Archive for February, 2009

Read All About It

February 27, 2009 at 3:26 pm · Filed under Liz Swenton ·Tagged

What do you think of when you hear the word “March”?  Do you have thoughts of spring and the days getting longer?  Or do you think of the PR agency located above the Fours Pub with an elevator that smells like hamburgers? 

I actually think of Dr. Seuss, one of my favorite childhood authors.  Did you know that Monday, March 2nd is National Read Across America Day, in honor of Geisel’s birthday.  The day was created as part of Read Across America, an initiative to promote literacy.

So before you embark on the start of a new month next week, maybe you should brush up on the tweetle beetles that battle with their paddles in a puddle on a noodle-eating poodle, sir! 

green20eggs20and20ham

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Do you ‘do’ social media?

February 27, 2009 at 8:57 am · Filed under Liz Caradonna ·Tagged , , ,

On everyone’s mind this week – the results of Jennifer Leggio’s research report: Is ’social PR’ for real? Which agencies get it?

Leggio surveyed over 600 PR decision-makers in various industries about what they consider important when it comes to ‘doing social media’ and how well they think their agencies are approaching these tactics. Some of the results were obvious: 79% of respondents think it is ‘extremely important’ for their agencies to understand social media strategy, and only 37% think they have a ‘great’ understanding of how to use social media for business themselves. Clearly this is an area where clients see the necessity and need the expertise.

More surprising and somewhat depressing? Not quite half of the respondents agreed that their current agency ‘understands how PR needs to fuel entire business strategy, not just news coverage.’ And as far as social media goes, only 20% reported that their agency recommended social media programs beyond tools to support business endeavors. Says Leggio:

This is scary. No social media decision should be led with tool selection. Companies need to first consider their corporate objectives, then determine where their customers, partners and competitors are, and also consider how such use of tools ties to the corporate culture. Agencies, this relates back to the importance of team members understanding the fundamentals of a client’s business.

With this in mind,  “does your agency ‘do’ social media?” is the wrong question.

Do we ‘do’ social media? The short answer is “Yes.” The long answer is this:

All media is social. To boot, print and broadcast publications are relying increasingly on online and user-generated content, or transitioning to an online-only format. Online influencers (both collectively and as individuals) have gained unprecedented authority in the traditional media.

No company in the technology sector should entertain a PR proposal that lacks thorough consideration of how social media fits into the program – including an explanation of how social media monitoring and participation will be integrated with the rest of the media relations, marketing and lead generation strategy.

So we don’t list “social media relations” on our list of services. Instead, we incorporate social media principles and tools into our client’s campaigns, at both a strategic and tactical level. That way, social media becomes part of what we do for every client, on every campaign.

As long as new social media tools and tactics are being developed, we will continue to find ways to use them to strengthen all of our PR and marketing activities.

What do you make of this research? Agencies can now weigh in with their own side of these issues for a follow-up report: Social PR Survey II: Digging deeper into agency/client relationships – the survey is open to PR professionals at every level, and must be completed by March 31.

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Are economic woes giving rise to owner-driven global PR networks?

February 26, 2009 at 7:55 pm · Filed under Cheryl Gale ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

I spent two days in Milano with 30 PR professionals from around the globe.  We all belong to the GlobalCom network – a network built by passionate owners of specialist agencies across the world.

During our time together, we asked each other what implications the recession has had on our clients’ businesses and the growth of the network.  Since the network is made up of agenices that specialize across the IT, healthcare and travel and tourism industries, all our clients are feeling the pinch and taking precutionary measures.

One trend we identified was the move toward owner-driven agency networks.  A number of our clients recently moved from the well established global networks most of us have spent time in.  They tell us the ROI is stronger and more quickly established with global networks that are made up of specialized and experienced teams that more often than not have the agency owner participating.

With a number of pitches on the boil and big conferences in the coming months, we weren’t short of discussion points to take us away from the gloom and doom of the recession.  I had the honor of presenting a case study my Tideway team so successfully implemented during WEF in Davos, Switzerland.  I simply showed how Twitter can be a useful tool when trying to reach influencers that are all in one place.  I have to be honest, if it weren’t for this Twitter experience with Tideway, I wouldn’t rate it.  I just don’t get why people want to follow me or why i should follow others.  Do I care what people are eating for breakfast, what city they are in, or their most recent thought?  May be but I think not.

