Everything we do at mBLAST rests squarely at the intersection where marketers and their PR firms interact with Industry Influencers, aka those publications, bloggers, event organizers, awards program  organizers, analyst firms and others that “influence” what buyers buy.

That’s why we’re thrilled to add another product to that arsenal. AwardSync™ helps awards program organizers market their awards programs to a wider audience, while making it easier for marketers and PR firms to find awards programs appropriate to their business.  There’s a virtual fount of  knowledge on awards program management on AwardSync News and tips and tricks for putting your best foot forward when submitting nominations.

Check it out at www.awardsync.com.

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You may have noticed upon visiting a website or two lately a small logo on the side of the page saying, “Kill IE6.”  This is not some sort of techno James Bond thriller, it’s a movement started by many web-based business leaders to get IT departments and users to stop using Internet Explorer 6. Microsoft has said it will support for IE6 until the end of life of Windows XP, 2014 at this point.  But sites like YouTube are starting to tell users to dump IE6 in favor of IE8, Firefox 3.5 or the relatively new Google Chrome browsers.

Why pick on IE6?  A lot of the fuss is over CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, which are bits of code on a page that governs how it looks.  Many of the neat advances in usability and user interface technologies are enabled by adopting the latest versions of CSS.  Want a truly Web 2.0 site? You’re going to want to use CSS3, the present incarnation of CSS standards.  As web developers, we are unable to use some of the new useful features that CSS3 incorporates due to the large amount of people still using Internet Explorer 6, which only (barely) supports CSS2.  A group called “Kill IE6″ has formed with most of the Web’s heavyweight players on board to politely alert all IE6 users that it is recommended that they upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer, and provide a link to enable them to do so.  It’s not a competitive or anti-Microsoft move; it’s a move based in solid functional desires to be able to use the latest technologies in designing sites.  IE8 also has solid advances in the way video is handled, security is effected, and performance is achieved.  Overall, it’s only the lethargy of IT departments and their mandated IT use standards that is holding this back.

Moving customers off of IE6 to IE8 (or competitively equivalent browsers) is critical for everyone.  Right now, more than 25% of mBLAST users still use IE6 — and it’s over 8 years old.  Think about that in “Internet years” … it’s almost a century old in that mindset…downright ancient. It would be like saying that we should only show content that can be supported with dial-up Internet speeds, or ignore mobile phone interfaces.  We’re not tolerant anywhere else with such old technology, why here?  The impact on mBLAST is substantial.  All code loaded to Production has to be thoroughly tested for IE6 compliance.  If we can free those resources, we could test other newer browsers (but with a lot less marketshare) or test our existing code faster, getting more features to you sooner.

We’re asking for your support here from mBLAST customers.  We’re not going to be cutting off IE6 support anytime soon, or even optimizing for IE8 and letting users run into compatibility issues.  But we are trying to get as many people along the migration path away from IE6 so that we can, as soon as possible, start moving away from IE6 ourselves. We don’t want to wait until 2014, and apparently no one else does either.  You will start seeing mBLAST detecting and alerting IE6 users to upgrade to a newer browser, in support of this overall concept.  If you get questions on this topic, now you know why, and hopefully you’ll be supportive too.

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Seth Godin recently wrote in his blog about the CPM that event organizers face for people attending their conferences, exhibitions, tradeshows, etc.    He argues that while the costs for advertising is generally in the $5 to $20 range for reaching one thousand impressions (CPM) in a market, an event may have a CPM of $1,000,000 when one considers just the travel costs involved to attend the event.

$5 versus $1,000,000.  WOW!  Godin goes on to point out how event organizers treat their audience as royalty, as paying customers who took the time and invested the money to be there and be exposed to messages.

We won’t argue Seth’s points.  He does that well enough

We will, however, challenge event organizers to start thinking about that CPM, and how they need to expand the reach of their brand and messages to their audiences beyond the life of the event.  With a CPM that high, we believe event organizers need to start thinking about how to maximize their exposure throughout the year to attendees.

