By Francis Moran
What does an RFID infrastructure company from St. John’s, Newfoundland, have in common with the Livingston, Scotland, outfit that makes the world’s most advanced prosthetic hand? Well, besides being inmedia clients, Cathexis Innovations and Touch Bionics both find themselves this week at the same trade show, Arab Health 2008 at the Dubai International Exhibition Centre in United Arab Emirates.
Touch Bionics is there to exhibit its i-LIMB hand, the world’s first artificial hand featuring five individually articulating digits that has been been fitted to scores of patients worldwide since being launched this past summer. Cathexis, whose mobile RFID reader IDBlue is also a world first, is demonstrating its event-management application at the show, a massive undertaking billed as the largest science gathering in the Arab world.
I can’t help being tickled by what I’m going to do next — email Cathexis’s CEO Steve Taylor and Touch Bionics’ marketing director Phil Newman and suggest they look each other up. At the risk of sounding — hell, let me be honest, at the risk of being — a bit self-promotional, it’s a lovely example of both the broad range of technologies represented in our client portfolio and the truly global scale on which these companies operate. I only wish I could be in Dubai to personally introduce these two chaps to each other.
By Francis Moran
A few months ago, Karen Russell of The Teaching Blog made a list of a dozen things she wished PR pros would blog about. Since I am on the receiving end of many, many enquiries from people seeking employment here at inmedia, most of which utterly fail to dazzle me, I thought I’d tackle this one, five ways to dazzle a potential employer.
Truth is, I feel sorry for today’s university grad or early- or mid-career person looking for that first or next position, especially if they’re responding to a job ad or board posting. Information technology has made it easier for resumes and cover letters to be machine-scanned, with only those that meet specific requirements making it through to be read by human eyes. Further, everyone knows that personal networking and connections are extraordinarily powerful tools in any job search and, if you don’t have them, you’re at a terrible disadvantage.
So, I’m not sure I can counsel anyone on how they can break through those barriers when seeking employment at a big company. But here are five things that would certainly put you several steps ahead at a small company like inmedia.
1. Present as though you actually know who I am. I admit I have one of those gender-ambiguous first names, but that’s no excuse for addressing me as Ms. Moran or, even worse, Dear Sir or Madam. A simple phone call is all it takes.
2. Also present as though you actually know what my company does. Telling me all about your political science education, or your years of sales experience, or what an incredible engineer you are means you have done absolutely no research whatsoever into who we are and what we do. We have a web site and, now, a blog, both of which should tell you everything you need to know about us, what we do and a whole lot about our culture and approach. The better an understanding of that you exhibit, the more you’ll dazzle me.
3. If you truly want to dazzle me, draw clear, compelling connections between what you know and what we do. Tell me how your education, experience and interests would make you a superb technology media relations practitioner.
4. Dazzle me with your writing. Writing is what we do, and we set extraordinarily high standards for it. Everyone, from clients to media, consistently comments favourably on our writing. You won’t survive a week here if you’re not a superb writer, and your cover letter won’t survive a first reading if it’s poorly written or contains spelling or grammar errors. As unbelievable as this may be, if everything is spelled correctly and there are no grammar errors, you will be in the top percentile or two of all the enquiries I get. Shocking, but true.
5. Try to rise above the noise. When I was younger and looking for a job, I often used some gimmick to attract attention to my application. I can’t say it ever worked for me, but the very first person I ever hired when I set up my first agency about 15 years ago enlarged his resume and cover letter to poster size and sent them to me in a mailing tube. He got my attention, and the job.
Bottom line — and here’s the real nugget for anyone seeking a job in public relations: These five suggestions just happen to constitute a solid handful of best practices in media relations itself. Know your media targets and why you’re pitching them. Get the story right and write it well. Do what you need to rise above the newsroom noise. If you can apply the fundamentals when you’re applying for a job, you’ll engender a lot of confidence that you’ll be able to apply them if you get the job.
By Francis Moran
My colleague, Linda, wrote a post yesterday about the reality that virtually every market niche imaginable has a media channel that reaches it. She managed, but only with great difficulty, to avoid referencing one of our favourite expressions here at inmedia. I am not as disciplined, so let me explain what the title of this post means.
