By Francis Moran
Almost exactly 10 months after publishing our very first blog post on September 14 last year, here we are celebrating post number 250! It’s been a fascinating journey of learning and experimentation, and I’d like to share some of that with you today.
If 250 posts in 10 months means we’ve written about 25 posts per month, then we have slightly bested our target of averaging one post per business day. There have been a few thin weeks along the way as client requirements dominated our time, but in the main, we have achieved what we set out to do by way of posting frequency.
Our best-practices posts, which highlight a particular part of our media relations practice, often using a client case study as illustration, are among our most consistently read posts. Such posts were a key part of our editorial strategy for the blog.
We have been less successful achieving two other parts of the editorial strategy. We have written fewer pieces that comment on what’s going on in the wider world in which our clients live, and we have had many fewer guest posts than originally hoped for. Both these targets are a function of not having a dedicated blog editor spending the kind of hours necessary to find stuff for our writers to comment on and recruiting posts from our clients and others in our network.
Our readership, after growing quite rapidly over the first two months, has averaged about 650 visitors per month, on top of our roughly 100 RSS and email subscribers. (This latter number ebbs and flows a bit but continues to grow steadily by about 10 a month.)
Our internal objective was to have more than 1,000 visitors at the one-year mark. We hit 793 site visitors last month, and topped 800 at least once, so I think we are well on our way.
More to the point, though, is what our blog has done for our organic search engine rankings. Even by month three, we were seeing extraordinary improvements, going from could-not-be-found to top-50, top-20 and, in many important areas, even top-10 results for the kinds of searches we believe prospects run when looking for a PR company. We have yet to be able to link a new piece of business directly to such a search, but we know that many prospects have read our blog and are impressed by what they see there.
We could do a much better job of building out the links that would make us a more active part of the extensive community of bloggers who write about public relations and technology marketing. Again, having an editor with more time to devote to this would improve our effectiveness.
Now, the tough part. Has it been worth the investment?
Well, I said at the outset that I would hold off on hard ROI calculations until we had a full year under our belts. I can say that it is a very expensive proposition maintaining a blog with so much original content. We are timekeepers, so I know exactly how much this costs. I’ll keep that amount under wraps for now but will say that anyone who believes Web 2.0 tactics like blogging are free or low-cost either ain’t doing it right or ain’t counting up all the costs.
Speaking just for myself, I have thoroughly enjoyed once again having an outlet (pulpit? soapbox?) for my views on certain subjects. I know many others around here have equally enjoyed being able to share their views and opinions. From that perspective, it has been very worthwhile.
Bottom line: We see value here and we intend to continue. Thank you for joining us, and keep coming back.
By Francis Moran
One of the first of what I like to call “Francis’s favourite fictions,” or “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives,” was a line from the CEO of one of the very first tech companies I pitched when I originally ventured out on my own in the early 1990s. “I want to be on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen tomorrow morning,” he said.
I was a lot younger, thinner and more intemperate in those days, so I replied, “Okay. Go home and shoot your wife tonight.”
Right answer, just not terribly delicately put. However, he got the point and I got the gig.
What I was trying to say, of course, is that media relations usually doesn’t work that way and, for some companies, it never works that way. In fact, at inmedia, our objective is never Page 1 tomorrow. Rather, we try from the very outset to build the kind of foundation for an ongoing media relations effort that will generate meaningful coverage over the long haul. In the technology B2B space, where virtually all our clients are new, small and/or completely unknown, this means we first must thoroughly educate target media about the client, its story and how it will be of interest to the journalists and their audiences now and into the future. If this process delivers immediate coverage, so much the better, but that’s not the primary intent.
This first company was also the first time I tried out what has come to be known around here as a ramp up and roll out, or the media and analyst launch of a company that builds the foundation I’m talking about. The company had recorded many newsworthy successes in its history and had a market-leading presence in its space. However, as we also like to say around here, they call it the “news” business, not the “olds” business. So most of those achievements were now just so much fishwrap as far as the media were concerned.
What I did was develop a comprehensive set of materials that told the company’s complete story, including a timeline of its growth and successes and a couple of case studies that showcased its leadership position. I then sent that package out to the media I had identified, through research, as being at the intersection of Writes-about-this-subject and Influences-my-client’s-market. I followed up with each of them, had great conversations about how my client might feauture in future coverage, and even generated some really good immediate hits. Over the long run, I generated a constant stream of coverage about the client, including, eventually, a Page 1 piece in the Ottawa Citizen.
