Here’s a video recap by NovusTV of the F5 Expo held April 7th, 2010 in Vancouver, Canada.

(Left to Right) Michael Tippet of NowPublic, Justin Young of Radar DDB, and myself discuss cost effective video marketing at the F5 Expo on April 7th in Vancouver, Canada.

Photos courtesy of www.jeremylim.ca

The F5 Expo held Wednesday, April 7th was a tremendous event. Rich content, well-attended and a powerful keynote from best-selling author of Blink, Tipping Point, and Outliers Malcolm Gladwell. His challenge to people using and developing on the Internet is to use it to create strong ties rather than just weak ties, of which the Internet is already very good at. Revolutionary change can only happen through strong ties Malcolm argued, as he cited several examples throughout history to prove his point. His feeling, and I agree, is that the world needs more social revolution, and if revolution can only occur through strong ties, then we must find ways to use the Internet to foster it. The question is, are we up for it?

Malcolm Gladwell argues that the Internet has only been good at generating weak ties quickly amongst crowds of people. Social revolution can only happen through strong ties.

I had signed up to moderate two panels, the first being Cloud Computing and the other Search Engine Marketing. Thank you to my panelists for a job well done. I got some very positive feedback on these topics from attendees. I was also a last second replacement on the Cost Effective Video Marketing panel and had the privilege of sharing the stage with Justin Young of Radar DDB Vancouver and Michael Tippet of NowPublic. All-in-all, I thought it was a great event… minus the registration snafu! Well done Linz!

I’ve become a fan of Tom Mayenknecht of The Sport Market. I catch his morning show on Team 1040 Radio almost every Sunday, and enjoy the business and marketing angle he brings to major league sports. Today, he talked about Toronto-based Sun Life Financial who, in a deal announced January 19th, acquired the 10-year naming rights for the Miami Dolphins’ football stadium for $40 million. The timing of the name change to Sun Life Stadium could not have been any better. Introduced last week as the stadium played host to the NFL Pro Bowl, it enjoyed a coming out party to the largest Pro Bowl audience in 10 years,  with over 12 million U.S. television viewers tuned in on ESPN. Today, that audience number will jump to over 100 million U.S. viewers and over 160 million global viewers. On his blog, Tom goes on to describe the value and impact the Sun Life brand will enjoy from this well-timed launch:

“Depending on the number of times Sun Life is mentioned and its new stadium graphics shown during the Super Bowl telecast, the case can be made that the Toronto-based insurance company will receive media value that is at least equal to the first five years of its naming rights deal. That does not include valuation of the billions of media impressions that Sun Life Stadium will receive this week in print and on the internet, along with radio… The Super Bowl timing is only one example of how this deal is a winner for Sun Life. The low cost of the sponsorship is the headliner here. Sun Life paid about one-fifth the $20 million US per year that Citi Financial has invested in Citi Field ($400 million US over 20 years) for the new home of the New York Mets of Major League Baseball. It paid well less than the going rate for NFL stadiums, including the $7 million US per year that Bank of America did for the home of the Carolina Panthers.”

In an economic climate where purchasing naming rights to sports stadiums is a luxury for most corporate giants, this seems like a brilliant move for Sun Life Financial who should enjoy an almost immediate return on their investment, while paying far less for naming right than other corporations in the past.

Malcolm Gladwell takes live questions through Mingleverse at F5 Expo Launch Party.

I was in attendance at the F5 Expo Launch Party yesterday, January 26th. What a great turnout! The place was packed with over 200 people – and all eyeballs were fixated on the many screens around the V Lounge as Malcolm Gladwell appeared within the Mingleverse online universe (think Second Life) to take questions from the live audience. If this party was any indication of what we can expect of the main event on April 7th, the Vancouver business and tech scene is in for a special treat. F5 Expo is all about online business, marketing, and technology. Hot topics like Search Engine Optimization, social media, video blogging, and cloud computing will be tackled in interactive sessions and panel discussions. I’ve just been added as a moderator on the SEO panel. Should be fun!

If you haven’t registered yet, take advantage of my personal promo code that gives you 30% off the ticket price until Jan 31st.

REGISTER NOW

ENTER PROMO CODE: P1F510

Even with the economy in the tank, the people at Apple continue to show outstanding profits and sales, all without pulling the trigger on deep discounts and fire sales to compete this holiday season. Find out four things Apple has mastered to make this possible.

Apple is coming off the best performing fiscal year ever according to cNet, with $1.67 billion in profit – which is a whopping $1.82 per share of earnings. This along with record sales for the Mac and iPhone, I wonder how Apple does it. When other companies struggle to weather the economic storm, how is it that Apple is able to sell a record number of some of the most expensive phones and computers on the market? Why is it that people are willing to put up with AT&T just to have the glorious iPhone?