We believe events need to exist in the mind of the audience for more than the one week the event occurs each year.  This is what we call “the other 51 weeks” for an event.

Attendees spend precious time and money to travel to an event – air fare, hotel rooms (often marked up 4x in the hosting city, Vegas anyone?), food costs, etc.  And then there are the soft costs of the attendee being away from their normal work routine and paying the price of having to deal with hundreds of emails and other work waiting for them when they return.

This audience attending an event has made a serious investment to be there.  The resulting CPM for the event organizer is high because of it.   So how can we maximize that investment?

We believe event organizers should consider:

• Grabbing content (articles, reports, white papers, etc) relevant to their  event and audience from as many sources as possible, and making that content available either on the event web site (which should be kept current throughout the year), or a portal which keeps the brand alive.  Communicating daily with your audience throughout the year through a web site and / or newsletter, and ensuring they have timely information pertinent to your conference topics is one way to remain a thought leader, and has value to past and future attendees.  Through this you have relevance.  You are a thought and information leader.

• Having a “virtual” conference for the other 51 weeks in the form of a buyer’s guide on your event site.   Just because the physical vendors and their booths go home does not mean that buyers stop looking for information and can’t trust you as a source.   Putting a buyer’s guide for all conference vendors on your web site, and keeping it current is a great way to ensure your brand is a trusted source in the market.  And allowing vendors who exhibit at your event with an additional outlet for marketing their product is adding value to their costs for exhibiting and attending the physical event.

• Running awards programs throughout the year – perhaps ones that even culminate as a “best of” or grand champion at the physical event – is another great way to keep your brand alive in the mind of your market.

mBLAST can help with all of these, and can help keep your event highly relevant and alive for the “other 51 weeks” of the year, thereby ensuring that the annual event is well attended, and the CPM maximized for you as an event organizer.

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Gary Lee, VP Business Development, mBLAST

I am old.  I remember steno pools, writing memos by hand, interoffice mail, the introduction of personal computers, the shift away from terminals, dial-up, direct mail, print advertising, and many other concepts in business that many marketing professionals today shrug their shoulders and dismiss with a “I read about that somewhere.”

So as I write this as a mid-40s guy who’s been in high-tech and high-tech marketing for 25 years, I feel old, and sometimes wonder how long the pace of marketing can continue to speed up before no one is able to market anything to anyone any longer?

We used to watch commercials.  Pay attention to them.   Study them.  Talk about them.  And buy the products we saw in commercials.  Of course we also had three channels of television (black and white), manual changing of channels, and tin-foil over the antennas.  But advertising was a proud discipline.   My wife and I still laugh as we remember jingles of our youth.

My teenagers have not seen a commercial in ages.  I force them to watch the commercials during the Super Bowl, so they can pick the winners and gain an appreciation for the creative side.  But I am convinced they believe advertisements are only created for that one annual event, and they have full permission to zap the remote through any television ad, skip any radio spot, and they have not seen a print magazine or newspaper in ages.  Why bother – it’s all online they cry.

Today, tweeps and tweeples tweet.  Facebook gives me more “Friends” than I’ve had in 25 years, but I never actually talk to any of them or share a cup of coffee with them.  IM ensures that I’ll never be alone, as least among people I work with who panic if I step away for a cup of coffee and am unreachable for the 1.27 minutes it takes to walk there and back (thank God for text messaging so they can find me during those long absences).

As a marketer, we’ve gone from 30 second spots on 3 major networks reaching the mass market, to 140 character tweets updating one’s closest “friends” telling them about the bad experience we just had with a company, or a blog entry detailing how company “A” is having mass layoffs, company “B” makes products that catch on fire and / or cause hair to fall out, etc.

It’s an exciting time for marketing….and a terrifying one as well.

