Flack's Revenge

PR Checklists: What is the State of the PR Program?

My post on Tuesday discussed PR process and checklists.

There are many types of checklists covering many different areas of PR. They can be about things as seemingly trivial as covering for a colleague on a briefing (my team sometimes regrets asking me when they see my checklist of info needed to make sure that I have everything), to large projects like events management.

Since President Obama just gave his State of the Union address I thought it might be a good time to ask: what is the State of the PR Program for your accounts? The checklist below is one I put together that can help a PR team make sure that the basics are in place and that the account is in good standing:

PR Toolkit

Key Messages
Last update / frequency of update

Thematics
Last update / frequency of update

Media/Analyst/Bloggers lists, graded for:
Accuracy
Categorization
Core list identified
How up-to-date it is

Editorial calendars, awards, graded for:
Completeness
Usefulness
Key opportunities called out

PR plan, graded for:
How up-to-date it is
Goals identified

Results / coverage

Quality - Did messages get through?  Did stories reflect our key themes?

Quantity - Did we have sufficient coverage?

Comparisons: vs. competition; previous year results; against goals identified in plan

PR Mix - Are you using a good mix of tools? Relying too much on any single approach?

New eBook on Market Positioning

At Fusion PR, we have teamed up with Silicon Valley tech marketing and strategy guru Rebel Brown on many successful product launches and company rebranding/turnaround efforts.

I am pleased to let you know that Rebel's new eBook It’s Not About You Anymore, P.S. It Never Was is out now (free download, no registration required).  It describes her approach to developing positioning that works.

According to the book:

Buyers do not use marketing propaganda to make decisions – whether they are consumers or B2B buyers. Buyers want credible evidence – and they don’t necessarily view vendors as the best source for those credible facts. Besides, B2B customers can find out every 'truth' they want to know about you. Give them a search engine and they are off and running on a factfinding frenzy. And thanks to social media – not all they learn will be facts. They’ll learn how others feel about your business. Market perception is more important than ever before.

Rebel reminds us that every position needs to be unique, discusses how to develop a positioning matrix, and explains the importance of focusing on the "pivot points" regarding your market, company and solutions.

The book offers great advice for anyone involved in tech PR and marketing, I strongly recommend it.

Every Number Tells a Story: From Bits, Bytes, Speeds and Feeds to Othello

Much has been written about the sorry state of the press release, especially when it comes to tech PR.   Just earlier this week CIO Magazine blogger Thomas Wailgum cited high tech vendor press release as number 6 on his list of  Ten Things he Hates about Tech.  (I am thinking of doing a post "the Top Ten things I hate about Top Lists"... then again, he wrote it, I read it, linked to it and you may well be reading it now so I suppose they work).

Whether the number is ten or a trillion, or the units are petaflops or a terabytes, one of the challenges we face in tech PR is the ability to tell a good story.   This is at least in part due to the fact that the stories are often built on performance numbers or "specs".   And all too often we throw numbers around without having any idea of what they really mean.

In this era of seemingly weekly trillion dollar bailouts, the public is being forced to digest large numbers and it is sometimes hard to have any real connection with them: to know what they mean and how to compare them.  This is especially true in tech, where it is not only numbers but the units of measurement that need to be understood; often in obscure areas that are far outside the experiences of any PR person who does not use the end product or has not labored on the front lines of tech engineering.

The best advice I can give (and what I tell my teams) is that you cannot run from the numbers but need to take the time to get your arms around them.   This means not just aping lines and taking what the client hands you in terms of specs, but understanding what the common benchmarks, standards and units of measurement are.

Try to get a sense of how people - reporters, analysts and other industry folks - measure and compare specs and performance in your specific area of tech.   What is really considered to be breakthrough and what is par for the course?

Then, take a step back, compare this information with what your client claims, and do your best to keep the client honest.   Be cognizant of the numbers you are using and wrap them into your client's story with an appreciation for what they really mean.

I saw a couple of articles on related areas that are worth mentioning.

