By Francis Moran
It’s been an interesting spring and summer here at inmedia.
The global economic downturn undoubtedly had its impact on us. Although we are headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, we have not been an Ottawa agency for a long time now. Over the past few years, we have worked for clients in Kelowna, Calgary, Toronto, Montréal, Halifax, Fredericton, Moncton and St. John’s. Outside Canada, for many years we have had a substantial footprint in Scotland, where we have clients in Glasgow and Livingston, and we have worked for clients in Farnborough and London in England. In the U.S., we’ve had clients in Boston, Jersey City, Chicago, San Jose and Phoenix.
Based on this extensive geographic diversification, we thought we might be able to better weather the economic storms that began to rage last year.
We were wrong.
Though our clients might be almost everywhere, they are, in the main, selling into just one market — the U.S. enterprise. And that market is a very badly wounded beast that is only now, and very tentatively, beginning to get back on its feet. As our clients cancelled or delayed programs, their spending with us fell and we found ourselves once again in an adjustment mode that, after nearly 11 years as a technology-focused public relations boutique, is not unfamiliar territory to us.
Our response was three-fold.
First, we’ve gone virtual. We’ve put our servers and shared resources in the cloud, locked the office doors for good and given back the key. With clients all over two continents, we’ve essentially been virtual to most of them anyway. We believe it makes us the kind of agile and responsive service offering this new economy demands.
Second, we focused our PR business development efforts on opportunities where we believed we would be given a real chance to demonstrate our differentiation. This has paid outstanding dividends, with four new clients engaging with us over the past 60 days. Two others have renewed their programs, and two more that had reduced programs are again spending a bit more with us, albeit on an ad-hoc basis as they continue to sharply evaluate every dollar and pound. And our pipeline is fairly robust.
Third, and most critically, we also began to focus on areas where our unique capabilities would gain us higher-value work. Public relations is a terribly commodified business, and the buyers of PR-agency services are still too-often wedded to ancient notions to which our approach simply fails to pay homage.
(This is not a universal truth, let me hasten to add. Our most recent account win saw us triumph over three U.S. boutique agencies and a large and experienced agency with extensive feet on the street on both sides of the Atlantic. The final round, between us and the big guys, offered the client a sharply differentiated choice, I believe. Entirely to their credit, they gave us every chance to show them a clear foretaste of what they would experience if they hired us, and they obviously liked what we showed them. Far too often, however, we never even get the chance to show how we’re different, or the prospect simply fails to grasp how that difference might change the PR agency game in their favour.)
In addition to this long-standing commodification of PR, the economic downturn has created a new class of competitors and made all existing competitors even hungrier. There are now legions of one-person PR shops staffed by perfectly competent former agency and client-side types whose practically non-existent overhead and sometimes-lifestyle approach to business make it impossible to compete. At the other end of the scale, we have bowed out of agency-selection processes where large multinational agencies were offering more services at a lower cost than we could manage as they struggled to at least cover their infrastructure costs.
It’s enough to make any wise business person look to new opportunities, and we have, with considerable early success.
So where are we going? We will continue to seek out high-value PR opportunities where our value proposition as a small but very senior band of sharply focused players with global capabilities can compete. But we’ll also look for opportunities to work with clients on a more strategic level, where the broader marketing and even business decisions get sorted. Although much of the last 10 years has been about guiding technology companies through the specific challenges of harnessing media and analyst coverage, we have a broader and more strategic pedigree that we’re keen to put to work.
In short, we bring technology to market. Stay tuned for more on this as we renew our commitment to this blog.
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.
As the editor of a business publication, I saw almost daily news releases plugging a survey that, on the surface at least, provided profound insights into one issue or another of relevance to the Ottawa business community. However, the appeal factor quickly evaporated when, upon closer inspection, it was revealed that said survey was sponsored by a major credit card company or software vendor.
This made the objectivity of the data presented, and the conclusions drawn from it, immediately suspect to me. After all, the sponsoring organization would not go to the time and effort to promote survey results that didn’t support its own sales and marketing efforts, now would it? It was this obvious vested interest that made me reluctant to devote even a couple of hundred words of coverage with an online news brief.
When trying to come up with ingenious and cunning ways to engage with the media, there is, once again, simply no substitute for taking the time and effort to understand:
1. Who are the media that are relevant to your organization? Which ones have the clout to move your market and a focus that includes the products and services that you offer?