A blog from Rita McGrath at Harvard Business Review Voices last month pointed out that Competitive Advantages are fleeting – getting shorter and shorter than ever.  As someone who digested everything Michael Porter ever wrote on strategic advantage during my graduate studies, and in my days running startups in the telecom industry, I believe in creating sustainable competitive advantage – finding ways to build value that others cannot easily replicate and destroy.  McGrath argues that the life of a competitive advantage is nasty, brutish and short.  And only companies who can adopt this view and refocus will survive in the long run.

McGrath could be talking about today’s marketing professional, publisher and anyone involved in the hyper-changing lifecycle of marketing today.

Communication channels and methods used in marketing have changed more in the past five years than in the last fifty.   Attention spans for prospective buyers are almost non-existent, with a keen ability to filter out, tune in, and self-select messages.   Traditional thinking about products, placement, promotions and pricing – the traditional marketing mix – is all but irrelevant.

Today’s marketing professional and the market influencers they work with must adapt to new models if marketing as a discipline will continue to be a factor in creating any sort of competitive advantage for companies.

Content and distribution of content across the web is more critical than ever before.  As the global market moves toward an interconnected network of individuals, groups, buyers, rumor-mongers, “drive by” influencers, and other professionals and would-be professionals, it’s critical that marketing adopt new ways of discovering, analyzing and maintaining content across the web.

Market influencers – those publishers, editors, journalists, analysts, awards organizers and event organizers which influence what potential buyers think about a company and its products and services – must recognize that their ability to build sustainable advantage is also under attack, and radical changes are necessary.

Advertising revenue must shift away from traditional media buys, and be replaced with content-oriented advertising in buyer’s guides, product / service directories and mashups which mashup content with vendor-supplied information.   Journalists must use new means of gathering content, finding resources, and writing stories.   And readers must find a wide array of primary and secondary information in order to find relevance.

mBLAST has solutions for many of these challenges, from our software for buyer’s guides, directories and awards, to search tools for finding, managing and using information.

I may be a little old, but I am excited about the potential and possibilities ahead.  And for those companies and individuals able to adapt to these challenges, the role of marketing is more critical than ever in creating competitive advantages – fleeting though they may be – and continue to stay ahead of the competition and lead markets.

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This is the place mBLAST employees, customers and industry watchers will weigh in on topics and issues that impact the industries we touch. Come on in and join the discussion!

Let’s start off with some introductions: What’s mBLAST you ask?  Simply put, mBLAST connects Marketers (and the PR firms that represent them) with Industry Influencers (publications, bloggers, social media sources, associations, analyst firms, event organizers) so the Influencers can influence the buying decision of Buyers.

Whew, that sounds like a mouthful, but the truth is that scenario is being played out every day in every industry on the planet – end users make their purchasing decisions based on the information they gather from reading publications, following bloggers and Tweets, attending industry events, reading reviews or analyst reports, finding data in Buyer’s Guides and Directories, etc.  mBLAST’s software as a service (SaaS) solutions help both groups – the Marketers and the Influencers – do their jobs more effectively.

For Influencers, our success speaks for itself; mBLAST is used by some of the largest, most influential publishers, associations and event organizers on the planet to manage and monetize Awards programs, Directories, Buyer’s Guides, content microsites, and more. We also work with dozens and dozens of small Influencers – one, two, 10-man shops – that “play like the big boys” because of mBLAST.

Late this summer, mBLAST is introducing new capabilities that will allow Marketers to better understand and control the presence of their company’s data as it is shown across the broad expanse of the Web. They’ll be able to better track the articles that their company (and those of their competitors) have a presence in, publish that data to their website with a simple mouse click (without asking “the Web guy”), understand how their company data is shown in different directories, buyer’s guides and membership lists across the Web, and change that data it where it needs to be changed.

In the end, think of mBLAST’s solution for Marketers as a tool to extend, manage and control the marketing presence they have now with their website – and which they optimize via SEO – out into all the different nooks and crannies of the Web where people are looking at their data when they are making decisions. Pretty cool stuff indeed.

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Coming Soon!!

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