Recently analyst firm Frost & Sullivan celebrated its 50^th anniversary (happy anniversary!) by releasing a list of the 50 emerging technologies most likely to make a meaningful impact on the world. The firm boldly predicts that their list of technologies will change industries, research agendas and even how we live.

Bold stuff for a list of 50, but after eyeballing the list (and having to look up a few terms) it does seem to be solid. I am most excited about:

• Wearable sensors (Star Trek is here!),
• Personalized medicine therapeutics (I’m over 40),
• Nanoviricides (Had to look it up, again 40+), and
• Carbon-fixing technologies (Do I need to say why?).

• Wearable sensors (Think about it),
• Artificial photosynthesis (Not sure why but seems like something we should not mess with, i.e. Jurassic Park but with plants),
• Energy harvesting (Can you say Matrix? I saw what Keanu Reeves when through), and
• Inductive wireless power transfer (I would worry about walking to a wireless “third rail” and getting an unexpected and unwanted jolt of energy).

Seriously, from the list below what excites or worries you…and what did the smart folks at Frost & Sullivan miss?

1. Accelerated carbonation technology

2. Biomass-to-renewable oil conversion technology

3. Microchannel process technology

4. Carbide-derived carbon (CDC) technology

5. Breathable antibacterial coatings, products

6. Plastic conversion to oil by gasolysis

7. Algal-based platform for production of a wide variety of chemicals

8. Destagnation and destratification of water

9. Non-woven coating spray-on technology

10. Artificial photosynthesis

11. BPA-free epoxy lining of plastic bottles

12. Hydrogen storage technology

13. Production of liquid biofuel from industrial waste gases containing carbon monoxide

14. Mini-chromosome gene stacking technology

15. Nanoparticles for use as anti-viral agents or “nanoviricides”

16. Substitute pancreas for diabetics using stem cells

17. Wireless sensors and ubiquitous sensors

18. Energy harvesting

19. Wearable sensors

20. Fiber optic sensor for security

21. Structural health monitoring sensors

22. Intelligent robots

23. Flexible electronics

24. 3D integration

25. Smart grid networks

26. Mobile projection systems

27. Advanced storage technologies (MRAM/PCM)

28. Hyperspectral imaging

29. Haptics and touch technology

30. Energy-efficient lighting technologies

31. EUV for higher transistor density

32. Energy-efficient variable frequency drives (VFD)

33. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems

34. Micro and nano manufacturing technologies

35. Machine vision systems

36. Charging infrastructure for electric vehicles

37. Inductive wireless power transfer

38. 3D cell culture systems

39. Personalized medicine therapeutics

40. Dendritic cell therapy

41. Vaccines for infectious disease and cancer

42. High-throughput sequencing technology

43. The infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution

44. Quantum computing

45. Energy management and carbon accounting systems

46. Fuel cell technology

47. Sea water desalination technologies

48. Green building technologies

49. Carbon-fixing technologies

50. Medical imaging technology

Recently I watched Sherry Turkle’s TED presentation “Connected, but alone?” It got me thinking about how as professional communicators we are expecting more from technology and much less from each other. This “new kind of connection” as Turkle puts it is not one we should be proud of; rather, it’s something that should worry us.

One 18-year-old boy she recently interviewed wistfully said to her, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.” WOW! This is just sad and is not good for our profession.

The art of true conversations with the give and take, the half-baked comments and the real person-to-person connections is what makes us human. It is also what makes the marketing and PR industry both exciting and important.

Turkle, a professor in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT and the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, gave me pause to think about how we use technology to communicate or to avoid real communications.

If you sleep with your smartphone, prefer to be with your iPad than with a friend, or favor emails over conversations with colleagues, you need to find 19 minutes and 48 seconds to see what Turkle has to say.  In fact, I think anyone that is paid to communicate professionally should see this presentation.

It just might cause you to rethink a few things. At the very least, I hope it will give you something to talk about, with maybe a coworker over coffee in the break room.

Ok, it’s not BtoB and it’s not high-tech. In fact, it was printed on an 11 x 17 sheet of paper taped to the window of a pizza and wings joint (although great placement if you ask me).

That said, this “shocking” ad communicates a lot and at least left me with a smile.

However, I still did not join the gym so I guess the ROI on behavior change is low, but on creativity… well, I will let YOU be the judge.

News release quotes are often the most underutilized communications tool at a PR pro’s disposal. Wire services are flooded with quotes from executives saying how excited, grateful, honored and thrilled they are about a new partner, employee, award or product release.

Let’s get real: who talks like this? Certainly no executives we have met.

It’s time we all took an objective look at the quotes we’ve written before claiming we aren’t guilty of this practice. When you consider the function of the quote in the release, you start to realize its significance–it is the voice of the executive, often the CEO.

