Start-up Innovation, Pitching, Funding and Failure

I haven’t written here in a while, because I’m busy working on a few different projects. As the title suggests, they involve start-ups.

I’ve started working on a project called AraBiz, together with my colleagues at GloBiz. AraBiz is a platform for entrepreneurs, which builds connections between start-ups in the ICT field and investors in the Middle East and North Africa region. That happens mostly behind the scenes. The website itself is a blog, providing different know-how for start-ups and about the online Arab world in general.

Outdoor Campaign Gets Down to Roachville

TBWA \ South Africa’s Roachville is the first campaign I’d like to feature on the blog. It made me smile and I think it has all the features needed to be effective.

Characteristics of Effective Advertising

For some time I’ve wanted to write brief analyses of advertising campaigns I like, so I’ve begun by briefly defining  what I think makes them effective. Expect to see some “fun” content on the blog soon, including print, TV and even radio advertising campaigns.

Online Advertising Trends

This post is based on the study by Google: What’s Trending in Display for Publishers? It addresses some of the following questions:

Which website types generated the most impressions and showed impression growth? (pgs. 10-11)

Arts & entertainment websites ranked 1st in impressions, meaning they generated the most ad displays, and also had a decent impression growth rate of 11%. Although Online Communities ranked second in number of impressions, their impression growth was -21%. Business & Industrial websites also suffered a negative impression growth of 25%.

B2B vs B2C marketing: same or different

We’ve all ran into the terms – B2B marketing (Business-to-business) and B2C marketing (Business-to-customer). We’ve also ran into people and literature telling us that they are very much the same, and probably just the same amount of people and literature telling us that they are completely different. This has bothered me for some time because I work solely in the B2B world. I’d watch or read something and then I’d go into an internal debate of whether its applicable to B2B or not. I would obsess over these two terms and think about the differences and similarities, rather than focusing on learning something new. Therefore, I’ve looked for clarity on the subject. Here’s what I found:

Why Inbound Marketing?

A few weeks ago, while still digesting the information from Social Me Workshop #7, I started thinking about the fact that Bulgarian companies are adopting the social media channel mainly to keep up with their competitors, gain a large number of fans, which they then communicate to in a one-way manner. It disappoints me that this is the major motivator for them and that they are not using the right methods for communication, though it’s not surprising at all. Keeping an eye on your competition is a great practice, but I wish companies in Bulgaria saw the benefits of inbound marketing and understood how opening up a two-way communication channel could transform their marketing for the better.

Social Me Workshop #7

Recently, I attended The Social Me Workshop #7, which focused on social media trends in 2012, but not only. I am glad I visited and got the chance to hear some up to date information on the subject and meet professionals in the field. In this post I will summarize the most interesting points from the conference. Social media statistics and tips, particular for the Bulgarian market, are hard to come by. These are up to date as of February, 2012.