Playing with the big boys

The Kusnetzky Group is tracking nearly 100 companies who are playing in the market for virtualization technology. Most of these companies, as one might expect, are relatively small but, have developed interesting technology. The key question is how can they get the attention of a busy, dynamic and quite noisy marketplace?

Going to trade show after trade show is a costly effort and it is very hard to determine if the money invested in that form of marketing is producing anything more than the creation of a series of T-shirts, coffee mugs and the like.

Banner ads for websites can also be a very, very costly choice. The click through rate is highly dependent on where these banner ads are placed, how clever they are, the phase of the moon and, of course, the results are unpredictable.

Search engine ads are moderate in cost and results are immediately available any time one of these company's marketing people care to look. These ads only reach the folks who searched on the words or phrases that have been "purchased." Furthermore, people are only likely to see the top 3-5 of these ads and the bidding process for key phrases such as "virtualization" or "virtual machine software" can be beastly.

A few have developed orchestrated campaigns based upon content being delivered in many different forms and linked together using activity in the network's ever growing list of Blogs, Wikis and forums.

Some have come up with very clever marketing tools using second life or youtube. "Greg the Architect" from TIBCO comes immediately to mind.

John Powers, CEO and Chief Bottle Washer (CBW) of Digipede, sent me a pointer to his organizations most recent effort. It can be found here.

What types of communication reach you?