When you have two professional marketers in the family, some casual conversations can take a peculiar bent. Such was the case when my wife, a seasoned marketing communications strategist, and I were driving along a city street here in Ottawa a while ago. Up ahead, I spotted a car, with a canine passenger whose head was sticking out the window, as dogs love to do. Being a dog owner myself who often indulged my pooch’s enjoyment of high-speed scent sniffing, I said, “Hey, there’s a dog lover.”
We got a little closer and saw a flag on the car bumper featuring the French tricolour but with a yellow star in the upper left corner. I’m a bit of a flag nut and a Maritime Canadian, so I was easily able to identify it as the flag of the Acadian nation, people of French descent who settled in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick starting in the early 1600s. In 1755, refusing to surrender the neutrality they had been granted in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht that ceded their territory to Britain, more than three-quarters of the Acadians living in Nova Scotia were forcibly expelled from their land and deported, many to Louisiana where they became known as Cajuns, a term that is derived from Acadian. It was arguably an early example of what today is called ethnic cleansing. Still, the Acadian culture persists in many parts of Maritime Canada today.
“Oh, it’s an Acadian dog lover,” I said to my wife.
We got even closer, and saw there was a rainbow stripe above the license plate. “Oh, it’s a gay Acadian dog lover,” I said.
“Now that’s a market niche,” my wife quipped. “Yup,” I agreed, “And I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a Gay Acadian Dog Lovers Monthly that reaches that niche!”
There isn’t, of course, but you know what I mean. We now consistently use this story to illustrate that segmentation can be endless, that clear market niches can be identified, and that, the non-existence of Gay Acadian Dog Lovers Monthly notwithstanding, there almost always is a media channel or channels that reach any niche you can identify.
By Francis Moran
Francis’s favourite fictions is a continuing series of posts on common myths surrounding the practice of public relations. When I give this as a presentation, I subtitle it, “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives.” Today’s fiction comes courtesy of a chief financial officer at such a venture who nixed her marketing vice president’s intention to hire us, saying, “I can’t measure marketing so I won’t fund it.”
Too bad; the company she used to work for is now out of business, taking a genuinely valuable technology advance and more than $30-million in investors’ money with it. Maybe now, she at least has a yardstick with which to measure the cost of not marketing.
It is an enduring myth, though, that marketing in general, and maybe public relations in particular, evades measurement, that there’s no way to calculate the return on investment for such an inexact science. As with many of my other favourite fictions, it is a myth perpetuated in large part because it serves many in the PR industry itself to do so. Theirs is a black box science, they tell gullible clients, dependant on things like “relationships,” and intended to “build buzz” and a bunch of other ambiguous terms deliberately employed expressly because they do evade objective definition.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
I can’t imagine that any client today will sign on to a program that doesn’t at least define a scope of work in clear and unambiguous terms. In other words, a critical path of activities that at least tells the client how much PR stuff they’re buying, how many news releases, analyst briefings, story pitches, trade shows supported, that sort of thing. We call that measuring outputs, and it’s as far as many agencies are prepared to go. We think it’s a good, but woefully inadequate, starting point.
Any agency worth its retainer should be willing to describe the results its efforts will produce in similarly unambiguous terms. If you invest in our exerting this much effort, dear client, you will see this much media and analyst coverage over the term of the program. We call this measuring outcomes, and we define it very clearly in terms of specific objectives for the program. We tell you which media outlets and analyst firms we’re targeting. This is not unusual. What is unusual is that we will then tell you exactly in what percentage of them we expect to generate coverage over the term of the program, what type of coverage that will be, and what sorts of stories, key messages and so on that coverage will contain. We break down our objectives by category of activity, setting success objectives for individual news releases, product launches, analyst tours, trade show briefings, speaking programs, and so on.
We like this approach because we’re not asking our clients to buy a bunch of PR stuff from us. Rather, we’re asking them to invest in a given level of effort, the outcome of which we have clearly defined. Now they only need to ask themselves whether those results are a good return on the investment we’re asking them to make. At the end of the program, our clients don’t need us to tell them whether we have achieved the objectives or not. They can tell, without a trace of uncertainty or ambiguity, for themselves.
If your agency or internal PR department won’t commit to setting those kinds of objectives, it’s time to find a new one.
