Following on from my last post on the topic, here’s a brief run down of day 2 of the Business of Software conference.
- First up was Dan Nunan of Red Gate software, who spoke about marketing made simple – a recurring theme of the conference. Like a number of previous speakers, Dan was originally a techie, but moved into the marketing side of things. Dan’s basic message was that software marketing was not done particularly well, and he provided a list of 10 ideas on how it could/should be improved. One simple idea that I really liked here is that Red Gate have put their software downloads directly on the homepage, and do not force people to jump through registration hoops to get the software.
- Matt Mason, author of the up-coming The Pirates Dilemma was up next. The theme of Matt’s talk was basically how good things can come from piracy (of various forms). Matt’s background is in pirate radio, but his reference to piracy spans all media, including software. This talk took a while to get going, but when it did, there were a few interesting ideas in there. I’ll have to watch out for the book when it’s available.
- Rick Chapman, editor and publisher of Softletter, spoke principally about Software as a Service: SaaS. His basic message was that Saas is coming down the pipe, and you better get ready for it. The talk was primarily aimed at vendors of enterprise software, and that much or all of these systems are going to have to switch to a SaaS model over the next few years, or get eaten alive by vendors who do.
- The fourth talk of the day was by Jennifer Aaker of UC Berkeley. Aaker’s talk covered the intersection between branding and consumer psychology, and she described a number of experiments that she and he colleagues had conducted to understand what emotions people use when attributing qualities to brands, and how brands that fall into different categories are thought of by people. This brief description doesn’t do credit to what was a very interesting and information packed presentation (the best of the day).
- Next up was Hugh MacLeod, the cartoons on the back of business cards guy. MacLeod’s talk was a little bit all-over-the-place, but the basic premise was that it’s important for the geeks to be geeking out over your product. Geeks, in this sense, is anybody with a greater than usual level of knowledge/interest in a topic – not just computer guys. That is, there are wine geeks and clothes geeks, and so on. MacLeod talked about a number of businesses that he has worked with – a Savile Row taylor and a South African winery – whose products he promoted through blogging and guerrilla marketing.
- The final talk was from Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer of the Stanford Business School. Pfeffer’s talk was on how software companies don’t do what they know to be right, and he elaborated to explain why that’s so, and what can be done about it. One of his key messages was the importance of measuring your business, and measuring the right things, and managing the business based on that. I felt that this was a pretty generic talk, and could have referred to any business sector at any time. Nevertheless, it was pretty interesting, if not earth shattering.
Thoughts overall: a very interesting conference, with an interesting mix of speakers and attendees. I felt that the speakers and presentations on the first day were generally better and more interesting than those of the second (Jennifer Aaker notwithstanding).
The one criticism is that most of the software guys that presented ran or worked for companies that sell software aimed at other developers. This is a whole different ball-game from developing and selling software aimed at the general public. Obviously, it follows on that marketing to non-techies is different also, and perhaps the people who espoused geek marketing of various hues might not be as successful with this type of customer.
Anyway, a minor point on an otherwise excellent event.
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