by Rita Baker | Sep 30, 2014 | Marketing
Qu’est-ce que la ville intelligente?
Vous n’êtes pas certain de ce qu’est une ville intelligente? Vous n’êtes pas seul. Bien qu’il s’agisse d’un concept qui existe depuis quelques décennies, sa mise en application de façon concertée est plutôt récente. De nombreuses villes utilisent ce concept comme plateforme de développement. Chacune définit la ville intelligente à sa façon.
Copenhague
Copenhague, que certains considèrent comme l’une des villes les plus ‘’intelligentes’ dans le monde, a opté pour une définition plus écologique du concept. La ville a mis en œuvre et soutenu de nombreux projets qui contribueront à l’objectif de la ville de devenir neutre en émission de carbone d’ici 2025. Un exemple est le projet de lampadaires LED ‘’intelligents’’. Ces lampadaires sont munis de capteurs qui leur permettent non seulement de ne s’allumer que lorsqu’un usager de la route arrive et s’éteindre ensuite, mais aussi de transmettre un grand nombre de données environnementales. Ces données permettent à l’administration de Copenhague de réagir à des situations problématiques existantes ou potentielles.
Québec
La ville de Québec est en cours de définir ce que sera sa conception de la ville intelligente. On y voit présentement des projets pour accroître l’accès aux technologies web des citoyens, pour faciliter l’accessibilité à l’information, via le projet de données ouvertes et d’autres projets disparates tel le coffre-fort virtuel. Ce dernier projet n’avait probablement pas comme objectif de contribuer à la ville intelligente initialement, mais s’y insère très bien.
Montréal
Suite à la création du Bureau de la ville intelligente et numérique en mars 2014, Montréal a identifié quatre axes de développement. On y voit des préoccupations de connexion technologique, d’accès aux données et d’effet de levier en stimulant des projets par les citoyens, entreprises et organismes du territoire. Le cadre de développement, pour le moment, repose sur des préoccupations de transparence dans la gestion municipale(1) et de stimulation des activités économiques.
Les quatre éléments de la définition d’une ville intelligente
L’infrastructure technologique
On inclut ici tout ce qui est réseaus de transmission, infrastructures de stockage des données et capteurs d’information. Certains incluront ici les applications nécessaires à la gestion de cette infrastructure, d’autres l’associeront plutôt au second élément.
La couche applicative
L’application permet aux humains d’utiliser les données à des fins précises, de gérer les infrastructures technologiques et de communiquer entre eux.
Source: Baker Marketing
L’humain
Pris dans son sens social. L’humain qui s’informe, qui réagit, qui gère, qui crée, qui interagit et qui se mobilise. L’humain qui peut agir seul, sous forme d’organisme social, d’administration ou d’entreprise.
Le cadre de développement
Le quatrième élément de la définition, le cadre de développement de la ville intelligente est la courroie de transmission, l’élément qui donne tout son sens à la définition. Cet élément est celui où chaque municipalité détermine les axes de développement qui seront priorisés. Cela en fonction des réalités et préoccupations du moment.
On peut donc concevoir que la définition de la ville intelligente sera non seulement différente d’une municipalité à l’autre, en raison d’un mix différent des quatre éléments, mais également évolutive dans le temps dans une même ville en fonction des préoccupations socio-économiques et politiques du moment.
Le prochain billet de cette série traitera de l’engagement du citoyen dans la ville intelligente.
(1) La Commission Charbonneau joue un rôle important dans le désir des municipalités québécoises de démontrer des efforts de transparence dans leur gestion.
by Rita Baker | Sep 23, 2014 | Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurs often see crowdfunding as free money which it is not. It is however, if done right, a way to have access to funds that most often banks or more traditional investors would not extend to your company or project.
Crowdfunding, like most anything else that may reap a benefit, requires effort. The days of just writing a short text on a popular crowdfunding platform and watching the money come in are mostly gone. Even Zack Brown, aka Mr. Potato salad project man on Kickstarter, will tell you that raising over 55 000$ took significant promotional effort on his part. Entrepreneurs who try and fail at crowdfunding identify their lack of strategic planning, knowledge, and/or lack of marketing/communication experience as contributing factors.
