Blog

What’s up with MFC in Visual Studio 2011 Beta

Hello, I’m Pat Brenner, a developer on the Visual C++ Libraries team. Through this blog post I wanted to share some information about the Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) Library, since I am the primary developer working on MFC.

As you know, MFC is an important technology component which has been extensively used over the years by C++ developers to build desktop applications for Windows. In every product release, we make enhancements to the library, whether it is taking advantage of features in newer versions of the Windows operating system or adding fixes for common developer issues. With the recent release of Visual Studio 11 Beta, there have been some concerns among the MFC developers about the apparent lack of focus on MFC.

Marketing: How to Outreach to Diverse Communities

There are five simple steps to developing and expanding your outreach activities. These steps are similar to those involved in most
marketing plans.

1. Establishing goals.
2. Identifying and understanding target audiences.
3. Developing specific strategies for achieving goals.
4. Defining objectives.
5. Evaluating success and soliciting feedback.

Why Marketing to Diverse Communities Matters

Marketing and Community Relations are the processes that an organization uses to connect with its various constituents such as clients,volunteers, donors, community partners, and peers.

• The American Marketing Association defines marketing as “creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and managing
customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”
• Community relations are your interactions with the community in which your organization operates. Community relations emphasize
fostering trust through interactions.

Community-marketing: to apply or to refuse?

In today's note I want to mention of one more marketing tool which can both to do much harm, and to help the companies with strengthening of the competitive position. It will be a question about application of community-marketing or «marketing to communities».

First of all, we will deal with the concept of community. In a case with a product or service (namely about this will er blog), the community is a group of the active users united by the general interest to the given product. Concept "interest" is wide enough are councils about product use, area of its application, discussion about improvement of fuctions, discussion of products-competitors, resolution of problems with use of a product and other.

The key moment for formation of high-grade community is possibility of communications between its participants, knowingly the word community is conformable to a word "communicate".

In a century of information technology presence of community around your product is capable to introduce essential value in a marketing complex. Let's consider these pluses:

Community Marketing

If you are trying to leverage communities as part of your marketing, there are a few things you need to approach differently.

1. Think consumer tribes – not market segments

The most important thing to know about your potential community members is how they behave with one another. That is much more important than to understand the market segment to which they belong based on market characteristics. That does not mean that traditional market segmentation will not allow you to discover tribes in some cases. As someone pointed out last week when we presented this concept at the BRITE conference, traditional market segmentation might have uncovered the stay-at-home moms as a segment in the health market. While true, traditional market segmentation would have described them by age bracket, income level and other such characteristics – and not by the behavioral characteristics that are so critical to understand how to structure the initial community.