Marketing

Tech vendors put way, way too much effort into keeping product plans secret until they can maximize hype and sales with carefully timed announcements. So why do they suck all the interest out of cool announcements by acting offended that anyone wanted to know?

Unusual scenario stories help Google Enterprise security chief keep disaster drills interesting, turn up new potential problems and maybe sell security of the cloud to nervous users.

Those who make personal choices, like browsers, different from ours obviously do so because they're damaged in some way. That doesn't mean even IE users are too stupid to see that this study is shallow and inaccurate. Not what you look for in a quantitative analysis company.

The same week it tried to supplant Microsoft with an alternative to Windows, Google suffered PR attacks, security scares and impending financial punishment for choosing bad ad partners.

Apple comes to the rescue of a guy whose wife made him return his iPad 2.

Rackspace and Akamai are high-quality providers of complex services; what do you get when they combine forces? A press release that gets too much coverage.

There're only a few more shopping weeks left in this holiday season and Microsoft and Sony are fighting tooth and nail to convince the world that theirs is the 'hot' video game peripheral for this year.

There's no such thing as bad publicity? Are we sure about that?

After Ubuntu made a concerted effort to change (and therefore highlight) it's brand, the Linux and open source community have started to examine the question of branding more closely. Some members, like Aaron Seigo, are wary of the whole notion of distribution/application branding. Which begs the question: are they right?

I got to thinking about the search field as a storytelling metaphor the other day when I had yet another occasion to explain to a technological newcomer just exactly what Linux and open source was. I gave the usual pat answers, nothing I hadn't said before dozens of times over. So, this morning, I tried something new.

When most companies engage in social media marketing, they ask "how can I get my followers to spread my story?" That's the wrong question, says Darren Barefoot, co-author of "Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook." Here's a better one: "how can I deliver value to my followers, and earn their trust and respect?" If you can do that, then your followers will spread your story whether you ask them to or not.