Barking

Matthew Revell makes an interesting point on his blog regarding the use of trademarks and Open Source companies after reading Patrick Finch’s blog. I find this of particular interest since we are currently in the process of filling out the trademark forms for both our company Senokian, and the GPL’d business application EGS which we write, maintain and support and happen to think that it is a good thing.

Our reasons for doing this are to protect the company name and branding by protecting the reputation of the software that we develop. As Senokian we have invested a lot of time and effort into our EGS software and are more than happy to release the code under the GPL but we need to protect our brand for the software incase people start trying to pass off as us and damage our reputation.

Trademarking is part of this process and at the end of the day, we see it as beneficial to us and the community at large. There is no point developing a great piece of software, only to be put out of business and not be able to maintain and support the software we love. As Patrick says:

Open source is not a free-for-all: it is fair-for-all, and Red Hat surely have a right to their trademark without being labelled “seeking profit at any expense”.

Now we are not Red Hat, but as a company supplying Open Source software we differentiate ourselves from other projects that are not commercially supported by our services and our trademarks are part of this. This brand gives consumers and buyers confidence that the application is professionally developed and supported and that is the value which we sell to our customers.

Two years ago we attended our first trade event as an exhibitor, and our lack of preparation in planning the event inevitably resulted in a poor experience for us - in fact quite a few of these trade show exhibiting mistakes ring true of our first event!

However two years on, we have sensibly used the experience as part of our exhibiting learning curve and are now in the process of researching and meticulously planning our first ‘real’ trade event!

Unlike the first time round, we have sourced loads of information about ‘how to plan your trade show’ and downloaded some great exhibitor top tips - in fact the great site businessballs has proved to be an invaluable research tool.

As the old saying goes ‘its not rocket science’ - what we have learned is common sense rules - such as having a clear focus on why we want to exhibit and what we ultimately want to get out of the event. Asking these questions helped to channel our thoughts and set specific targets – we have even been using the SMART model (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time frame) to set out some meaningful objectives.

So having managed to absorb snippets of exhibiting tips, here are the Senokian Exhibitor Planning Top Tips:

• Perhaps most obviously, agree your reasons for exhibiting at a show, decide on a budget and start researching the right show for your business
• Set a realistic time frame in which to complete all pre-show tasks (EGS/projects is great for planning this!)
• Confirm your specific goals for attending the show - for example it could be to generate 50 potential qualified new sales leads, to give 25 demo’s of your product, to make 5 direct sales, to generate media coverage, to invite 5 key journalists to your stand or to position yourself as a market leader – I’m sure you get the picture!
• Decide on a theme for your event – how are you going to entice visitors to your stand? What give-aways are you going to offer and where shall you source them from? Top tip – whenever I visit a trade event I find the most useful give-away to be a carrier bag to put all the free pens in! (Make sure you get your logo and web address prominently displayed on both sides of the bags!)
• Make sure you have sufficient and relevant marketing literature to hand out at the show – but once at the show make sure you only display say 10 brochures and give-aways at a time - this means your stand wont look cluttered – but remember to replenish your stock!
• Write a press kit and send it to relevant journalists in preparation for your pre-show PR, include a brief company fact sheet, biographies of key employees, client testimonials, a case study snippet, your company logo, some screen shots and a few examples of any previous press releases – oh and of course include contact details of your press/marketing officer
• Train your staff – its sounds really obvious but its important that all staff members feel confident and sufficient product knowledge to allow them to sell!
• Pre-show PR – invite your clients to visit your stand, inform the local papers and contact specialist trade publication – they’re always on the look out for worthy, relevant news. Be sure to get a list of pre-registrants and send out an e-mail or postal mail shot inviting them to your stand. Even invite key journalists to come and visit your stand – but remember to entice them beforehand with your Company press-kit. And of course its always the simple things…display the details of the event on your company homepage.
• After-show preparation: never underestimate the importance of following up on your contacts and of course sending a simple email to say thank you visiting our stand!

This is by no means an exhausted list of top tips but we’re sure there are plenty of handy hints in there to help you plan your best exhibition EVER!

As many of you will be aware from the recent ‘Open Rebrand’ campaign that we launched, Senokian Solutions have been undertaking a re-brand of the main ‘Senokian’ and ‘EGS’ brands.

The re-brand process has been an interesting one, it took a while to come up with a new brand - including the unenviable task of having to change design agencies part way through the process - but we are happy with the results after a few hick ups and are now working on a new website for Senokian Solutions and the Open Source website for EGS.