Dell just came out with their earnings a few weeks ago and missed even the most modest analysts expectations with only $727 million in profit, or $0.27 per share. Not even close to Apple, and the new Netbooks with Windows 7 is apparently pretty hot, right?

1. Packaging. When you buy any Apple product, the packaging is very high end – you feel like you have purchased something very special. When I first opened my new MacBook Pro box, I felt like I was opening a gift from Nordstrom’s. Open an HP box and it’s nothing special. You actually get instructions that look like they were meant for a 5-year old, or those wordless graphics like you see in the backseat of an airplane. Yep – I think I can figure out how to put the battery in – thanks.

2. Marketing. If you visit apple.com from a PC, you see a page really hyping the new iMac. If you visit the page from a Mac, then you get a page pushing new accessories. This is smart marketing. Visit www.dell.com and to find a monitor, you first have to decide if it’s for Home or Office – as if it matters – do they price them differently? The Apple home page is simple, easy to navigate and puts a big focus on the “hero”, which are the products. Their checkout process is refined and brilliantly cross-sells other accessories leaving you no choice but to fill your cart with about $300 of more stuff that you absolutely have to have. After all, that’s great marketing, right?

3. Trust. Apple has spent years building a brand. A brand that you can trust is reliable and where the products will last. The only company that decided it was better to manufacture the hardware and the software all in the same place. That means installing new software or applications will only require you to click and drag an icon, rather than having to scour the Internet for a driver.

4. Innovation. The innovative products that Apple keeps pumping out are a huge factor in their success. If your company doesn’t change, or innovate, you likely will not experience explosive growth, revenue or profits.

So if you have all of these things and you’ve been able to create insatiable demand, you really don’t need to have sales on days like “Black Friday.” Not only would a sale “cheapen” the brand, but it creates an expectation in the mind of the consumer that all you have to do is wait and eventually the price will go down. This is what the cable companies do at the end of every month, and car companies do at the end of every year. Surely you’ve heard the best time to buy a car is at the “end of the year clearance sales” – right? Apples doesn’t need sales, and unless the competition brings, well… competition, they probably won’t even have to lower their prices much either.

Host of Tech Talk Expert on Global TV News and show organizer, Lindsay Smith asked me to join her advisory board this year to help with the latest edition of the Massive Tech Show to be held in April 2010. The event has lost some steam over the past couple of years and is looking to refocus. We had our first group advisory meeting earlier this month and the overwhelming consensus was the event needed a heavy makeover to make it relevant again for people doing business today. Some of the core decisions included a re-branding, focusing on social media (Twitter and Facebook) and online marketing (SEO and SEM), and placing a greater emphasis on quality content and big personalities. To that end, Lindsay announced yesterday she has signed on Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers as the event’s keynote speaker! Wow. If you haven’t read any of his books, please do yourself a favor and visit Amazon or your local Chapters or Barnes & Nobles and pick up one. A tremendous author with incredible insight on the world as we know it, Malcolm will be quite the draw at F5 Expo (ah yes, the new brand, cleverly named after the “F5″ function button on your keyboard, typically used to refresh your screen).

As the event starts taking shape, I’ll post some more details on it, but expect it to be an entirely different show than past iterations – in a very good way. Congrats Lindz on getting Malcolm!

Guy Kawasaki at SXSW 2009.

Lucky me. I got to sit down with marketing guru and popular author, Guy Kawasaki across from our ServerBeach booth just minutes ago at SXSW. A Tweet up was brought together at the Opera booth with Guy who fielded any questions. He’s really excited about his latest venture, Alltop. He’s launching a MyAlltop this upcoming week. Very cool guy and refreshingly down to earth. I’m a big fan of Guy. My company, PEER 1 is one of the sponsors of JFSA’s Innovators Lunch with Guy as the speaker in Vancouver on April 1st. This by chance meeting was a nice surprise.

Love this commercial!

Just got back from the Structure 08 conference hosted by GigaOM and headline sponsored by my company, Vancouver-based PEER 1. The sold out event was a tremendous success with over 600 people in attendance representing companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and VMWare. A third of the conference room was allocated to media alone.

Making the decision to sponsor Structure 08 was an easy one. It is so rare to have a room full of the brightest minds discussing and debating the latest technology impacting IT infrastructure. “Cloud Computing” was by far the topic of the day, a buzz term that seems to encompass anything related to virtualization or on-demand scalable web hosting, which is sometimes, well, cloudy.

The line up of speakers included Jonathan Yarmis of AMR Research, Mendel Rosenblum of VMWare, and a heated discussion that included panelists from Google, AT&T, GigaSpaces, Mosso, Joyent, and XCalibre. Read more