If a client today tells me the same thing — “I wanna be on Page 1 tomorrow.” — I tell him or her much the same thing. I just use a slightly more subtle approach now.
By Francis Moran
I have written a few posts (Take One and Take Two) about the generally lousy job too many companies do at taking care of their customers once they’ve made the sale. It’s a phenomenon that frustrates the customer in me and utterly bewilders the marketer in me.
The customer frustration bit is obvious, and I doubt there’s a fellow citizen who has not railed against robot voices that answer the phone and can’t help, so-called customer-service agents who eventually come on the phone and can’t help, or web-based “Contact us” forms that never generate a reply or that generate a meaningless reply that can’t help.
The marketer in me is bewildered by a strategy, so widely deployed it has come to be accepted as the norm, that has companies treat their only source of revenue as something icky that has been scraped off the bottom of their shoes and must be disposed of as swiftly and cheaply as possible. A large forest of trees has been pulped to print all the studies that prove that superior customer service is clearly the most potent differentiator in an era when your technology advantage can be leap-frogged, your cost advantage can be evaporated by an offshore competitor and brand loyalty means increasingly less and less.
So I am one cynical and unhappy old crank, both personally and professionally, when it comes to any expectation that any customer-service experience is going to be a happy one.
Which makes it all the more enjoyable to report on one that went phenomenally well.
While in Las Vegas a few months back, I bought a Jawbone ear bud for my iPhone. I’m an early adopter, remember, so having a Bluetooth wireless earbud is nothing new for me. I bought an early product from Jabra many years ago that created an unholy echo on the Treo I used at that time. I replaced it with a Treo-branded device that squashed the echo but had a lot of trouble holding its pairing with the phone. I had heard a lot about the Jawbone, and I held off until I was able to visit an Apple store to buy it because I wanted to make sure it would work properly.
Man, was I delighted. It is easily one of the best pieces of new technology I have ever used. It is gorgeous in design, brilliant in feature and utterly reliable. What a standout.
Except I broke it.
Okay, I broke one of the little ear loops that come with it. (They give you four, two of different sizes for each ear. They also give four little snap-on buds so you’re sure to find one that fits comfortably in your ear. This recognition that one size does not fit all is just one very-well-thought-out element that makes this thing such a standout.)
So I went on Jawbone’s website to see what could be done to replace the broken loop. I fired off one of those “Contact us” emails and assumed I’d never hear anything back.
Well, turns out their customer service is every bit as brilliant as their technology. Ben, from the Jawbone Support Team, emailed me back. My first surprise was that he had actually read and understood my full email. He knew I had recently bought the device but couldn’t prove it since Apple, in a breakdown in its customer-service department, had failed to email me the receipt for my purchase as the Apple store clerk had promised. No problem. Turns out there’s a small date code etched on the Jawbone. I sent that to Ben, and he said he’d need a delivery address. I gave him one, and he promised I’d get a replacement loop in five to seven business days.
Now, this is where my cynicism went into overdrive. Up to that point, I had not mentioned that I live in Canada. So I wasn’t too surprised when a couple of weeks went by with no sign of a package from Jawbone.
Until a little box showed up the other day, containing a complete set of four loops. It was later than promised, but with good reason. I had provided my home address, but my office postal code. That was my mistake. Then, someone in the Jawbone shipping department compounded my mistake by replacing my home town of Ottawa with Toronto. So a thoroughly buggered address, and yet it still made it to me.
So there are two customer-service heroes in this story. The first is Jawbone, which has salted an already superior customer experience. Very wll done, Ben, and the rest of the Jawbone Support Team. And the second is Canada Post, which persisted in its task and eventually found me. For the record, that second one doesn’t really surprise me; Canada Post is consistently exceptional at what we pay it to do, usually delivering letters here in Ottawa the morning after I post them.
By Francis Moran
…until the reporter has turned off the mike, descended in the elevator, left the building and driven away. That’s what I teach executives when I do media training, but it’s amazing how tough a lesson it is to learn.