Anyway, Milano was amazing.  I loved the wine, the food and especially being with 30 PRs who get it.  Most people would find the thought of being surrounded by 30 PR people frightening.  I am not like most I guess.

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Where is privacy hiding?

February 26, 2009 at 4:45 pm · Filed under Juliana Allen ·Tagged , , ,

Privacy issues are surfacing everywhere…

Two weeks ago Facebook suffered its third outrage around user privacy after announcing terms of agreement changes that had users horrified that their data and content could become property of the behemoth social network; on Monday, New York Times reporter Saul Hansell wrote an article about the World Privacy Forum’s most recent report on cloud computing privacy concerns; and just yesterday, John Foley covered a new survey by Kelton Research in InformationWeek’s blog Plug Into the Cloud, showing that security concerns are one of the top two reasons holding businesses back from adopting cloud services.

While the connection between Facebook and cloud computing may not seem that clear at first, they both support the undeniable fact that everything is moving online.

To give you a better example of how closely these social and high-tech applications are connected, take a look at Google’s Gmail outage earlier this week. While Gmail accounts via Web access were down for approximately 2.5 hours, Venturebeat reports that people accessing it through their IMAP accounts – what you might use on an iPhone – never even noticed there was a problem… a clear “victory” for cloud computing, according to Tim Beyers of Motley Fool.

It’s clear that cloud computing and social applications like Facebook and Gmail are here to stay, but until we can find ways to adequately meets concerns for privacy, people – and businesses – are just going to have to decide if potentially losing some privacy is worth the benefits.

(…As I was writing this, TechCrunch tweeted a new story on Facebook’s plans to open it’s terms of service for user input – staying true to its roots of promoting a more open and shared environment. Will be interesting to see what ensues….)

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Stories with legs…

February 26, 2009 at 2:46 pm · Filed under Martin Jones ·Tagged , , , ,

Marvelous – a new category in marketing – ‘Backlash Marketing’.

I came across it because I was intrigued to receive an email from a friend linking to this video – a CBS story on Heart Attack Grill. I first heard about the place in 2006, it was launched in 2005, and so wondered what was new that was grabbing the headlines once again.

The answer…? Absolutely nothing.

Heart Attack Grill exists to court controversy – deliberately unhealthy food, from Quadruple Bypass Burgers to full fat Coke to fries cooked in pure lard wrapped up in all things socially unacceptable, cigarettes on the menu, waitresses dressed in scantily clad nurse uniforms and wheelchairs to get you back to your car after you have gorged yourself. Lovely.

The story has captured the hearts and minds of media and pundits alike, in both a good and bad way, and has delivered a massive dose of free exposure that money simply cannot buy.

In days gone by, this story would have caused a stir, hit some headlines and then gone away….largely.

But in today’s PR world, people are still talking about it, whether they are outraged, excited, relieved, angry, no matter.

It would be challenging to apply the principles of Backlash Marketing to technology PR, although not impossible!

What’s more interesting is that the power of PR, in today’s media landscape combined with the variety of ways people can now share information, means that if you can give a story some legs….it can just keep on running.

The concept of ‘media control’, the mantra of our PR-edecessors, is now officially dead and a new opportunity exists to fully engage our audiences in ways that live and breathe in the same way they do.

Unfortunately, while the story rocks, the food apparently does not – but I don’t think they really care!

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Revealing (not pushing) an Agenda to the Media

February 26, 2009 at 1:49 pm · Filed under Eric Seymour ·Tagged , , , ,

A good PR person views themselves as the eyes and ears of the media – not a salesperson. We exist to help the media do their job better. We’re granted access to the most sensitive views and positions of a company, as well as research, technology and often customer experiences from our clients – a privilege for sure. Our position is coveted by journalists whose job depends on getting access to this very information. And they work really hard to get it on their own! When we share what we know rather than ramming it down a journalist’s throat, clients get the opportunity for ink.

Case and point from our client Exigen Services. These guys have a vision to transform the application outsourcing industry (and they really do have something special). Unfortunately, every journalist in the space has heard this story before and is rightfully jaded. Our approach? Share what we know and help the journalist find a new angle to an old story.

