By Linda Forrest
This one goes out to R.E.M., a band whose breakup last week reminded me of their full discography, including New Adventures in Hi-Fi, hence the focus of this post.
Wikipedia describes high fidelity as follows:
high fidelity—or hi-fi—reproduction is a term used by home stereo listeners and home audio enthusiasts (audiophiles) to refer to high-quality reproduction of sound or images, to distinguish it from the poorer quality sound produced by inexpensive audio equipment. Ideally, high-fidelity equipment has minimal amounts of noise and distortion and an accurate frequency response.
The best PR is high-fidelity PR. PR practitioners act as the conduit through which the marketplace receives our clients’ messages. In order to achieve the most accurate, worthwhile coverage that supports our clients’ overall communications objectives, the process itself needs to be as friction free as possible. But, in some cases, that’s easier said than done.
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By Linda Forrest 
It’s been a busy week, with Francis Moran and me visiting Waterloo and region for a number of events, client and business development meetings. We kicked off our trip by attending the Girl Geek Dinner, which took place Tuesday evening at Waterloo restaurant Oliver & Bonacini.
One of these things was not like the others in that Francis was the only male in attendance; the inverse was just about true the following night at Demo Camp Guelph where I was one of a handful of women in the crowd. But the intimate room at O&B was filled to the brim with interesting, welcoming and friendly women who work in technology. The brainchild of Cate Huston, a software programmer at Google, who upon moving to KW from Ottawa started up a local version of this international concept, Tuesday’s dinner marked the third local iteration of the event, which is also organized by PJ Lowe, and Michelle Kostya.
The speaker for the evening was Carol Leaman, a serial leader of startups, who recently sold PostRank, an aggregator of social engagement data, to Google. Almost as soon as we were seated, it became apparent that many of the women in the dynamic crowd knew one another, thanks to the tight-knit and supportive tech community in the region. But they welcomed Francis and myself with open arms, and it took us just several minutes to establish the (very few) degrees of separation from everyone at our table. We had the great pleasure of sitting with a variety of women, all of whom are working or studying in different and fascinating aspects of the technology ecosystem.
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By Linda Forrest
There’s a famous adage in our industry that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. I beg to differ. Your PR resources are doing you a disservice if they fall into any of the following five categories.
1. They’re poor writers
We’ve actually had prospects tell us that their PR agency can’t write. Superior writing skills are essential to good publicity, especially in the technology realm. Technology is complicated and if you don’t clearly articulate what it is your technology actually does, your market won’t know its value and you’re subsequently hampering your market opportunity. Those media targets on your list who are interested in and write about hardware, for instance, may not give a fig about the software components of your offering. Speaking from experience, I’ve visited websites, read press releases and other marketing materials that fail to communicate the value proposition of whatever’s being written about. The death knell for your communications effort is sending out materials that leave the reader scratching their head, no clearer about what it is your company actually does, who for, at what price, why, and where they can learn more about it. The five Ws (and two Hs: how and how much) are essential to communicating effectively with your marketplace. Your PR resources must be able to articulate the important details of your offering, no matter how technical. If the technology is not well understood by your PR team, then they will be unable to write about it effectively.
Bad grammar and spelling are simply unacceptable.
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By Linda Forrest
Outbound news is just one aspect of a company’s PR program, but it’s an important one. While there are ways to generate coverage without making announcements, it’s likely that your company has plenty of newsworthy announcements to share with its marketplace.
We’ve all heard the adage “if a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The corollary in marketing might be the title of this post, “if your company does something and you didn’t tell your marketplace about it, did it actually happen?” First, let’s examine what sorts of news is best suited to a news release versus a story pitch, benefits of sharing your news with the marketplace, objectives besides market awareness served by sending out news and a brief story about missed opportunities and the ripples that they have across marketing channels.
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By Linda Forrest
Now that those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer are drawing to a close, many marketers will be looking at the fall as a time to make plans for the year ahead. We’re big advocates of maintaining PR activity all thoughout the summer, especially in the modern era where media increasingly consists of bits and bytes that occur in real time as opposed to ink on dead trees. Unfortunately, not everyone takes our advice and so the fall is jam packed with PR activity, some of which won’t bear fruit until many months from now.
With memories of the summer sun still fresh in your mind, it’s a good time to consider what your marketing plan for the year ahead will look like. The corporate world emerges from summer with a renewed vigor, ready to make plans for their upcoming fiscal year. With this comes the need to conduct a forensic analysis of your previous activities to determine what worked and what didn’t and why, explore what tactics you’re not currently using but could, budget for activities new and old and source resources whether they’re internal or external.
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