In The Biggest of Puzzles Bought Down to Size, which ran in the NY Times Science section yesterday, Natalie Angier reports how to use the back of the proverbial envelope to comprehend large numbers and quickly calculate imponderables like how many miles Americans travel on the road each year or the total volume of human blood in the global population  As the article states:

It’s really just critical thinking, breaking down seemingly complicated problems into simpler problems,” said John A. Adam, a professor of mathematics at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va... To further enhance one’s quantitative prowess, Dr. Adam suggests translating amorphous figures into familiar terms. A million seconds, for example, is about 10 days, while a billion seconds amounts to some 32 years.

A few weeks ago WSJ writer Carl Bialik (The Numbers Guys, according to his column heading) wrote a story about deceptive numbers in advertiser claims in his article In Ads, 1 out of 5 claims Is Bogus

From Pimping Data Centers to Tidying This Old Glass House: New Language in Tech Marketing

Last week the Sunday NY Times Real Estate section ran a story Adjectives get Evicted, which described how the language is changing in real estate based on the economic climate:

Not only are there fewer buyers today, but they are more apt to have a yard sale attitude, demanding sharp discounts on top of reduced prices... The new propriety frowns at luxury, lifestyle and the fetishistic focus on designer brands... Instead, brokers say they are trying to recast their listings in terns of responsible spending, comfort, and most especially, value.

CFO Magazine covered the fact that it is now a buyer's market in IT, in the article Have they Got a Deal for You.

So perhaps we can draw an analogy between what is happening is housing (and more broadly, the economy) and the state of marketing related to the glass house, or data center and other IT technologies. 

I blogged last November (A New Mood in Tech PR) that tech marketers need to revise their messages in line with the tenor of the day.

Tricking out lavish new data centers is out, making the most out of your current IT assets, in.

The focus is no longer on pushing the envelope, it is now on protecting what you have and cutting costs.

Protecting data and applications is Job 1, ambitious development projects with no immediate benefit are out.

Power saving and green is in.

Soft benefits are out, and so are nice-to-haves that might seem extravagant like scalability and speed for the sake of scalability and speed.

As we move from the data center to the front office, news articles have been looking askance at Web 2.0 plays that have no apparent business model or hard benefits for enterprise users.  Now is a great time for companies in this space to be focusing on cases that do show hard benefits like increased sales and customer satisfaction, and emphasizing these attributes in their messages. 

Enterprise Reporting for Dummies

The No Train, No Gain site website - a training resource for journalists - has a page on enterprise reporting, a sort of "how to" guide that I thought my tech PR readers would find interesting.   I first saw this in The PR Practitioner's post about dealing with reporters.

It seems to me that reverse engineering the piece can help tech PR folks who wish to have a better understanding of the realities of an enterprise reporter's job (this assumes, of course that the article reflects widely held views and best practices.)

The article seems to be written for editors of daily publications.  Its main points are :

• Give reporters more latitude in covering the enterprise, covering tech is not like covering general news.
• Let them go where the story takes them

There is often the debate in PR about which relationships can be most productive to cultivate: is it the beat reporters, or their editors - those who arguably have more clout at a publication?  The gist of the article is that editors should respect the specialized knowledge and news instincts that enterprise tech reporters (ideally) have.

Here are some excerpts:

Let the reporter manage her/his beat. Are you really listening to what the reporter is telling you or are you coming up with your own ideas? Before you start taking over your reporter's story, listen. This is not to say you can't help shape the story. But the reporter is out on the street, working sources, noticing trends. Let them take the lead on the enterprise.

Don't hold your reporter to their initial angle if they've learned something different.

Don't force them to commit until you've given them time to get into the subject. You and are your reporter should be talking about the story all along the way, and eventually you will need to focus, but try to give a little latitude at the front-end.

Let the reporter decide deadlines for the enterprise story.

Every meeting does not a news story make. This goes along with the above. Don't penalize reporters by making them write a story from a meeting that didn't yield any news.