InformationWeek listened (scroll down to read customer comments). ZDNet’s IT Project Failure’s blogger listened. TechTarget’s SearchSoftwareQuality.com and SearchCIO.com both listened seperately. SoftwareProjects.com blogger videod (and posted to YouTube.com). Financial Times’ magazine, Direct Foreign Investment listened. Financial Services Outsourcing asked Exigen Services to explain it (so did Bank Systems & Technology). Projects @ Work thought the company was on to something. IT Business Edge thought they had one, an ‘edge’ that is.

We’re not done helping journalists see the industry through Exigen Services’ eyes, however if Inc Magazine’s Fastest Growing Private Companies in America is any indication that Exigen does have something special, we’re living up to our end of the PR / journalist relationship.

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Conversing, not Pitching, Leads to Ink Today

February 23, 2009 at 1:24 pm · Filed under Eric Seymour ·Tagged , , ,

Journalists are being bitten by the economy more than most other markets and if you’ve tried to get them to write about your company recently, you know this first hand. PC Magazine is no different. When NCP engineering asked us to get ink with this heavy weight pub for their Windows 7 VPN client launch, we went right to work. Our strategy? Talk with the writer on his own terms and translate a ‘pitch’ to a ‘conversation’.

With PC Magazine’s Forward Thinking blogger, Michael Miller, in our sights, we went to work. Miller is active in PC help forums so we started there. Like the rest of the software media, Miller was focused on Windows 7 so we identified key forums he’d be likely to show up in. And when we did, we started the conversation about NCP. The moniker you see, VPN Haus, is our blog for NCP. Having a real conversation with a journalist requires transparency. The seed was planted: NCP offered a VPN client for the beta Windows 7. Next, we saw he wrote about the topic on his blog, and so we commented there as well.

By addressing Miller on his own terms we had managed to introduce our client, their product and a key message or two. Now we were confident that a traditional email pitch would not only get read, it would also jog his memory of the forum post and blog comment. We were in! Miller responded to our email and requested the product to test. Success!

We’ll update this post with the PC Magazine ink our ‘conversation’ style generated for NCP’s product.

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Live… from Davos, Twit-zerland

February 6, 2009 at 7:08 pm · Filed under Liz Caradonna ·Tagged , , ,

According to my records, I averaged over an hour a day on Twitter last week. Not because I find the lure of constant 140-character correspondence with 100 of my closest acquaintances absolutely irresistible (although that is also the case!), but because one of our clients was in Switzerland and I had a job to do.

Tideway, one of the 15 IT companies chosen as a 2009 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, had the opportunity to attend the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland last week – a prestigious event that attracts the very top tier of entrepreneurs, politicians, media and geniuses from all over the world.

By now, you’re probably aware of the prominence Twitter has gained in the way people interact at conferences and trade shows.  It’s an ideal tool for connecting people who are all in one physical place, but don’t already know each other or have one another’s contact information. You may be surrounded by six hundred strangers in suits and nametags, but on Twitter you can be engaged in a dialogue with these people about the session you just attended, the big news a company just announced, the party you’re going to later, or the best booths to hang out in. We knew Twitter would be crucial at Davos – and before the meeting started, we had our eye on at least three dozen prominent attendees and media outlets who were already actively tweeting about it.

Tideway’s CEO, Richard Muirhead, sent tweets throughout the week reacting to panels and sessions, responding to open-ended questions, and distributing his first-person blog series about the Davos experience. Our job was to keep our ears to ground and eyes on the screen, communicating multiple times a day to relay who was talking about what, and identifying opportunities to connect Richard with people who would appreciate his perspective and personality. This was, of course, in concert with all of the traditional PR activity surrounding such a momentous event!

The outcomes of this strategy were huge. In just over a week, Tideway received first-time visibility in some of the highest-profile media outlets in the world, including Forbes.com (three times) and the BBC (twice).

Here’s the thing about social media: only the tactics are new. The philosophy remains the same. Following and corresponding with the Davos media on Twitter worked, because it enabled us to take advantage of timing and tailoring - two things every PR team should be doing with any pitch already. Our time spent digesting hours’ worth of 140-character dispatches paid off in knowing what journalists wanted to talk about, when they would be receptive to hearing about it, and where and how to approach them. It’s not always this easy!

The only thing left to be desired from Davos? Bono. He is apparently busy recording an album right now, and did not attend. Bono, if you’re reading this – Richard is still available to meet with you when you’re ready.

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