Thank you for being with us for the ninth month of our new blog. In case you missed them, here is a recap of our posts from October.
Moving forward with our two new series, Technology Marketing 101, and A Startup’s Story, we uncovered how startup BlueArc managed to move past the “wow” factor of its technology to achieve market penetration, explored the fine art of the business hustle and how it helped CommentAir Technologies bootstrap its way to market, explained how telling the right story helped Screenreach drive customer acquisition, and introduced a new startup, Genevolve Vision Diagnostics.
Beyond our series, we further investigated the roles of the IP Co-ordinator and social media champion, shared more best practices on PR and marketing and examined how the brain reacts to technology, among other subjects. And of course, we also paid our respects to the Pitch Innovator Steve Jobs. We welcome your feedback.
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By Linda Forrest
“You’re doing it wrong” can be an irritated admonishment of your practices or a helpful push in the direction of improvement. It’s all a matter of how you see the world, whether you’re a glass half full or a glass half empty kind of person.
In the longstanding symbiotic relationship between PR professionals and reporters, there have been tomes written on how one side thinks the other side is failing and flailing.
Inspired by National Post tech reporter Matt Hartley‘s thoughtful blog post on why we hate your press release, this round-up shares the words of a few technology reporters as they point out the areas for improvement in the modern PR professional’s approaches.
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This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from February, 2009. We welcome your feedback.
By Leo Valiquette
There is no question that we PR types are often taken to task for blitzing the world with news of little relevance or importance or, at least, for failing to ensure that the news is relevant and important to the hapless targets in range of our scatter guns.
In an ongoing series of posts chronicling his study of the pitches that flood his inbox, research analyst Josh Bernoff has been examining why three quarters of the PR email he receives is irrelevant. He makes the point of saying, “I really like working with PR people, I just don’t like all of their tactics.” After working for 14 years as an analyst and being barraged by tens of thousands of emails during that time, he believes his exercise in navel-gazing is well justified.
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By Linda Forrest
In honour of Halloween, this post is a round-up of the frightful ways that PR can scare away prospects and editors and how bad PR haunts those who neglect to adhere to best practices. Boo!
Frightfully bad PR practices
Last month, I wrote a whole post about bad publicity, but it’s worth scaring you silly again with the key points. At this very moment, there are PR practitioners who can’t write, can’t pitch, who are selling short your opportunity to tell your story, offering all strategy with no implementation or implementing a spray-and-pray program without any strategy to back it up. Frightening, isn’t it?
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By Linda Forrest
Earlier this week, TechCrunch readers were given a rare treat – the chance to engage in a public forum with a technology icon: Sean Parker. One of the founders of Napster, founder at Plaxo, a former advisor to and the first president of Facebook (who bears little physical resemblance to Justin Timberlake who played an, according to Parker, historically-inaccurate, party animal version of him in last year’s Oscar-nominated film, The Social Network), and now director at Spotify. In short, Sean Parker has been an architect of many of the “large-scale societal shifts” of the last 15 years.
So, it was with great interest that I clicked on (and subsequently retweeted) the following Tweet:
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