This may be one of the worst examples of a CEO talking about a serious competitor that I have seen. The mocking laugh and outright disregard, for what anyone with any foresight could see was going to be a serious competitor, is inexcusable. If I were a shareholder of Microsoft, which I am not, I would be outside Ballmer’s office with torch and pitchfork for forfeiting a 9 year head start in the market to Apple because of lack of vision.

Want to avoid sticking your foot in your mouth? Here are some guidelines for positioning against the competition:

• Understand your market. You ought to have an advantage with a given audience relative to your competition. If you don’t you are in big trouble. Hopefully this advantage can extend to a larger audience over time. Whether your advantage is technological, user experience, cost or another advantage make sure you understand that and communicate that.
• Never underestimate your competition. Don’t believe your own marketing that you have the best solution in the market and that your position is safe. Your competition typically is far more capable that your internal team will give them credit for. Talk to customers where you lost deals to them to get a clearer picture.
• Never belittle your competition. This is the one that I can’t believe that CEO Ballmer never learned. You never win when you do this. Essentially you are saying to undecided customers that they are stupid if they are still considering your competition. Is there any better way to drive away some of the key customers you want to capture?
• Let the market belittle your competition. Looking for the best way to ruin your competition’s reputation? Build a kick ass product. With the advent of social media, crappy products can’t stand the light of day. If you build a far superior product than your competition and engage online with your audience your fans will quickly point out your strengths over the competition without you getting dirty.
• Build a case for the importance of your strengths. If you are competing with a strong competitor, be sure to get out there and champion your strengths as a critical component of a good product in your space and make sure that they really are. Blog, write contributed articles, engage analysts and your prospects in this discussion. Make sure people are looking for products with your strengths.

Competitive positioning is never easy. Be honest, be clear, and be respectful and you will be on your way.

So if comments are highly desirable, does this mean you should give up on your blog if all you hear are virtual crickets in response to your posts? Definitely not. Your first order of business is to get people to follow your blog and to generate interest in what you are commenting on. Here are a few ways to look at the values of your blogs:

• Blog traffic – If you aren’t using some form of web analytics, start immediately. Generally it is easy to see a direct correlation between your blog posts and the traffic to your site. You should promote your blogs through any and all social mediums you are currently using like twitter. If you are promoting your blogs properly, you should see a bump in your traffic on the days of blog posts.
• Drip marketing - Blogs are great for drip marketing and lead nurturing. Highlight your blog posts in your newsletters and create quick e-mail templates for your sales team to send relevant entries to their prospects. Not only will you find that blogs are one of the top links of interest on your newsletter, you will also find that it helps facilitate opens of those newsletters over time.
• Competitive marketing –  Blogs are great for staking out a competitive position. It is an easy way to point to your competitive advantages and highlight weaknesses of competition. When competitive questions come up in a sales engagement, a link to the appropriate blog is a good tool in the hands of your sales team.
• Search optimization – Populating your blogs with search key words is an important use of blogs. Blogs help your ideal customers find you rather than having to search them out.
• Lead generation – Ultimately you would like to convert blog traffic to leads. Leads that come through blog traffic are often more qualified than other prospects because they found you while searching for a particular topic that you wrote about. You should certainly be using web analytics to track lead conversions from links on your blog.

These are a few of the reasons you should blog even if there are relatively few comments. Also recall that you are blogging for your specialized audience and the magnitude of that audience may necessarily be limited. Generating regular and relevant content through a blog is a marketing tool that every company with an online presence should be using.

• Craft the presentation – Spend the time to storyboard the presentation, fuss with the text and key messages.
• Crank up the graphic look & feel – If you are going to be using this presentation in front of customers then it better look professional.
• Seemingly endless reviews – Can anyone ever agree on a presenation? Usually it takes a command decision to come to a conclusion and then there is inevitable grumbling about omissions or confusing slides.
• Sales training - Now comes the fun part. You have crafted the presentation, but can you get everyone to present it the way you want?
• Ad hoc modifications – I guarantee that unless you threaten to fire people that do it your presentation will undergo significant modifications by the people that use it. Everyone has a different style and one PPT does not fit all.
• Presentations in front of customers - Now the fun begins. It’s either too long, too boring, doesn’t describe your product quick enough, or has too many words.
• Net problem? One way communication – PowerPoint presentations don’t facilitate the most important part of early stage company meetings; two way communication.

Think of how much time and effort is often spent on crafting and refining presentations and how often they simply fall flat. So what should you do? Focus instead on these 5 key aspects of your meeting and make it a conversation.