2. Who on staff specifically covers your offering or the specific markets that you target?
3. What kind of content is the publication looking for and how can you provide it? When you pursue potential customers, you position your product or service as a solution to a problem. Attracting the interest of the media is no different. In Francis’s example above, by putting the spotlight on its own internal thought leaders, this IT consultancy was conveying the value it could provide to a publication in search of expert opinion and insight on pertinent issues and topics.
Answering these questions takes research and the patience and persistence to secure that all-important first conversation with an editor. This is relationship building based upon your ability to offer something that is relevant and valuable. Prove that you’re useful, and your foot is firmly wedged in the door. It is not about flogging today’s news release, though that does present a good excuse to pick up the phone.
Don’t operate under the false assumption that following this process faithfully is a magic bullet that guarantees results, or that great things will happen over night. It still takes time.
For one client, I have been working to place a leadership piece with a key publication since February. The editor held on to the draft we submitted for almost two months before coming back with requested revisions that essentially gut much of the article’s original focus and content. But he’s still interested. With another magazine that lies at the pinnacle of this client’s wish list, I have been touching base with the editor every few weeks for the past three months and finally hope to garner a firm commitment in June when work commences on a signature fall issue.
Invariably, great results are the result of this kind of furious paddling below the waterline, rather than something like a sponsored survey that can fall into the category of gimmickry. The sooner you take to the water and get to work, the sooner those media clippings will begin to add up.
By Francis Moran
Yesterday morning’s excellent Social Media Breakfast Ottawa got me thinking again about a recurring conversation I have been having about the nature of citizenship. Presenter Mark Kuznicki is an organizing force behind ChangeCamp, which will appear in Ottawa for the first time on May 16, and a consultant who helps forge open, creative communities whose purpose aligns with his personal social mission, “to reinvigorate community resilience and adaptation in response to accelerating global change.” It was an uplifting and thought-provoking session that left me in exactly the opposite state of mind from last month’s breakfast.
ChangeCamp is about “re-imagining government and citizenship in the age of participation,” and Kuznicki bemoaned a devaluing of the concept of citizenship that limits our participation to occasionally voting for our governments and regularly complaining about the quality of the services we receive from them.
In a comment after his presentation, I suggested to Kuznicki that it’s even worse than that. Citizenship has been reduced to a client-service model, I said, where the governed look only to receive the services they individually require and to pay the least amount possible for them, and to pay nothing at all, if they can help it, for services other people receive.
A parsimonious business ethic has invaded the relationship between governments and the governed that has many of us clamouring for the lowest possible level of investment into public services. On a local level, this ethic reached its pinnacle during the most recent mayoral race in Ottawa, where the winning candidate’s platform was the single-note promise that he wouldn’t raise municipal taxes. (That he was unable to even remotely keep his promise speaks eloquently of his woefully inadequate grasp of the realities of government.)
In several recent conversations, I have allowed myself to get a little heated when someone else argues that this city would be better off if the mayor had his way and investments in public services were whittled down to the bare minimum. Not only is this bad for the citizens who rely on those services, it is also bad for the very business and economic well being of the city that these misguided cheapskates, uh, business people, would insist they’re trying to promote. A robust public infrastructure that includes excellent public transit, public housing, public funding of arts and cultural activities — the list goes on and on — is exactly the kind of environment that attracts the entrepreneurial and creative talent that Ottawa likes to think it welcomes. In other words, not only is the right thing to do, it’s a bloody good investment.
More to the point, however, it’s part of our obligation as citizens. I am not a client of the City of Ottawa, or the Province of Ontario, or of Canada, or of the world for that matter. I am a citizen, dammit, and that places on me an obligation to do more than merely exercise my electoral franchise and complain when things don’t go how I’d like them to. It obliges me to invest both my human and fiscal capital into creating a public infrastructure in which all our citizens can thrive.
I suggested to Kuznicki that the client-service model, the minimal-investment model, is a right-wing construct and he objected that notions of right and left are antiquated and that the kind of open government he promotes is as much a threat to the left as to the right. My experience, however, is that I never hear progressive lefties argue against robust investments in public infrastructure; I only hear that from the more conservatively minded. And I don’t think Kuznicki’s open government philosophy really challenges either the left or the right; engaged participation can come from all points on the spectrum. It challenges a closed, silo-like approach where governments build and protect service-delivery establishments that reduce citizens to the business-school role of clients.