In order to succeed, you first need to find the right platform for your specific project. Then have your financial advisors help you figure out how much money you need to raise. The amount you need to raise will determine the types of investors you go after, the amount of effort required and the time needed for the campaign. Once this is done, let your marketing team take over. Marketing you say? But it’s about funding, finance. Why should I let my marketing team run this, because successful crowdfunding is about virality.
How does one achieve virality? The following is definitely not a foolproof recipe. If it was I’d be sunning myself on a yacht in some exotic location somewhere. These elements are however essential in achieving virality.
A good story
Aside from the business plan basics, that are not to be taken lightly if you are seeking larger amounts, you need to involve your investors emotionally. Entrepreneurs who have tried their hand in crowdfunding know that you need a good story to achieve this. What most don’t realise however is that it’s not a one-time text. It’s an on-going story with new chapters released with the right timing. More than this, it’s an interactive story that you create to answer your investors or potential investors’ needs as you figure them out along the way. A very basic example of this is how Zack Brown used the FAQ function to continue his story on Kickstarter. So, what kind of talent do you need to execute this step?
- Someone who can quickly identify and research investor segments and their characteristics
- A content writer who will woo your major investor segments with his or her words.
- A planner /coordinator who has an overview of all the attention directed to your campaign and will ensure the timing of new chapter releases are optimal.
Katamaris or the nucleus, the stickiness and large amounts of potential investors
Those who played the original Katamari Damacy on PS2 know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, a Katamari is a constantly sticky ball that rolls around, collects everything it touches and can grow to celestial proportions. There are three components of this game: the nucleus, the stickiness and lots of stuff to roll over to increase your size.
The nucleus is where your first level network comes in. Family, friends, former co-workers and anyone else who owes you a favor should be called upon insistently to participate in the funding. They will become your nucleus. If you have multiple co-founders, employees that participate in the profit sharing, all of their networks should be utilised.
Once your nucleus is formed you then need to find stickiness agents to add to your Katamari. In crowdfunding, stickiness is the ability a person, an event or an information possesses to attract and influence positively the decision making process of a new segment of potential investors to invest in your project. If you excel at it, you’ll even get new investors to bring in their own network of contacts. Creating a stickiness plan requires knowledge of the investor segments you are targeting. The talent required here is:
- A market researcher familiar with demographic databases
Once you have a nucleus (the bigger the better) and stickiness for your Katamari you now need to find stuff to roll over i.e. more potential investors. Many entrepreneurs think that the popularity of a crowdfunding platform will do this job for them. It may help but it won’t get you the number of eyeballs you need to reach your goals. This is where you need a full promotional plan to bring the right people to look at your pitch page. The required talents here are:
- An experience marketer to plan your overall campaign
- An experienced media campaign manager (preferably someone with an large network)
- An internet marketer or internet campaign manager
It’s obvious that start-ups or small companies cannot afford an entire team of experienced people. You do however, if you want results, need at least one person with some experience in all of these fields of marketing and communication.
Honour your commitments to your investors
Think of this final step as paying forward. Crowdfunding has helped out your company. Now make sure that other entrepreneurs who follow this route can also have access to your investors. When you honor your commitments to your investors you insure that they won’t feel used, betrayed or disillusioned therefore being open to subsequent investment forays.
As you can plainly see, crowdfunding is not free money. It requires a lot of efforts and a good marketing team.
by Rita Baker | Sep 16, 2014 | Lean Startup
What is web analytics?
Aside from being scary for some, web analytics is the capture, analysis and reporting of web data from any type of platform (computer, mobile, clothing, etc.). A growing number of small companies now use web analytics. However, unlike big businesses, not all of them do. The availability of multiple free applications, of excellent quality, certainly has helped the adoption rate. It has yet to convince however many of small businesses to make the jump(1).
Do you need it?
If any significant amount of your sales comes directly or indirectly from the web, you definitely need to master web analytics.
If any of your business goals are tributary to your web presence you need to have, at the very least, a basic understanding of web analytics.
Should I let my IT department take care of it?
No more than you let IT take care of your accounting because you are using accounting software. Your IT team can play a supporting role if more complex coding is required to track data from your website or other platforms. In order to know who should have this responsibility in your company you need to look at the objectives you are trying to reach with your web presence. The responsibility can be shared if more than one department have goals attributed to them that are significantly impacted by your web presence.
If you are running an online business, just about every goal in your company will be tied directly or indirectly to your web presence. Hence, the CEO should be the person responsible for web analytics and can delegate to each department the care of appropriate metrics.