PR Tips for Entrepreneurs

I struck up a nice dialog with Anne Clelland, a dynamo who is the force behind Handshake Media and a number of innovative blogging efforts, namely Handshake 2.0 (I love that name), a blog that showcases tech entrepreneurs, and helps them make connections, and Inside VT KnowledgeWorks, a blog for the VA-based business incubator of the same name.  Please see this link for more info about her various forums.

Over the course of our discussions Anne posed a question to me: what are the top three PR tips I can share that she can bring back to the entrepreneurs she works with for H20 and VTK?

I gave it some thought and came up with these:

1) Before You do Anything Else, Spend Time Honing the Message

With the proliferation of media of all types, it has become increasingly harder to be heard above the noise.  That is why you need to make sure your story is interesting and resonates.

Most focus their efforts on describing the service or product they are marketing - the names, features, benefits etc. You need to also fit this within a story - a narrative that takes into account the marketplace you fit into, and explains how and where you fit, and how you will make a difference.  In  short, you need to describe your position in the market and vision for it.

For further reference, please see my Words that Work in Tech PR series.  Also, in my post Building Better Memes , I referenced the excellent book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, which tells how to craft stories that resonate.

2) Take your Story to the People

Back in the day (just five years ago), coverage was important for the sake of coverage and the vaunted press clipping reigned supreme.  These days it is more about making connections, and knowing where and how to be seen.  Many social media and social networking channels let you bypass the traditional gatekeepers - major media and market research analysts - and take your message directly to the audiences of interest.

See my post on Fusion PR Forum: The Advent of User-generated PR.

Social media such as blogs enable anyone to have their own soapbox.  Social networks make it possible to directly connect with potential customers and influencers.

There are many who can help you understand and utilize these channels.  Anne focuses on this in her work with H20 and VTK.  The agency I work for, Fusion PR, offers a range of social media PR services.  One thing that can't be outsourced is your own genuine voice - your thoughts, ideas and expertise.

So it is important for you, the entrepreneur to be vocal online, and get out there and be seen and heard.

3) Work the Traditional PR Channels

As important as social media is theses days, traditional media still counts, so don't forget major media, radio, TV and the trade media that cover your market in your PR efforts.

Some in the media and PR profession have said that the press release is dead.  Don't believe it for a minute.  Press releases are still a great way to get the word out, assuming you follow my instructions in 1, above, and don't spam people with gratuitous releases that don't say much.

New companies and new products are intrinsically newsworthy, and issuing a press release over one of the traditional wire services is a great way to get attention, boost SEO, etc. 

I would be remiss if I did not mention that there is much more to PR than "sending and praying" - i.e., just issuing the press release over the wires and hoping people will take note.  You need to also directly get in touch with those who are most likely to cover the news, and not leave it to chance that they will see it on the wires.  Ideally, you want to do this before the news goes out, give these people a heads up that the news is coming, and offer to brief them in advance.   News has a very short shelf life these days; after it crosses the wire people will quickly lose interest and move on to the next hot story.

Anne posed some additional questions in the above-referenced link:

What’s happening here, however one defines “here,” is high-tech on fire.  It’s fueled by innovations and inventions at Virginia Tech and Radford University, the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, the business accelerator VT KnowledgeWorks, initiatives from economic development organizations such as the New River Valley Economic Development Alliance, and other factors.

Here are our tricky local questions:

• If California has Silicon Valley and New York has Silicon Alley, what does Virginia have?
• More specifically, how does the New River Valley, Southwest Virginia, or the NewVa Corridor name and brand its high-tech economy?
• Does it need to?

I am not sure if anyone who reads this blog has suggestions; I am sure Anne would appreciate some good ideas.

I did mention to her that she should get in touch with Near-Time (disclosure, a client of mine at Fusion PR). 

It won't answer all her questions.  But I can say that this hosted Web 2.0 platform has been used successfully around the US, and internationally, to aid regional economic development and  promote workforce innovation.  The platform provides an interactive Web 2.0 hub that can link government agencies, education and economic development organizations, and entrepreneurs, providing users with ways to make contacts and access resources that are key to building businesses, training workers and reinforcing local economies.

