With grant deadlines, business plans and (a little bit) of summer vacation, blogging has not been on the priority list. While I haven’t been posting, I have been reading many different blogs.

Over the past few months, I have been working with a few different start-up companies to develop their business plans. Business planning can be a daunting task and one of the greatest challenges is determining what to include and the level of detail required. David Pasieka from MaRS just posted a great list of business plan tips “Tips for bright & not blurry eyed business plans“. His point about following business plan protocol made me laugh – I can’t even count how many times I have read the “[we are] so unique . . . [we have] no competitors” line. When I was working in venture capital, that line often equalled a due diligence fail.

Another element of business planning is translating technical information for the non-technical reader. I usually work with technology companies (in the life science, biotech and ICT sectors) and frequently cut significant amounts of technical detail from business plans. The business plan should be about the business (not about the technology) therefore only necessary details of the technology should be included. For example, it isn’t necessary to explain how antibodies bind to their antigens or include the specific binding sequence – it is more important to explain the (better, faster, cheaper) attributes of the technology and how you plan to get it to market. Business plans are about outlining the path to success for the businesses and engaging the interest of potential financiers and partners. Once you engage their interest, you can break out the enormous technical due diligence packages for them to review to their heart’s content.

Tourism Queensland announced the winning candidate for “The Best Job in the World” competition today. UK’s Ben Southall will start exploring and blogging about the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef on July 1, 2009.

I blogged about the whole social media marketing phenomenon of the “Best Job in the World” a few weeks ago. Here is an article discussing the evolution of the idea and its results.

A relatively paltry $1.7 million dollar marketing initiative that reaped $100 million dollars worth of marketing exposure.

That is awesome!

I am looking forward to reading the analytics of their conversion rates after the holiday booking season. Even if the impact isn’t significant this year, I suspect that this campaign will keep paying it forward.

Today is World Intellectual Property Day – a day to “celebrate and promote innovation and economic growth”. This year the focus is Green Innovation: “the development and diffusion of technological means to tackle climate change . . . [the] key[s] to halting the depletion of the earth’s resources”.

Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO)
World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO)

In accordance with the theme, WIPO didn’t send out promotional materials for the event and have encouraged organizations holding events to upload their advertising to a gallery. Marketing that is carbon-friendly and cost-effective.

One of my current projects has me immersed in distributed power generation technologies; particularly solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, wind energy, and geothermal storage. I am finding it extremely interesting as I broaden my knowledge base to understand the business models that are effective for commercializing renewable energy technologies. Cool stuff, indeed.

I have become increasingly fascinated with Tourism Queensland’s competition for “The Best Job in the World”. The successful candidate will live on Hamilton Island and will spend their time exploring the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef and reporting on their experiences through video diaries and blog posts. The call for applicants occurred on January 11th and the top 16 candidates were announced on April 3rd.

No, I am not interested in the job itself, I am interested in the concept as a case study in the use of web 2.0, social media, and viral marketing. According to media releases, the competition received over 34,000 video applications. Anthony Hayes, CEO of Tourism Queensland, said,

“In many ways [the competition] has taken on a life of its own spawning special discussion groups, bulletin boards, blogs and websites with applicants critiquing the competition, having detailed discussions and swapping ideas and tips. …. During the first weekend of the campaign . . . more than 200,000 people from around the world logged onto the website, including 25,000 in one hour alone.”

Wow. That is an amazing amount of traffic.

From a March 25th press release: “[t]he worldwide response to Tourism Queensland’s Best Job in the World campaign has been nothing short of phenomenal and already we have achieved around $100 million dollars worth of global publicity for Queensland.”

The top 50 applicants were tasked with campaigning for votes for a wild card spot on the top 10 interview list. Tourism Queensland ended up inviting 16 people, including the wild card, for interviews in early May. The wild card candidate, Clare Wang, received over 150,000 votes.

But get this, the wild card voting process tallied over 470,000 votes.

What fascinates me the most is the fact that Tourism Queensland spawned a global virtual army of social and conventional media marketers through the process of selecting the interview candidates. Yes, that’s right, they haven’t even given anyone a job yet! In the April 3rd press release announcing the top 16, Tourism Minister Peter Lawlor, stated,

“Tourism Queensland has spent the past few weeks watching in amazement at the lengths these candidates have gone to in their quest for The Best Job in the World. From organising stunts like scuba-diving in a tank in Amsterdam, dressing up as a mermaid in downtown Singapore and spruiking at a London pub to conducting hundreds of media interviews, the Top 50 have shown an incredible amount of ingenuity and passion. Within a week of being short-listed, Brisbane applicant Hailey Turner had even organised a 12 day round-the-world trip promoting herself and the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.”

The process isn’t complete yet as it still remains to be seen whether all this awareness will translate into addition tourism, but as an example of how viral and social media marketing can impact web traffic, I think that “The Best Job in the World” is an unqualified success.

I’m convinced that Tourism Queensland’s experiment would make a fabulous marketing case study. Analyzing what they did right, what they did wrong, how they managed and measured the process, and how you could repeat their results would be a terribly interesting read. Maybe someone with one of those new SSHRC business-focused graduate scholarships could make this their thesis topic.

Now that would be my dream job . . . being paid to do my own curiosity driven research.

The editor in me shudders at the title, but I’m not above blatantly asking for approval. It almost feels like one of those awkward high school moments. . .

Yes, I have joined Technorati.    

I recently discovered that some of my posts have been picked up by Technorati so I figured that I better “ride the wave”. Please make me feel popular and fave me. All the cool kids are doing it. Really.

I even faved myself, but Jake Seliger did it first, so I thought it would be okay. Oh no – I just went and gave you more authority Jake!