By Alexandra Reid
Mark Zuckerberg rocked the Facebook boat again last week when he introduced a handful of new features that received mixed reactions from the site’s 750 million users.
From expressions of excitement to confusion to outright hatred on blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, as well as mainstream media such as the BBC, it’s clear that Facebook users have become increasingly more vocal with their opinions of the free site. This PCWorld article reveals a number of immediate user reactions to Facebook’s new features, from the blunt and judgmental, “Sucks,” to the pessimistically speculative, “Wonder what is going to replace Facebook,” which suggests that these new features may be just the provocation Google Plus needed to transition users to its platform. But then again, who’s to say Google won’t turn the product in radical new directions in another year, as The Guardian’s Dan Gillmor asked in his intriguing post. It isn’t all bad though, as one individual, who was featured on MacWorld, tweeted “It’s the ‘Facebook cycle’ – things change, people complain, they get over it and carry on.”
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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 October, 2008. We welcome your feedback.
By Francis Moran
“I’ve just come to expect that my (public relations) agency can’t write,” was the astonishing admission I heard a few weeks back from a vice president at one of Ottawa’s larger technology companies who called us to see if we’d be interested in participating in an agency review process.
(I’ve promised not to name him (or her) for reasons that will be obvious as you read the rest of this post.)
I could hardly believe my ears. But yes, he said, it had long been his experience that the PR practitioners he had been dealing with from a range of different agencies and across a number of companies just weren’t very good writers, and so it fell to him to write most of the materials used in his campaigns. One of the key reasons he was approaching inmedia, he told me, was our very strong reputation in the marketplace as superb writers, a reputation he said was confirmed when he read our blog and web site.
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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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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 May 2009. We welcome your feedback.
By Leo Valiquette
Recently, Francis fielded a question on LinkedIn about the value of running a survey to generate media coverage.
Surveys can be used effectively to position a company, but not if the company is perceived simply as a sponsor of an external survey. Francis cited the example of one IT consultancy that, on inmedia‘s counsel, did away with its external survey of CIOs and instead realized much better media traction from publishing the results of an internal census of its own IT experts. The spotlight was shifted from a group of faceless CIOs to the consultancy’s own knowledge keepers, positioning the consultancy as an authoritative subject matter expert rather than a mere survey sponsor.
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By Alexandra Reid
