The Telerik Marketing Blog

Conferences?

Marketing Team — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 02:27:04 GMT

I was thinking about how professional conferences and the accompanying them trade shows are a great place for networking, finding out what's hot in the industry and learning from the leading experts in the field. �I still believe that conferences are very useful �but I am starting to have some second thoughts about the tradeshows.

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Considering the myriad of online communication recourses�available to companies for interacting with their customers and the community,�and the global economy crisis, 2009 will be an interesting year.

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I decided to post this to see if you have any opinion on the subject. I�think it will be interesting to see the different views as to what makes you go to the vendor booths, other than the swag. And what will make you go this year, especially if you feel the burdens of the word crisis? Maybe you believe that tradeshows are useless and the conference part is all that is needed?

IMS London 2008 - First European Thrills for Sitefinity

Marketing Team — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:52:59 GMT

. And surely not the last ones! This massive event on content management and Web 2.0 technologies gave us the chance to see the way a conference goes in Europe. We were definitely not disappointed - the event was huge, all of the usual suspects were there of course :) It turned to be a very interesting experience - our staff at the booth quickly learned that the approach here should be different - the audience primarily consisted of business users who were not exactly into coding; the attendees seemed to be more reserved and shy when approaching the exhibitors; not to mention that all kind of techniques such as games, free merchandise and cat women walking around the exhibition floor, which the competition undertook to hook up the attendees, didn't work in their favor at all - it was all business classy.

The cause of our biggest excitement was, however, the fact that our senior developer Ivan Osmak made a presentation at the Content Management Seminar that took place during the conference. The focus of the session was on "CMS as a Platform - Beyond Content Management" or the way flexible and well designed CMS platforms add business value. There was a huge interest towards the topic and our speaker!

You can see some photos from the event here:

Sitefinity ad

Telerik Marketing Team — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 02:23:00 GMT

Hello and thanks to everybody who gave their insightful comments in the first blog post by the Marketing Team.

We have decided that it will be a good idea to blog more often, to engage in a conversation, and generally to shed some light on our work. We are aware that what we do is not directly related to programming but we hope that you may be interested in what else is happening at Telerik, besides lines of code being entered in VisualStudio :-)

This post will continue where we left off last time. We would once more ask for your opinion on an ad we recently finished. I can promise you that this blog won't be all about us asking questions, so please bare with us with one more of the "what do you think?" entries.

What you see below is the new Sitefinity ad. We will really appreciate your feedback and here are the top questions that are flying around the room.

What's your overall feel when you see the ad?
What does it communicate to you?
What thoughts, if any, does the ad evoke?
Is there anything you particularly like or dislike about the idea, or the execution?

If you find the questions too restricting, please feel free to just write whatever comes to mind. For now, we won't be revealing anything about the ad in terms of our ideas while creating it, just so we don't push you in a certain direction of thinking about the ad.

Regards and thanks in advance to anyone who decided to contribute some of his/her valuable time.

Tell us what's on your mind - are print ads dead?

Marketing Team — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 07:22:00 GMT

Welcome to the newly-created marketing blog!

While all developers at Telerik were busy preparing new cool features and upgrades for the Q2 release, the efforts of the marketing team were focused on cooking up brand-new print ads to match the enhanced Telerik products. Finally our concepts saw the light of day - you can find their online versions below. We'll be happy to read what you think about them.

To dig deeper into the topic, people say technical ads full of info are the ones that developers pay attention to. However, is this really the case or are you more likely to spot an ad with a single clear message conveyed through it? Another topic that raises lots of arguments among marketers in our industry is the "the-screenshot-is-a-must" one. In other words, would an interesting, creative ad catch your eye or you'd rather see screenshots that can give you some insight about the product itself? (As much as a screenshot can say about a product because we all know you can't show everything on a screenshot).

Generally speaking, print advertising is expensive and results are hard to measure. However, marketers believe that it's a vicious circle - once you start pouring cash in print media, you can't give it up as it "adds to a company's credibility". Does it indeed? In other words, if you don't see print ads from a certain vendor in a magazine, would you think something's wrong? Do you care about print ads at all?

Overall, this is a discussion we'd like to start with you - we believe lots of interesting ideas might pop up out of it.

Click on an image to see a larger version.