But, as they say on the late-night infomercials, don’t call yet, there’s more.
Even if we achieve the outcomes we projected, is it worth anything if that media and analyst coverage hasn’t advanced our clients’ business objectives? Here’s where the wheat really gets separated from the chaff. I’ll write more about this in a future post.
By Francis Moran
The line above is a statement by former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy that was quoted by Canadian novelist Guy Gavriel Kaye in an article in the Globe and Mail‘s Books section just before Christmas. Kaye wrote about how technology, and especially the everyone’s-a-publisher-now phenomenon of the internet and its pervasive blogs, has changed how he interacts with readers he meets. Mainly, he wrote, he is now a lot more circumspect about what he says, even in informal conversations, knowing that every word he speaks — and, unfortunately, some words he never spoke! — will end up published on a blog somewhere where they will persist forever. It’s all contributing to what Kaye called “an erosion of space between reader and writer and book.”
As a new blogger, I have already wrestled with this phenomenon and the issue of what responsibility, if any, I owe to people to obtain their approval before I quote them or refer to them in a post. When I was a reporter, the lines, for me at least, were very clear. If you were a politician, public official or corporate executive, everything was on the record unless we explicitly negotiated otherwise. For me, that meant that anything I heard, any where at any time from such a person was fair game. If you were an ordinary citizen on the other hand, I cut you a great deal more slack, making sure you were aware you were talking to a reporter working on a story and that I was taking notes of what you said. In a couple of very sensitive stories, both having to do with suicides of young people, I even read my story back to the parents I was quoting to make doubly sure they were comfortable with how I was treating them.
Since launching inmedialog a few months ago, I’ve written, or wanted to write, posts about wholly public events, somewhat public events and private or by-invitation-only events. In the case of the wholly public events, where I knew mainstream reporters had been invited and were likely present, I felt absolutely no compunction quoting freely from the speakers and other formal participants. If something outrageous or controversial had been said, I would have felt equally free to quote at will. And I think that’s fair. No reasonable person participating in such a forum should have any reasonable expectation of privacy. I will, however, play by the same rules that governed me as a reporter, meaning that I will strive for accuracy, fairness and balance.
At a somewhat private event, I tread a little more carefully. I am no longer a reporter with an obligation to disclose what I learn, so I can pick and choose. So long as what I write reflects favourably on the people and organizations I’m writing about, I don’t feel any responsibility to gain prior clearance. But if someone at a less-than-openly-public event says something controversial that I’d like to write about, I’d probably make sure the person was comfortable with my doing so, and I’d certainly offer them the opportunity to participate in the blog discussion. Indeed, I’d encourage it. That’s how we’ve ended up with Peter Kemball’s continuing posts on Canada’s SR&ED tax credit scheme.
The waters get a lot murkier for me when the event is expressly a private one. A couple of months back, I was invited to an event in Calgary featuring a panel of executives from leading Canadian companies talking about their sustainable development practices. The organizers nixed my suggestion that I bring with me an old friend of mine who now lives in Calgary where he covers the energy sector for the business newswire service, Bloomberg, so I knew they felt that the event was strictly off the record. However, after hearing inspiring stories of how sustainable development practices at these large corporations were mitigating damage to the environment, improving products, enhancing human health and safety and, most riveting of all, boosting profits, I badly wanted to write about it. Unfortunately, the organizers put the kibosh on that idea, insisting that the closed event remain that way. I respected their right to do so.
(As an aside, I think they did their panelists a disservice. The speakers and their companies would have been presented in a highly favourable light for their leadership on sustainable development initiatives. And, paradoxically, more than one speaker lamented the fact that not enough was known about the positive financial results that could flow from doing the right thing environmentally and that more Canadian companies might follow their lead if only the issue was more widely understood! Oh, well.)
Here, then, are our rough operating principles for how we’ll treat what we hear when we set out to blog about it. If it was said or published in an open forum, it’s open season. If it was semi-public, we’ll use discretion, and seek permission before we wade into controversy. And if it was a private event, or a conversation you have every reasonable expectation was private, we’ll honour that and seek express permission before we attribute words to you.
Bottom line: McNealy probably has a good point when it comes to the broader world but at inmedialog.com, privacy still has a role.