1. Vaildate your customer problem – Don’t go in assuming that you know with certainty what your customer problems are. Validate your hypothesis regarding the customer pain you intend to address. You will often find opportunities to make your idea that much more powerful. For more on this process I recommend Steven Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany.
2. Explain and demonstrate your approach - Early meetings ought to explain the key objectives you are trying to achieve with your product and demonstrations where applicable. Make your product the star and remove ambiguities about what it is you are offering to your customers and how you can help solve the particular problem you are addressing.
3. Establish your credentials – Why is your company positioned to solve your prospect’s problem? Have you proven it with their peers? Do you have deep industry experience? Can you point to advisors that they would know and respect?
4. Validate your pricing - Early in a product life cycle you should be attuned to your pricing to discover whether you are priced too high or too low. Whether it’s competitive pressures, ROI analysis, or optimizing price, you should get a lot of information about pricing in early meetings with customers. If you are solving a real problem, customers should be able to instantly grasp the value of your offering, in fact, they may already be spending money trying to solve it themselves.
5. Listen, listen, listen - One of the things I hate most about PowerPoint presentations is that they leave so little room for listening to your prospect. You ought to be listening at least 50% of the meeting. If you are not, then you will most certainly fall victim to good meeting syndrome where you come out of a meeting thinking they love you and then can’t understand 6 months later why the deal hasn’t progressed at all. You have more to learn from your customers than they have to learn from you.

Where are PowerPoint slides appropriate? Presentations are best when there is a graphic, chart, or illustration that adds to your conversation in a way that couldn’t be done just by talking. More traditional presentations are best when you have a demonstrated successful repeatable process that you can train a large sales team on and be consistent. In startups, this often comes several years into the life cycle of the organization. Until then, you should be ready for a more interactive sales process with participation from executives, product managers and founders until you are really ready to grow and build your company with a proven, repeatable sales process.

If you are falling into this trap it is absolutely critical that you address it sooner than later. Why? Because today you are no longer finding your customers, they are finding you. Information overload has diminished the effectiveness of traditional mediums of marketing like advertising and direct marketing campaigns. Today, with the growth of importance of social media, more than ever, web content rules. If you are messaging around your unique differentiator instead of standard industry terms, you significantly diminish your chances for customers to find you.

So how do you know what the standard language of your customers is?

• First, talk to your customers and prospects. How did they justify the budget for your technology and what language did they use? What specific pain did they say they are addressing through the adoption of your solution?
• Second, closely follow your competition. How many times have you heard complaints about how a customer is copying your messaging? Don’t worry about it. Establishing a common language for your solutions is in the best interest of both you and your competition. It creates demand and budget for a given solution, allows you to self identify to prospects looking for that solution, and finally creates the impression that using those types of solutions is a best practice for their industry.

You are much better off being in a position of differentiating yourself from your competition for an established customer need than you are trying to create a demand for your own unique type of solution. If you are the only vendor in a market, then it is a good bet that your technology is not an industry best practice and the perceived risk of adopting your solution goes up. Embrace a common language for your market and move onto the more important task of being the best in that market.

Unfortunately, for many companies they have not been able to get past the very tactical step of establishing a company presence. They put up a LinkedIn corporate site, a facebook site, establish a corporate blog (which typically has a flurry of posts and then tapers off to inactivity), maybe even set up a YouTube account and post a few videos. Then they hit a roadblock. What next?

It is important to understand that social media is simply a new and highly effective medium for distributing a company’s original content. Good social media strategy always should begin with a web content and messaging strategy. I just engaged with a client and our discussion focused on the following important items:

• Thought leadership – how will their content strategy support thought leadership in their industry
• Competitive positioning – how will their content build a case for prospects prioritizing capabilities that emphasize their strengths and highlight competitors weaknesses
• Customer needs – what key needs are they addressing for prospects
• Search marketing – what key words need to be consistently used in the content they create
• Messaging strategy – what are the top messages that they want to weave into all of their posts and documents
• Key markets and market drivers - what markets are most important to them and what motivates their purchasing decisions, i.e. regulatory requirements

Only after walking through their strategy for web content and messaging did we begin to approach how that would be distributed through coordinated blog posting, tweeting, blog responses, pay per click campaigns, LinkedIn group postings, etc. If your company is exploring a social media strategy, think first about how you will be able to create fresh, consistent and relevant content to get the best results. Once you know what content you will create and who will create it then think about how you will distribute that content through a variety of social avenues.