To the other extreme, if your web presence’s only goals are to inform and maintain your image the team responsible for communication can take the lead.
What is the minimum I need to know?
The best way to learn web analytics is simply to hook up one of the many free applications such as Google Analytics to your website, via coding or a plug-in, and familiarize yourself with the application. You (or the person that will be responsible on your team) will quickly get a feel for the basic statistics.
Basic information is interesting but not always useful unless tied to a specific goal.
Learning how to set goals in your application is your next step. This can easily be done by using one of the multiple online training resources available. Google has an entire web analytics course on Youtube that is broken down in convenient modules.
I advertise on the web
Advertising on the web (or anywhere for that matter) without controlling how much revenue the ads bring in is akin to burning your money. Web analytics of advertising campaigns increases the level of complexity and will require a trained resource. If you run frequent campaigns consider training an internal resource.
I run an online business
If you run an online business, web analytics is as important as your accounting. Ideally both your analytics and accounting software should be integrated. Knowing only the basics won’t get you very far. I would strongly suggest that your business model identifies web analytics as a key activity and your platform as a key resource from the start. Put the necessary efforts to translate your business goals into data that will be actionable, accessible and auditable. Dedicate the best internal resources you can afford to ensure that the data stays relevant, is of the best possible quality, and flows constantly.
If you need a web presence of any kind to run your business then web analytics is for you. The efforts you put into it depend on what your web presence brings to your bottom line.
(1): My observations suggest that the adoption rate for web analytics application for small businesses in Canada probably hovers around 20-30%. The rate would however be most likely above 50% for small companies in the software sector.
by Rita Baker | Sep 8, 2014 | Lean Startup
Eric Ries wrote Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Business in 2011 and sparked an entire movement. Lean Startup is a methodology or, some may even say, a philosophy based on ideas from lean manufacturing and agile product development. Ideas such as minimizing waste through small batches, getting to market quickly and ensuring that all tasks accomplished in a company must benefit the customers.
Although the author’s experiences that led to Lean Startup are mostly in software start-ups, the concepts can be applied to organizations of all sizes in all sectors. If you haven’t read it attentively yet I strongly urge you to. It is one of the most pertinent and content rich books I’ve read in a long while.
The Good
It’s easy enough to understand the concepts. You build a minimum viable product (MVP), the equivalent of the small batch in lean manufacturing. You send it out to market quickly using agile development techniques. You measure how well it does with metrics that are actionable, accessible and auditable. You learn from the information you just gathered. You adjust your aim or you change your entire strategy (pivoting) if necessary. Then you start the cycle again aiming for the perfect product/market fit.
It will get your start-up to be profitable faster. You won’t be spending a year or two developing a product that the market has zero or not enough interest in to make it profitable.
It also promotes the idea that rigorous management, based on a sound dashboard, is a winning strategy. So many start-ups, managed solely on instincts, go round in circles and waste resources.
It makes implicit the notion that companies, products and strategies are not set in stone but fluid. The Lean Startup model pushes everyone in the organization to adapt constantly.
This type of agile, efficient and adaptable model is what is needed to answer the demands of today’s fast changing markets where customers and consumers hold the bigger end of the stick.
The Bad
Although the concept is easy to understand, putting it into practice is difficult, very difficult.
Figuring out what exactly is a minimum viable product when you are still not sure of what the market wants is not a science, it’s an art. Hence you need market artists that have a ‘’sense’’ of what the market wants. You do not want to spend precious time over developing your product nor delivering such a shoddy one that you kill your reputation before your company even takes off.
Figuring out which metrics to use for your learning curve and how to translate them into the right questions to ask is not easy but it’s doable. Finding potential target customers in large enough numbers, at every iteration of your product, to give you their feedback is pretty much mission impossible for most start-ups. Hence you need a budget (a hefty one at that) to outsource this part if you want to do it right.
Learning is easy enough for most people. Adapting to an Nth change of strategy (pivoting) within a short period is not, especially if you are part of a team. The larger the team, the harder it is to change your strategy. Unless you are equipped to deal with the strong emotional reactions significant pivoting generates you could, at best, damage morale and at worst lose key players.
