Linda Popky: "We Built This City"
This Week's Guest: Linda J. Popky
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
The cliché “Been there, Done that” is overused in most cases but not when talking about Linda Popky and her 30+ years of experience marketing tech products.
One of Silicon Valley’s top 100 women of influence, Linda stops in to talk to Melinda Byerley about her lifetime of marketing experiences and specifically her time at Sun Microsystems in the heady days of the genesis of Silicon Valley. She shares surprising stories about marketing for Sun in the rapidly changing era of the late 80’s and 90’s. We explore the differences in the tech cultures of the East Coast versus California, and how marketing for tech products has evolved—and what is largely the same—after all these years.
Her attitude and love for her profession epitomizes the of Silicon Valley when she says, “Don’t ever listen to somebody who tells you you can’t do something.”
Show Notes
VIDEOS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
20th Anniversary summary video of Sun Microsystems
A couple of fun Sun Microsystems commercials--a movie trailer parody, "The Dot", and a compilation of comedy spots.
MORE FROM LINDA
Linda's newest book: "Marketing Above the Noise" Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing That Matters"
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More About Linda Popky
PRESIDENT, LEVERAGE2MARKET ASSOCIATES, INC.
Named one of Silicon Valley’s Top 100 Women of Influence and a member of Alan Weiss’s Million Dollar Consulting® Hall of Fame, Linda J. Popky has extensive experience in marketing—in industry, agencies, and consulting.
Linda is the founder and president of Leverage2Market® Associates, Inc., a strategic marketing company that helps organizations transform their business through marketing. She is the author of the recently published book Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters (Bibliomotion, March 2015).
If it relates to marketing, Linda has done it. Her expertise includes corporate marketing, communications and messaging, marketing team development, facilitation, sales training and support, partner and channel programs, market sizing and intelligence, field marketing, marketing operations, industry/market development, and product marketing.
In demand as a speaker for presentations and workshops for corporate, non-profit, and professional associations, Linda has been quoted and featured in a variety of online and print publications, including Business Week, Fortune Small Business, Fast Company, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many others.
Linda has served as the Program Advisor for the Integrated Marketing Program at San Francisco State University’s College of Extended Learning and she helped create the school’s Social Media Marketing program. She is the author of Marketing Your Career: Positioning, Packaging and Promoting Yourself for Success and Promoting Your Non-Profit: Using Marketing to Help Your Organization Succeed in Turbulent Times, and the co-author of Disciplined Marketing For Building a Professional Services Practice. She is the editor of Alan Weiss on Consulting: A Guided Journey with the “Rock Star of Consulting.” She created the NorCal Business Marketing Association’s Marketing Strategy Roundtables, and she hosts her own MarketingThoughtLeadership.com podcast series. You can also find her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
