Breaking Through with New Technologies in Tech PR

Here's an anecdote, which hopefully you will find interesting, and some advice to go along that bridges trends in social media with the state of tech PR.

In doing so, I also add to the findings from our earlier study on the impact of social media on Tech PR.   Not bad for a lazy day before the July 4th long weekend sets in, right?

We were recently doing something we often do when researching technologies and prospective new clients.  We conducted a time-honored tradition called a media audit, in this instance covering the realm of workload automation: software that automates and coordinates the execution of enterprise software batch processes (also sometimes referred to as job scheduling software). 

Talk about a bluster index (see my previous post in which I describe article searches that turn up just press releases and little if any actual coverage)!  I would chart if for you, but I'll save us the trouble.  Article searches under this term over the past year turned up almost exclusively press releases.  Yet, here's the interesting part - the area has been followed and covered in detail by the top analysts - so you can't argue that it is not real or is unimportant.

In conducting the media audit (basically, a telephone survey), we got the audible equivalence of blank stares when asking about workload automation.  Some in the media had heard of it, but it did not really register - even for those who had mentioned it in articles previously.

One bit of feedback we got was that a result of the tech trade shrinkage (in turn, it can be assumed, driven by the growth of social media) is that fewer reporters are covering more beats.  This makes it harder for the "less important"  news to see the light of day, and for new technologies that aren't already creating lots of buzz to get covered.

This would seem to make sense, and perhaps you have seen this and can relate to it.  It leads to the question - how does one get coverage for new or niche technologies?  Although the obvious approach might be to convince the tech trades that it is important, perhaps using customer and analyst validation - we can fight fire with fire by using all the new social media tools that are availalabe to bypass tech trade media and bring the story directly to audiences of interest.

Comments

[Heidi Sullivan]

Great post! I believe Social Media is the way to address these niche communities. There has never been a magazine devoted solely to say, enterprise data storage networking, however, there are forums, blogs and social sites in spades.

However, because these are communities and not audiences, PR people will need to learn to engage in the discussion and establish authenticity and not "sell" a press release.

Tech magazines like InfoWorld have gone online-only with great success. I don't think it will be long for others to follow suit.

[Bob Geller]

Thanks, Heidi, for reading and commenting

Many focus on blogs and social media but let's not forget about the success of companies like IDG (of which InfoWorld is part of, of course) that have reinvented themselves as online tech publishers