Silver Lining in Enterprise Tech Spending

The New York Times had a couple of excellent articles yesterday, which should be of interest to tech PR and social media PR folks.

There is a silver lining in enterprise tech spending numbers, and it is in the clouds (both literally and figuratively).

The article: Gartner Tech Forecast: Cloudy and Getting Cloudier breaks down a recent Gartner report on the subject:

Spending on information technology worldwide, Gartner projects, will grow at a rate a bit higher than global economic growth — up 10 percent (4.5 percent adjusted for a weak dollar), to $3.4 trillion this year. The weakness in the United States will be offset by the strength in emerging economies...

But the information technology sector has become so large and so central to the world’s economy that the spending total is not the place to look. The top-line numbers, almost inevitably, mask the ferment beneath.

The "ferment," according to writer Steve Lohr's analysis of the Gartner report, relates to the impact and growth of cloud computing, a technology which I have previously blogged about.   Cloud computing (Wikipedia definition) is having a disruptive effect on the IT sector.  Its adoption will mean good things for those who supply related hardware, software and services, and bad things for other tech vendors.

If you are in tech PR, what are you seeing in terms of the state of business?

Also, in A Campaign Not Filtered by the Press, David Carr wrote about how Barack Obama is a taking his campaign directly to the people via social and mobile technologies.

Crowdsourcing and Collaborating on the News

My colleague Chris Michaels blogged just the other day about crowd sourcing news in his post on Fusion PR forum. 

This is the flip side to User-generated PR, a topic I just wrote about.  Crowd sourcing and collaborating on news covers the demand side, drawing on the reach (if not wisdom) of the crowds to connect bloggers and news writers with sources and story fodder.  It is a fascinating concept, and one that illustrates yet another way that the PR business is changing every day in response to Web 2.0 and social media.

One such service that has gotten lots of attention lately is HelpAReporter.com.  Peter Shankman, the site's creator, lives and works not far from Fusion PR's office.  He came in as a guest speaker for our internal education series this week.  It sounds like his service is really starting to get some traction.

I have signed up, and it is indeed sending a steady pipeline of qualified inquiries, three times a day.

Also, I learned about Sally Whittle's GettingInk website when she commented on my blog.  According to Sally:

This service has been running for several months now, as has a UK blog (run by me) called Getting Ink Requests, which provides free media requests by email, RSS, Twitter and on the blog itself. We're still quite new but have more than 1,500 regular subscribers and growing!

Another site I learned about recently is Andy Fowler's NewsVetter.  We got to chatting based on a conversation thread on my blog about poor PR writing   (with blogging you get collaboration, knowledge discovery and networking all rolled into one, isn't it a beautiful thing?)

I spoke with Andy at length about his novel concept.  He has developed a site (still in beta) that lets people not only submit stories, but also provides a format that guides users through the process of writing a pitch.  It provides pointers along the way, alongside entry fields for different parts of the pitch, and a handy checklist at the end.

If it is not cure for poor PR writing, at least it gets you thinking about how to organize your thoughts.

Further, the site promises:

News media review the submissions, provide feedback in the form of ratings and comments and, if warranted, contact news presenters to discuss possible publication of their story ideas.

He lets you share the pitch publicly, or you can mark it as private and instruct the site to forward your pitch to the desired targets.

On the demand side, reporters can sign up and indicate their interests.  This is a key difference from the more established media databases, which are not opt-in (the last time I checked, anyway).

It seems the positioning he is taking is to be a step up from the sites that simply broker story opportunities and PR connections.  His site seems to want to go to the next step to ensure that interchanges are productive.  He spoke about some interesting plans such as adding all kinds of metrics tracking.

Andy impressed me with his research, and is obviously well connected.  He has spoken with many influential people and it seems like he put a lot of thought and effort into the site.

Andy has some ambitious plans and may well be interested in taking on the heavyweights like Cision and Vocus.  Although he has quite a ways to go, some very respected names in tech journalism that tech PR folks like myself know well and respect have signed on,  earning credibility  points with me and showing me that he may just be onto something with NewsVetter.

