I have written a lot about technology and communications – about technology categories, and the
importance of understanding the nuances of the space you work (and communicate in).
In researching the buzz in a space, there are many excellent tools PR folks use. Periodicals search engines like Nexis, Factiva, and Meltwater come to mind (I have worked with all of these at various times and each has its merits).
One of the first things I will do is enter the technology category as a search phrase. Depending on how you structure your search, the results can have press releases from newswire distribution services mixed in.
I have observed that some spaces have a much higher ratio of press releases to actual editorial content. To me this says there is a lot of bluster in these spaces, but the vendors and their PR teams have not had much luck in convincing the media that the category is worth covering.
So I thought I would introduce the (drum roll please)…. Flack’s Revenge Bluster Index – a handy guide which charts, for a given technology category search, the ratio of news releases over real articles.
A high index means there’s a lot of bluster – much heat but little light. A lower index might indicate that the media is picking up on a story without lots of PR impetus (it is not often that you run into these under-promoted spaces).
As an example (see chart) I have selected a few terms that were mentioned on sites that claim to track emerging tech trends. I have structured the searches (done on Factiva, across all publications and news distribution services they track) going back six months and reviewed the results to take care that spurious articles and press releases were not included, and to not count multiple listings of the same press release or article.
So far, unfortunately, a manual exercise, but one that is hopefully interesting and illuminating. My next step will be to try to provide a user interactive tool that automates the process, using Yahoo Pipes (if it in fact can do this) and publicly available article search tools.
No doubt the approach can be improved. For example, why not take a look at traditional vs. social media tracking of certain tech categories? Another significant improvement would be to further refine results so that they just focus on articles and releases where the tech term is the main subject of the story. Finally, the index as described here is a ratio. It seems to me it should also be important to chart sheer volumes of articles and press releases – perhaps in a related Noise index.
I would not take the results above too seriously due to lack of rigor in the process. For what it is worth, they say that there is lots of bluster in the realm of semantic applications (eight press releases featured the term, out of a total of 12 stories). On the other end of the chart, Prediction Markets featured relatively few press releases (10, out of a total of 101 stories). There is less bluster in this space.
Each space has its own story and there are many related variables. Less bluster could mean fewer vendors participating in a space that the media apparently thinks is a hot story. More bluster means that the media is not picking up on it, but this could be for very good reasons: perhaps an ill-conceived technology, or one that really doesn’t resonate for whatever reason. Or the media could be writing about the technology using a different label for it.
The biggest takeaway, of course, is that PR should be about much more than press releases. If you are in a space with a high bluster index, it makes sense to first recognize this, explore why it is so, and then take the steps needed to more efficiently get your story out.