Think about that – the voice of the CEO.

Yes, the PR team is truly inserting words into the mouth of the most senior person of the organization. This is no small responsibility.

Quotes in releases have determined company policies, influenced political decisions and inspired strategic vision. Quotes have cost people jobs, sent stock prices plummeting and driven customers to competitors.

These maybe extreme cases, but the point remains: the quote is a far from trivial element and should be treated accordingly. Here are suggestions for crafting powerful quotes that get noticed.

• Tip one
  Write the way people speak. Quotes are meant to be the true voice of the person being cited. If you find yourself using a superlative or figure of speech that belongs only on an SAT test, you are most likely are not writing the way your executives speak.
• Tip two
  Use your quotes to add information – not reiterate statements already made. Powerful quotes that help further the story are more likely to be used by a reporter. Ensure your quotes add new or deeper information about the subject of the release.
• Tip three
  Incorporate your organization’s name into your quotes. When the release involves a customer or partner, it’s also appropriate to include their name in your quote. In this case, turnabout is fair play. Use the opportunity to say something substantial about the other organization – then create a quote from them that says something meaningful about you. This creates a testimonial that, once on record, can be pointed to again in the future.
• Tip four
  Avoid clichés like the plague. (See what we did there?) Use anecdotes, facts, figures and real-life experiences as content for your quotes. Think of a quote as a mini-speech set within a very short story.

While this is not an exhaustive list, incorporating these four tips will result in releases with the power to influence, engage and drive interest from both media and customers.

The votes are in and PRSA has put a stake in the ground on the definition of Public Relations. It is simply:

“Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”

Not bad, in fact I think I voted for this one. Following the KISS (keep it simple stupid) philosophy, PRSA has delivered something that I think the industry can live with. Now, I think it’s time we all get back to the work of PR.

Want to know more about this definition? Michael Sebastian, the managing editor of PRDaily.com, did a nice article on it for Ragan.com. His article can be found at: http://www.ragan.com/Main/Articles/8113f1c6-e654-4e29-b39d-f674333eb74d.aspx.

The latest CMO Counsel survey (Jan. 2012) is good news for firms, like Arketi, which believe the right marketing strategies link to and build business value – you know Where Marketing Generates Revenue.

The research finds multi-national client marketers are seeking strategic contributions (57 percent) and business value created (56 percent) from their marketing agencies. Other key considerations include:

• Agency efficiency and effectiveness (50 percent)
• Market impact and success of campaigns (42 percent), and
• Creative excellence (42 percent).

Another finding of note included that the top technique for improving client-agency collaboration, output and performance is the religious work to keep all teams fully aligned and in-sync with objectives and deliverables.

In addition, marketers said fresh ideas, analytics and perspectives were what they value the most from outside agencies.  For more on this study check out the great blog post from Marketing Charts or download the entire report from the CMO Counsel.

As part of the Technology Assocation of Georgia’s (TAG) Georgia Awareness campaign that kicked-off July 11 with Georgia Governor Deal, Arketi Group created a series of billboards designed to highlight the importance of the technology industry in the state. The first of the six billboards designed went up this week on I-85 southbound right below the Beaver Ruin Road exit. In case you are not driving by it anytime soon, here is a quick passing glace.

Technology Assocation of Georgia "Where Georgia Leads" billboard created by Arketi Group

How often has your Marketing or PR team cultivated a lead that failed to produce a sale? And, how does your company address that lead? We have found that a large number of companies allow unfulfilled leads to fall into a great abyss, never to be contacted again.

At Arketi, we recommend applying the principals of nurture marketing to recapture unfulfilled sales through strategic communications and continual outreach.

Understanding the basics

Before lead nurturing can occur for an unfulfilled lead, you must identify why it was “lost” in the first place. Did the lead buy from a competitor? Did it simply stop taking action on Marketing outreach? Was it prematurely sent to Sales but not ready for a live conversation?

Recognizing when and why a lead moved on from your company is critical to knowing how to best reach out to them in the future.

Knowing where they belong

Begin by returning the prospect to Marketing and placing them in the nurture pool. Since the majority of companies use a marketing automation and/or CRM solution to manage their leads, it should be easy to determine where in the nurture pool your unfulfilled lead belongs. We consider three phases – Awareness, Discovery and Validation – to describe the mindset of leads.

• Awareness: Prospects are interested in knowing the benefits of technologies but not actually shopping. Relevant material for this phase includes webinars, podcasts and generic industry white papers.
• Discovery: Prospects are starting to shop and are looking to determine their buying criteria. Relevant material for this phase includes case studies and more detailed industry white papers.
• Validation: Prospects are ready to buy and want to know your differentiators. Relevant material for this phase includes product and company brochures, comparison sheets and product quicktours.