Here are a couple of other interesting concepts that I will explore further and blog about in a future post:

Fast Company writer Francisco Dao has created a Fast Company Buzz Pitch portal for people to pitch their buzz worthy stories.  People vote for the submitted ideas, and the highest rated ones make his column.

And a service called Handshake 2.0, which my colleague Bennie pointed out to me today, appears to do the same thing.

User-Generated PR

I just want to call attention to my post yesterday on Fusion forum about user-generated PR.  This post contains excerpts, and you can read more on the topic here.

If you are in tech PR, it might seem that there are fewer places to go to pitch your stories these days.  The trades have been consolidating and shrinking for some time.  True, the shrinkage of traditional media has been offset by the growth of blogs and other forms of online and social media that buzz about tech.  To many, however, these options require a new approach that might be unfamiliar and perhaps even seem a bit risky.

I have covered effective approaches for pitching social media quite a bit.  Rather than focus on these tactics in this post, I'd like to discuss other opportunities that are sitting under our noses.  User-generated PR cuts out the journalist, blogger or editor middleman. 

There are many opportunities to post your (or your clients') news, opinions, and stories.  While there may be some vetting and approval of this content for it to meet the standards of the targeted sites, in many cases, if you make sure the content fits the style, rules and format of the forum in question, then it is almost just a formality to have this content appear online.

I list a few ideas below.  Once you start thinking about this, I am sure you will think of other options, it would be great if you can share these.

YouTube
Online PR makes it easier to tap into the storytelling and emotional power of rich media, and what better way to use video in your PR efforts than through YouTube?  Everyone in PR should become familiar with how to produce a video and post it to YouTube.  Although it is important to understand that the vast majority of videos posted do not become hits, there are some methods for boosting the odds.  Click here for more info and helpful links.

Blogging, and commenting on blogs and other online media
PR folks and their clients or employers have always dreaded coverage that is negative and/or inaccurate. While we have previously been somewhat powerless in correcting the record, these days there are many options for doing so.  We can post our comments in a variety of online forums.  Most articles these days appear online and many allow for comments.

Blogging is the shining example of user-generated PR.  You can help clients' find their online voices and establish digital identities by helping them master blogging. This can involve putting in place individual blogs, corporate blogs or finding guest-blogging opportunities.  However setting up a blog generally requires some thought, planning and commitment from the client. 

You can get a journalists' attention by commenting on their article or on their blog, if they have one.  Of course, this is another way to reach the same audience that follows the reporter or blogger. 

For the above tactics, it is important to realize that these opportunities come with an awesome responsibility.  The ability to quickly react online does not mean that one should casually do so.  Gain your clients' approval if it involves your client.  But try not to have client and team collaboration devolve into paralysis.  It will boost your online credibility and increase your odds that your comments survive the moderators' cut if you speak simply and genuinely, in the tone and tenor of the forum at hand, and ideally within the flow of the ongoing online dialog. 

Click here for more info and useful links

Online Directories and References
Although print directories and buyers' guides have been around forever, these days many are online, and allow you to submit your clients' information there.  You should get to know which sites accept content and listings.  Start with the recognized media brands that have high traffic and work your way to the niche sites.  Also, some do require fees.

Of course, you need to do your homework to find out about which directories are relevant for your offerings and markets.

And let's not forget the gold standard of online references, Wikipedia.  Although it is not a product directory, Wikipedia does list information that is related to technology and often mentions vendor names.  Their editing system takes a little getting used to, and anything entered runs the risk of getting edited out.  Still, given its stature and rising reputation as a go-to source for all kinds of information, it is important to leverage Wikipedia in user-generated PR efforts.

Click here for more info and useful links

Submitting News
Of course, no post about User-Generated PR would be complete without mention of social news sites that you let you submit and vote on your favorite news items: sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit.  Please see my post: Blocking and Tackling PR 2.0 style for more info about this.

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.