Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

Fuelled by Stephen’s glowing recommendation of the Thoughtworks presentation “Emergent Design & Evolutionary Architecture”, I went along to Neal Ford’s repeat performance in Sydney this morning.

The talk presented some very sensible sounding ideas on software “design”, and few more on “architecture”. Stephen has covered some points that stood out for him in his post, and here are a couple more that I consider worthy of mention or additional comment.

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When I put my hand up to see Jason Coleman (of So You Think You Can Dance Australia fame) present at this AIM event, I admit I only glossed over the event description. So I was a little surprised when I received a reminder for the “AIM Management Excellence Awards Brisbane Regional Final” awards ceremony.

With the awards as the center of the event, Jason’s presentation fell more on the side of novel entertainment than groundbreaking insight. He made an entrance with a song of the broadway variety, accompanied by a pair of dancing girls in bowler hats.

The Worst Jobs with the Best People

Jason spoke at length about his dance career, highlighting his disdain at being called “just a dancer”. One of his more relevant points was the necessity of the everyday little jobs that “sustain you”, though they may not be recognised or publicised like the “big jobs”. He described his experience working on the movie Happy Feet, in which dancers were required to spend hours on end wriggling around like penguins in uncomfortable motion capture suits, to empasise that even the worst jobs can be the most enjoyable when done with the best people. Whenever his agent identifies a potential job, he asks two questions - how much will it pay? (”it’s showbusiness“) and who else is working on it?

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Why are we interested in internet marketing?

Our business is a little different than the “typical” internet marketer (though I guess they all say that).

Yes, we do deliver “information products” (ours is software) over the web, but our clients are mainly large corporates who operate in a narrow, vertical industry.  Our software is priced well above the typical level of the typical e-book, and it’s for a pretty specific target market.  That said, there’s pretty much noone who’s life (and business) is not touched by electricity in a significant way - hence there is a broad potential market for us to tap into, in the future, as we seek to find other unmet needs for understanding of of the electricity market.

Given our type of client, a degree of one-on-one interaction is still necessary, so we are looking to internet marketing to augment our holistic approach to marketing (online and offline) - as part of a larger project of upgrading (and part-automating) our “Business Management System”, as I like to call it.

Over the past 18 months I have learnt a great deal about marketing, and am continuing to explore other avenues for learning, such that I can help the company meet its ambitious growth targets over the next 10 years.

The System Seminar 2009

In March this year I attended The System Seminar in Chicago. We weren’t sure what I would bring back from the experience, but if it turned out to be a poor investment at the very least we would know not to attend in future years.

The seminar featured presentations on a broad range of areas of Internet marketing. For each presenter, I have highlighted a couple of points that I found most useful or relevant to our company.

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