Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I have been inviting bloggers to pay attention to an announcement from one of my clients, Attensa, as they bring out a new Mac RSS reader and other enhancements to their enterprise RSS platform.

It has been fun work, reconnecting with good folks; meeting new folks, and talking about enterprise RSS. One particularly smart guy, Mitch Wagner, who blogs the “Apple Unvarnished” column for CMP’s InformationWeek.com, challenged me.

(To paraphrase him:)

Janet, RSS readers are a dime a dozen. In 100 words or less, what’s so special about Attensa’s?

Oh, and I do love a challenge. To boil a pretty meaty subject / comparison down to something that will compel a smart guy to want to write more… So I bit:

95 words:

Attensa’s enterprise RSS readers are designed specifically for business use:

• Users can share business information quickly and easily, with one-click republishing to blogs/shared sites.
• Attensa ties desktop, web and mobile reader clients together so articles read, filed and deleted are treated consistently across all clients, in a secure manner.

I get the benefits of securely sharing feeds / snippets of feeds quickly and easily with teammates - within or outside the firewall - no matter the device. My company benefits from understanding what captures my attention, and can learn from and retain it.

————

Of course, I had to add (outside the 100 word limit, I hope):

I think the capture and retention of knowledge workers’ attention is critical. That IP walks out the door every day. The Attensa enterprise RSS platform provides a way to grab it and keep it.

————

We’ll see whether it’s enough to get Mitch’s attention. I’m pretty sure he’s got plenty of people vying for it. But in the meantime, I’m grateful for the pitch back, Mitch.

I’m prepping the blogosphere this weekend for an upcoming announcement by Attensa on Tuesday, August 28.

They’re going to announce some pretty major enhancements to their enterprise 2.0 RSS platform, and a Mac reader - finally.

If you’d like a scoop, you’re welcome to contact me at janet (at) janetleejohnson.com.

I’ve got screen shots galore, a preview of the press release, a pre-release download area to try the Mac reader, a video of Attensa’s Scott Niesen demoing the new capabilities and more:

In fact, check out this screen shot from within their River of News view - you no longer have to leave your RSS reader in order to see the full effect of a site’s content, in context. (Including video!)

Attensa is a firm believer in the power of the blogosphere to push the needle on new product announcements and adoption. They’ve hired a blogger (me!) to replace a traditional PR agency, and I’ve joined forces with their SEM firm, Anvil Media, to push the envelope on discovering industry influencers. And they’ve got strong traditional media relationships as well.

Show your support for the preview. I’m prepped and happy to share news and information - ping me for more.

I’ve known Eric Hayes and Tim Brown, co-founders of Attensa, since about 1990, when we all worked at Now Software. We bled the colors of the Apple rainbow together at Now where we developed and marketed applications solely for the Mac.

I started at Now as a very green product manager for Now’s compression utility; Eric was the architect of Now-Up-to-Date and Contact, our best-selling calendar and contact management software. And Tim was an engineer on Now Utilities - the original Mac system enhancement suite.

Those were the days.

Our products were award-winning, our engineers were rock stars in the Mac community, and we got to go to great parties at Mac World when you actually knew most of the people there.

Oh, I miss Boston in August! We were always there at Madonna Festival time, and what a place to see it…

Fast forward 15 years: the Apple logo (and some of my hair) is stylishly gray, and I’m working again with Eric and Tim at Attensa; helping them get the word out about their enterprise RSS platform and RSS readers.

Of course, the worlds of marketing and engineering software is much more complex than in the good old days. As are the applications, tools and platforms that we use.

But one of the things I’ve always appreciated about Eric and Tim (and others like them) is that they’ve been smart enough to hide the complexity of the worlds they negotiate from pretty much everybody else but themselves.

Thank goodness some things really don’t change.

It’s no wonder the Mac has challenges in enterprise 2.0.

Now… I love Apple, and have for years. I got into technology in 1984 - The Year that Apple Built. I worked for Apple as a business development manager. I have always had a soft spot in my heart for the platform.

So I was pretty thrilled to I walk into one of my clients and find a pretty daring environment for a non-agency business: they have both Mac and Windows-based PCs in their 60-person firm.

Most interesting to me, the Windows-based PCs came in late to the party.

But my cross-platform pain is becoming acute. It’s not like I want to slit my wrists yet; but I am sick of even graphics “standards” like JPEG not rendering correctly on my COO’s laptop when she opens PowerPoint documents I’ve created on a Mac.

It seems that in 2007 (only 23 years later) - with all the “cross-platform” products, standards and services we have at our fingertips - the damn Mac and Windows machines still have trouble communicating.

And yes, the Macs have Microsoft Office, some have Intel inside and even Windows software emulators in use; and there are Windows 2007-based PCs that can more accurately communicate (the setup can be laborious, but that’s another story) - inside the building. But the majority of Windows PCs remain on 2003 - as is the majority of the world.

Apple’s problem?

Microsoft has done a piss-poor job of cross-platform integrations of their own products for “the rest of us.” (To coin an Apple phrase from those radical 80’s.)

I know there are plenty of companies who make cross-platform applications work quite successfully today. But from a knowledge worker’s perspective, too few productivity applications have it humming across platforms yet.

The work in creating applications, tools and services that work together seamlessly in a cross-platform environment is critical.

What does it take? Two critical consistencies:

• Consistent architecture - applications make the same kinds of requests to the same resources and get the same respect. (No one will know how well this works until it doesn’t.)
• Consistent user experience - a great software engineer can make applications dance. But if the user experience is poor on any side of the cross-platform equation, knowledge workers will find non-standard workarounds.

Consistency takes patience, resources, coordination and vision. We should reward those companies who embrace a multi-platform with consistency with our attention and our business.

Our employees’ productivity will surely follow.

Wow, Janet, what a headline! Trust me, I didn’t make it up.

I’m excited for my smart friend Steve Gehlen. He’s producing the first of what I believe will be many inVerge conferences in Portland that focuses on the invergence of media platforms, of online + offline, content + advertising, and corporate content + consumer-generated content.

“inVerge 2007 is a multi-disciplinary conference designed for thought leaders, executives, strategists, influencers, mavericks and cultural creatives from a variety of creative industries and disciplines.”

I’m signed up. The list of speakers is impressive, and Steve had the foresight to link inVerge to a couple of other ‘happenings’ the first week of September -

“In order to create a unique experience for attendees, this conference starts on the same day as, and is integrated with, three other cultural events happening in Portland:
+ Time-Based Art Festival (performance : dance : music : new media : visual arts)
+ MusicFestNW (over 125 indie bands)
+ First Thursday Gallery Walk (an evening of art, wine and music)”

Steve was involved in the original Portland Creative Conference, so he knows how to throw an incredibly creative event.

Please check it out. I’ll be there, blogging the conference, you can bet. But I’m pretty sure reading about it will pale in comparison to living it.