Enterprise 2.0 guru/blogger Mike Gotta speculates that one of the jewels in the Sun crown is a Corporate Facebook platform called SunSpace that includes a set of algorithms complimenting ones "Oracle acquired from Tacit and BEA (Pathways) to analyze a variety of network relationships across people, artifacts, activities, etc."

Powerful, innovative stuff. Just the kind of thing the tech industry needs to drive new demand.

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency.)

We've blogged in this space about "business tweeting" and indeed we're learning every day how useful Twitter is to forge new and sometimes faster relationships with journalists, bloggers and build stronger bonds with customers.

In today's Financial Times, Charlene Li, social media analyst with the Altimeter Group, was quoted by Left Coast Tech Correspondent Chris Nuttall saying "Real-time content and data are almost becoming the new TV. Instead of watching pre-programmed TV, you're watching the activity of the world go by and, in particular, that of the friends you find interesting. It's mesmerising and addictive."

Indeed, over the Easter weekend my 15-year-old son Gabe, after channel-surfing his grandparents' vast cable TV offerings, thanked us for "not allowing us to waste our lives watching this crap". Then, abandoned in a septagenarian household without bandwitdth, he grabbed my iPhone so he could tune into his Facebook feeds to interact with the real lives of his friends versus passively consume the fictional lives of the TV characters on Friends.

Who knows, maybe he'll require social media/"lifestreaming" rock star Robert Scoble's five screens to keep up with Scoble's astounding 5,000 Facebook friends, 13,000 (now available real-time via their new Beta) FriendFeed subscriptions and the 86,000 people on Twitter he's following. More likely, I suspect my son will be telling me about a cool new iPhone app that makes sense and intelligence out of Scoble's information-overload frontier and delivers "must interact" information to a palm-sized footprint.

A more measured, less breathless take on the Twitter phenemonen comes from The National Post's Jon Chevreau, who wrote extensively about technology both as a reporter and PR pro in the 80s and 90s, tried and ditched Facebook, but wrote last week on his blog that he finds Twitter "slightly more appealing" and is going to try it out as part of his Web 2.0 toolkit.

And if the whole idea of real-time media streaming of social networks gives you a case of "So when do people do any WORK?" cynicism, please have a laugh and a look at the "Trouble with Twitters" animated short from SuperNews:

(Nathan Rudyk is President and CEO with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency.)

Working with market2world, ICBA recently launched www.icbamembers.com. This site is an online, members-only marketing portal which hosts the organization’s overview video and quarterly newsletter archive among other new marketing tools, and also offers Trade Credit Insurance Insights – the International Credit Brokers Alliance blog.

A week before the first ICBA blog post went up on January 4, 2009, a global team of three ICBA brokers – two executives from Millennium Credit Risk Management (ICBA Canada) and another from International Risk Consultants (IRC) (ICBA U.S.A.) – met with market2world CEO Nathan Rudyk to participate in a Skype-enabled, online Webinar to review blogging best practices, establish a target audience for the team blog and research newsworthy topics for the initial posts. The ICBA blogging team was set on fire! The result: eleven blog posts in the first two months of the blog – all offering insightful opinions about the state of the global economy and the trade credit insurance industry. Additional posts include excerpts from the new ICBA Advantage newsletter, giving that content a new online audience.

This slide is from a marketing strategy presentation delivered earlier this month to ICBA’s steering committee.

The Google Analytics pie chart below shows most Web traffic to icbamembers.com is coming from ICBA bloggers’ home countries (ICBA bloggers reap what they sow!), but visitors from more than 26 countries are taking advantage of the blog content as well. To that end ICBA (with market2world’s help) is currently requesting and encouraging more international contributors to the blog.

A market2world-led thought-leadership PR campaign aimed at financial media is the next logical marketing move for ICBA. Reporters and bloggers discussing the economic cycle and current credit crisis need new insights, information and experts to interview. The ICBA international team is now in position!

Stay tuned for news about ICBA, but get in touch with market2world now if you think your company would benefit from starting a team blog, building an online marketing resource centre, or creating a thought leadership PR campaign that builds on your blogging efforts.

(Jill McCubbin is a conversation architect with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency.)

• Include a link! 70% of retweets include an url (see below graph from www.danzarella.com)

• Post original tweets during regular business hours. Most retweets occur between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., peaking in the afternoon at around 3:00 p.m. EST.

• Twitter your latest blog entry. Posts that include the words “blog” and “new blog post” are among the most common words that are retweeted (which bodes well for blogging CEOs)

“We're not really looking at short-term ROI in terms of sales. We're looking to form life-long relationships with our customers, and we think Twitter helps us do this,” says Tony Hsieh, the twittering CEO of Zappos.com, an online shoe and accessories store. Writing about everything from company announcements to shoe giveaways, Hsieh, the 20th most popular person on Twitter according to twitterholic.com, is attracting thousands of new followers a day by being the 25th most retweet-worthy person in the world, tracked by retweetrank.com. See a full live page of people retweeting him. With every retweet he, and his company, are exposed to whole new set of people. Here’s a great example: RT @zappos: At Celebrity Apprentice viewing upstairs at Hot Rod Grille in Henderson. Stop by if you're around, it's a @Zappos task episode! On March 8, 2009 Hsieh was retweeted 127 times! Since joining the micro-blogging site in late 2007, Zappos.com revenue has grown 30%, with 75% of customers being return shoppers.

“The customers that are following @zappos on Twitter seem to really enjoy it because it allows them to interact with us on a much more personal level. I've heard anecdotally of people buying from us because of our Twitter presence,” said Hsieh in an interview.

The list of the top 100 Twitter users is filled with CEOs, including Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media (#85), Jack Dorsey, Twitter.com (#37), and Kevin Rose, Digg.com (#11). "Twitter is another way for us to get news out about Digg. Whether it's company announcements or sharing [our] casual information, Twitter is a great way to quickly reach people," says Rose.

Retweeting helps the power of the community to take over. It allows a single (CEO) voice to be amplified by the voice of the crowd, making retweeting a powerful aspect of this social networking tool, further cementing Twitter as a valuable corporate marketing tool.

(Jennifer James is a Communications Strategist with market2world communications inc., Ottawa, Canada's tech PR and product marketing agency.)