Thanksgiving is Story-Telling Time

Thanksgiving is a time for gratitude, reflection … and family stories recanted over mincemeat pie.

Want a lesson in extremely compact story telling?  You may have seen AT&T’s Rethink Possible TV spot.

If these guys can visually tell the life story of a fictitious future U.S. president right up through inauguration, along with the meeting and courtship of his parents, in 30 seconds, and still have time to include a leisurely look at the parent’s curious, flirtatious first glances …  while demonstrating the cell phone technology that made the meeting possible …. then certainly we B2B PR content developers can deliver a case study in a one or two short paragraphs.  Some of us do.

Happy turkey day to all my colleagues and friends.  I’m going to try my hand and making a mincemeat pie from scratch – complete with rich, brandy-fortified hard sauce.

One ERP Vendor Product Page Scores High

By its nature, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) installations are complicated and broad in scope.   Below, I rate the product home pages of three top ERP vendors, using my Core Score method (see point criteria at right).

NetSuite (an ERP package combining CRM, ERP and web activity) is the winner, awarded all the points except for “News headline and link,” totaling  11.  But they also get 4 bonus points, with 3 of them for effectively differentiating their product/service from competitors.  So the grand total is 15.

I love the use of many customer logos that are links to Customer Success Stories – although it would be better if the stories were on web pages rather than downloadable PDFs.

By comparison, Microsoft Dynamics ERP and SAP Business All-in-One product home pages both score 9.  Sage MAS 500 did poorest among those examined, with 4 points out of 12.

All companies got one bonus point for not using “leader” or “leading” in the text, although NetSuite succumbed on their “About” page. All are clearly leaders in the ERP game and can prove it – nothing would be gained by proclaiming it.