One of the main changes that we have undertaking is to sub-brand several versions of EGS as Senokian products and incorporate different websites for these - obviously pulling all of this design together is a challenging task and the results will be available soon. The other big change we have undertaken on the back of this is to change the company name slightly.

Obviously changing the company name is a big decision for any organisation, and several people suggested that we change the name from Senokian Solutions. After an extensive consultation period we decided to simply drop the ‘Solutions’ part of the company and become ‘Senokian’. Our reasoning for this was due to the fact that we operate in several different areas within our industry and gives us more flexibility - for example Senokian Internet will soon be launched offering many of our ISP services in a more accessible form to people and the hosted Zimbra platform.

The new ‘Senokian’ brand will come online next month with the new website and marketing material available at http://www.senokian.com. For those of you who cannot wait, here is a sneak preview of the new logo:

Project management is an interesting and integral part of the work that we do at Senokian and something that is evolving on a continual and organic basis, especially since we started our ISO9001:2000 process.

Of course we use EGS/Projects to manage our process and as you’d expect it works incredibly well for us. However, we are currently doing some additions to the projects module for a client, and as EGS is released under the GPL we are able to include those into the main code base. Obviously this is a great benefit to us from a commercial sense, new functionality paid for by a client, but the other benefit that we have is that we are involved from a consultancy side in the project and are able to see how they run their [service based] projects and incorporate some of their ideas into our process where possible.

Some of the new features that are currently scheduled for the next EGS milestone that have come about from this project are:

• PDF generation of ‘Project Definition’ (a one sheet overview of a project, its deliverables, etc.)
• PDF generation of project task lists
• PDF generation of project progress report (on addition we have decided to make to our process that is not in our clients process is to email these project progress reports on a regular basis to clients)
• Time shifting of projects - allows you to build project quotes/times into EGS and then shift the whole time frame forward to the new start date
• Automatic emails on potential project/task over-runs

These are just a few of the new features that have made their way into EGS and our project management process - keep an eye on our blog and the Senokian website for news on the upcoming release of EGS and the new EGS/projects module.

So you have a great idea for a company and its first product and you have thought of a great name for it - sound familiar? It should do, there are a lot of companies out there that go through this process and a large number of them will share the company and product name. Here are a few I thought of:

• SugarCRM
• Zimbra

Now the problem comes if you are looking to bring more products to market, do you use the company name in future products or think of new ones? SAP for example use the former (well a variation on it):

• mySAP ERP
• mySAP Supply Chain Management
• etc.

The benefit of this is that the product name encompasses the use of the product, the downside is that the naming is a bit boring and can become too long to easily fit on marketing literature.

A company like SAP, with its brand awareness can get away with this, but for Senokian, we feel that it won’t work when trying to bring new products to market. EGS/[insert module here] gets a bit dull.

So what is the answer?

We have decided to go down the individual product name, similar to the way 37 Signals name their products. The big issue we have found with this is how to think up the product names.

If you have ever set up a company you will know how difficult it can be to think up a name - every great name you think of has either already been taken, or more likely the domain name has been registered, so trying to think of several new names can be a daunting task!

At Senokian we are lucky, there are currently nine of us (10 if you include my dog Archie who comes into work) so the method we used below came up with a lot of potential names that didn’t sound to similar. If there are one or two of you, your mileage may vary with the method below:

The method we found most successful was to sit everyone around the white boards in the office and start coming up with names (no matter how silly), once we had filled a white board for each product we narrowed the selection down to the best three and put them to the vote. We now have names for five new products that we plan to launch over the coming months and will post details of them on this blog and the Senokian site when they become available.

The first stage was a bit more involved than simply thinking up random names, we found after a bit of trial and error that drawing a really simple icon/picture of what the product does really helped with the process. So for example we put a picture of an office building and a chain up (to symbolise linking things together) for the CRM product/module and a whole load of names started flowing from there.

With a little help from everyone in the office, a thesaurus and a white board we now have a load of great product names! Check out the blog shortly to find out about the new products (and their names) and hopefully this might give you some inspiration when you next need to name a product.

A professional follow up

A couple of days after we thought up the product names we had a visit from a client who used to work for a large marketing company. She saw our white board (we had left one up in the office) and immediately knew what we had been doing.

Apparently this is exactly what they do in big marketing agencies and charge you a huge chunk of money for it.

So if you are a small company our top tip for the week is: buy a white board, get a few staff (or friends if you only have one or two of you - and offer them some beer once you have finished!) and draw some pictures and think up some names.