I have to admit I occasionally engaged in gotcha journalism when I toiled as an ink-smeared wretch, so I know how the game works. The reporter goes through her tough-but-fair questions and the interviewee responds, honestly but according to the script and messaging prepared so assiduously before the interview. (You did prepare assiduously before the interview, didn’t you?)
The reporter then starts packing up her gear and, ever so gently, in a manner that would make Columbo blush for his jack-booted incompetence, she asks just one or two more questions and the interview subject, relaxed now that the mike’s been put away, strays away from the script. Or maybe gallops away from it like a runaway horse.
So the perils of a traditional interview are quite clear. But they’re also quite easy to avoid with just a little diligence. Not so the scary new world of so-called “citizen journalism,” as this post points out. Anybody, anywhere can write anything and post it everywhere. So beware.
As a journalist, I reserved dirty tricks, if you want to call them that, for those who should have known better and from whom I was only going to get the truth if I defeated their legions of press secretaries and overseers. I like to think I subscribed to Pulitzer’s old dictum that the job of journalism is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and playing hardball was always part of my view of the latter.
As a blogger more interested in supporting my community of technology entrepreneurs, I don’t do drive-by interviews. I wrote previously about my operating philosophy of who I quote and how I seek their approval for doing so.
But just because I intend to be fair, don’t bet that everyone will be. So remember, the interview’s never over.
By Francis Moran
Last week was quite an extraordinary one for Ottawa’s start-up community.
Wow. When was the last time over the past six or eight or 10 years that I could make a bold statement like that and not have the guys in the white coats start measuring me for a jacket that buckles in the back?
And no, I’m not referring to a spate of product launches or company foundings or even venture capital funding announcements that would have been the basis of such enthusiasm in the past when Ottawa’s technology sector was dominated by capital-intensive efforts to invent a better telecom system or new semiconductor.
Instead, my enthusiasm today comes from a series of events we attended last week, all of which we blogged about and all of which contributed to a subtle but undeniable sense that something very exciting is afoot.
On Monday, I joined a warm and standing-room-only crowd at DemoCampOttawa9, where developers from six companies demonstrated their applications and received scads of intelligent, creative and constructively critical feedback from their peers.
Tuesday night, several generations of Ottawa technology entrepreneurs helped Ian Graham celebrate the official opening of his novel and creative co-working and collaboration space, TheCodeFactory. A series of short speeches was book-ended by veteran Denzil Doyle and emerging company founder Scott Lake. We here at inmediaare such big fans of what Ian is doing that we’ve signed on as founding partners of TheCodeFactory and we’ll be watching with more than passing interest as he builds a facility that is much needed in this town.
Wednesday night was The Ottawa Network‘s regular monthly Start-up Drop-in at LaBarge Weinstein and this was when the penny really dropped for me. As I wrote here Friday, every speaker was, among other things, sounding the consistent notes that Ottawa’s start-up community is focused on exciting new opportunities in the online world, is actively supporting its individual members and is building a broadly collaborative and globally minded ecosystem that may just yet spit out the next Facebook.
Thursday night I took a pass. But my colleague Leo Valiquette attended an event that in many ways emphasised one of the key realities of this exciting new world. In a session titled, “Buddy, keep your million, but buy my product,” The Ottawa Network in collaboration with the city’s various technology clusters came to the inevitable next stage of its now three-year-old series on how to tap into venture capital.
The first year, the title was, “Buddy, can you spare a million,” emphasizing the traditional route to building a company — beg for whatever venture capital you can lay your hands on.
The second year’s title, “Buddy why should I give you a million,” betrayed the fact that most of the begging was going wholly unanswered as VCs shut their wallets and became unyieldingly skeptical about the business plans they were seeing.
Last week’s title brought the whole thing full circle. If you can’t beg funding from VCs who either don’t have it or won’t invest it, then you have to build a company the old-fashioned way — develop a product and find someone who wants to pay you money to buy.
What a concept.
Fortunately, this reality now aligns with what Ottawa’s startups are doing anyway. Exciting and promising new ventures really can be launched on a shoestring. When a budding entrepreneur needs help, there is a wealth of events to attend, or many willing peers in the community who will contribute counsel or even hands-on support. When the venture grows a bit larger, places like TheCodeFactory will give it an affordable home. And by the time the VCs come calling, they really won’t be needed very much.
Hold the buckled jacket. It really is an exciting new day here in Ottawa.