The Ugly
The Lean Startup model may give the impression that anyone can be an entrepreneur and pump out an AirBnB or Uber. The reality is very different. Starting a company from scratch is not as easy as following a 1-2-3 recipe. It requires certain aptitudes and predispositions that most people don’t have. Ask any seasoned venture capitalist. They will tell you that, once the basics are covered, what they look for they find in their interactions with the entrepreneurs themselves. Entrepreneurs have a certain attitude that VCs can spot a mile away.
Finally, and this is a point that Eric Ries himself mentions, is the tendency most of us have to, for the sake of doing things quickly, apply a proven recipe without understanding its goals and where it stems from. Applying the build-measure- learn model or developing a MVP without understanding the basic ideology behind lean is a great recipe for failure. As illustrated by some critics of Lean Startup forecasting that the world is about to witness an onset of defective products stemming from start-ups launching their minimum viable products.
Lean Startup is not a magical recipe that, if applied rigorously, will yield successful start-ups without fail. Like any other methodology, using it blindly without proper questioning, perspective or adapting it to your environment, is never a good idea. Lean Startup is, however, a flexible experience-based methodology adapted to today’s market realities that will definitely increase the chances of success of any project.
by Rita Baker | Sep 2, 2014 | Marketing
D’emblée, je vous avoue que je suis d’avis que le marketing doit obligatoirement générer autant et, idéalement beaucoup plus, que ce qu’il coûte. Un marketing qui ne répond pas à cette condition n’est pas nécessaire.
Je contribue au succès d’entreprises technologiques, principalement dans le secteur des TIC, depuis de nombreuses années. Je suis convaincue, pour l’avoir mis en pratique dans des douzaines d’entreprises, qu’un marketing bien pensé et bien exécuté est très rentable. Dans un environnement compétitif, le marketing est même essentiel à la survie de l’entreprise.
J’ai donc été surprise de constater que plusieurs dirigeants de nouvelles entreprises technologiques ne voient pas l’utilité du marketing. Voici deux témoignages entendus récemment.
‘’ Nous avions une ressource marketing pendant un bout, qui a quitté après quelques mois. Il n’y a eu aucune différence dans nos résultats après son départ.’’ Startup d’une application consommateurs
‘’ On a investi des milliers de dollars dans notre marketing web et ça n’a rien donné du tout’’. Entreprise de 2 ans, 5 employés qui commercialise une application destinée aux grandes entreprises
En posant un peu plus de questions, j’ai compris certains des enjeux.
Des ressources trop novices
Les dirigeants de jeunes entreprises technologiques ont souvent de la difficulté à évaluer la compétence des ressources marketing qu’ils embauchent (ce n’est pas leur domaine). Ces entreprises disposent aussi généralement de peu de moyens. Il en résulte une tendance à embaucher des stagiaires ou des gens ayant peu d’expérience. Ces ressources savent généralement se débrouiller pour exécuter, mais sont rarement en position d’élaborer une stratégie-cadre.
On ne comprend pas ce qu’on ne connait pas
Je vois très fréquemment des startups technologiques dont les dirigeants, souvent programmeurs ou ingénieurs de formation, occupent le rôle de directeur marketing. Il en résulte généralement une stratégie marketing inadéquate et par le fait même des activités marketing qui contribuent très peu, ou pas du tout, à la croissance des ventes.
Le marketing n’est pas nécessaire
Dans le cas où un produit/service doit nécessairement se vendre face à face, comme pour les applications complexes offertes aux grandes entreprises, il est peu utile d’investir dans le marketing pour les petites entreprises. Tous les fonds disponibles devraient plutôt aller vers la rémunération de bons vendeurs. Ces derniers feront eux-mêmes leur étude de marché, stratégie de vente et matériel promotionnel. Si le territoire à couvrir est vaste, ou que les ventes générées le justifient, vous pouvez embaucher un adjoint administratif pour exécuter les tâches que les vendeurs lui assigneront.
En fin de compte, lorsque le marketing est requis dans l’entreprise, il est plus profitable d’obtenir les services d’un expert réputé en marketing dans votre domaine dès le départ, même si ce n’est qu’à temps partiel. N’hésitez pas à demander des recommandations avant de le choisir. Demandez-lui de vous guider dans l’élaboration d’une stratégie-cadre et de coacher une ressource novice. Vous vous assurez ainsi de ne pas gaspiller votre argent, de former une ressource selon vos besoins et de ne jamais avoir à vous demander si votre marketing est vraiment nécessaire.