Based on a lead’s past history, you can place them in the appropriate phase and take the appropriate actions.

For instance, take a lead that came from a tradeshow and was immediately handed to Sales but was not ready to purchase. There is a strong probability that this lead should be in the Awareness phase and wants to receive invitations to industry webinars to learn the benefits of solutions that are on the market.

Another example is a lead that already made it through all three phases, was handed to Sales and then bought from a competitor. Rather than sending them an Awareness-level podcast a month later; try sending them a Discovery-level industry white paper that discusses the how leveraging technology provides real ROI. This provides the lead with educational information to use in future purchases and also pushes them to expect those results from their new provider.

Simple can be strategic

This strategic placement of leads back into the nurture pool ensures you are staying in front of former prospects with information relevant to where they are in the purchasing cycle. And rather than pushing prospects to make decisions before they are ready, recapturing unfulfilled sales promotes continual nurturing until the prospect identifies themselves as a hot lead. This new way of thinking will make Marketing a hero for reconnecting with unfulfilled leads to help secure future sales.

Ok, for those math challenged folks, that is under 7 minutes. No, this is not a dirty joke, it is the underlying thinking behind PechaKucha – a Japanese presentation format design to help story tellers (and those who are not story tellers) get to the point in an impactful and speedy way.

“PechaKucha 20×20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images forward automatically and you talk along to the images,” according to www.pecha-kucha.org.

I love this concept. I will be the first to admit that I have built my share of PowerPoint presentations over the years that 1) had too much information on each slide and 2) were just too long. That said, I have noticed that over the past five years, far too many companies seem to have replaced Word documents with PowerPoint presentations as the best way to share information and ideas.

Seriously, I have in my possession client PowerPoints with hundreds, yes hundreds, of words on a SINGLE slide. To protect them I will not share their names, but boy this just does not make sense.

What does make sense is the 20×20 format. I must admit I have not tried it yet, but I plan to give it a good college try.

Recently, a friend of mine was reviewing a presentation I often give and he said I had too many words on my slides. I thought I had done a good job of not having much on the slides. Then he said something brilliant.

“When you are watching ESPN or CNN and the news crawl starts across the bottom of the screen, do you read it or listen to the program?” Well that is an easy one for me to answer.  At least one time every morning, I need to rewind the news to hear what the anchor said because I was too busy reading the news crawl.

He went on to challenge me, “Do you think the audience is listening to what you have to say when you put up a slide with a bunch of words?”

I answered, “No.” I was depressed for a few days, but then I found PechaKucha!

Now I am energized and ready for the challenge. The PechaKucha Challenge:
20 slides,
20 seconds and
one heck of a compelling story.

I’ll let you know how it goes, and if I can convince any of our clients to take the PechaKucha challenge too.

Completing our series of posts on 10 PR and Marketing Tips for BtoB Tech Companies, we conclude with our three final key learnings from our client work in 2010. To view the first 7 PR and marketing tips in this series, visit our March 10 post and March 17 post where we uncovered some key learnings which may be of interest to our fellow BtoB marketers.

Case Eight

Feature Writing was where Arketi won with a bylined article on behalf of Cbeyond designed to guide small businesses through the current rocky economic conditions. The byline ran in Corp!, Michigan’s largest business magazine, as well as the “Entrepreneurs” section of Corp!’s website and Corp!’s home page. Following the article’s success, Corp! offered a quarterly online column to Cbeyond.

What we learned: Look to consumer magazines like Cosmo and Glamour for byline article inspiration. Take that “Five Tips for Landing a New Year’s Kiss” article and turn it into “Five Tips to Accelerate Business Growth in the New Year.” Inspiration is everywhere!

Case Nine

The Internal Video category was where Arketi won for our contribution to Cbeyond’s roll-out of new product packaging strategy to its employees. Arketi worked with Cbeyond’s communications team to script, shoot and produce a six-minute video, which has led to a notable increase in positive customer referrals.

What we learned: Scripting always pays off. Very rarely are folks able to “wing it” in front of the camera. Scripted videos actually result in a more natural look – and make post-production faster and easier.

Case Ten

Winner in the category Event Lasting Seven or Fewer Days was the event Arketi created with Ryla to elevate awareness for Ryla’s work on the 2010 Census and subsequent personnel needs. Aided by media coverage in key outlets including USA Today, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, WXIA-TV, WAGA-TV, WGCL-TV and The Associated Press, Ryla successfully filled its positions from a pool of nearly 2,000 event attendees.

What we learned: There is no such thing as too much planning for an event. And briefing the media early in the process on their access to the event and its players will only help to ensure stellar media coverage.

That concludes our 10 tips. We love to hear what you’ve learned from your 2010 PR and digital marketing campaigns. Leave us a comment so we can learn from you!