By Francis Moran
We’ve written a couple of posts about the wisdom of continuing marketing activities through the summer months when, it is broadly assumed, everyone is on vacation and so not paying attention to such things. Our consistent counsel has been to maintain a steady level of activity since not everyone is on holiday at the same time, mind share is a highly perishable commodity that needs constant refreshing and you might even gain a leg up on the competition that put its marketing on a summer hiatus.
One area where this does not apply seems to be our own business development activities, which are largely based on networking and getting out where we know we’ll meet technology companies. There are precious few such events during the summer months and this isn’t entirely a bad thing since it vastly reduces the time I need to spend, especially in the evening hours, doing the networking thing.
But man, I tell you, come Labour Day and the whole tune changes, and this year seems to be even more pronounced than usual. I don’t know whose hand was on the dial this year but the volume has been cranked way up.
Here in our home town, The Ottawa Network has introduced a new schedule of events that gives us somewhere to go every Wednesday evening. Judging from the numbers turning out so far, they’ve hit on topics and approaches that are drawing a good crowd.
OCRI, of course, greeted September with a new season of programming and we’re regular attendees at many of these. On the private-sector side, Ian Graham of The Code Factory — and a client of inmedia‘s — has a pretty full calendar of activities at his downtown business incubator.
The start-up community here in Ottawa and elsewhere is also newly galvanized. We’re looking forward to Ottawa’s first DemoCamp of the season, the city’s 10th edition of the wonderfully grassroots event that sees six new companies show off their product or application and get feedback from a room of their peers.
On a somewhat larger scale, the superb Toronto-based blog startupnorth.ca is organizing a two-day conference it has grandly titled Startup Empire. Featuring two days of workshops, speakers and networking “by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs,” the event takes place November 13 and 14 at The Diesel Playhouse in Toronto.
I don’t know if I’ll make it to Startup Empire but I’ll seize any good reason to go to Montreal if only because it provides the opportunity to tuck into the best smoked meat on the planet at Schwartz’s Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen. On November 27, there’ll be a lot more than good brisket bringing me to town, however. inmedia has singed on as sponsors of StartupCampMontreal3, which will see scores of new companies compete to be one of five that will formally present to what organizers hope will be hundreds of attendees. This is our first interaction with the Montreal startup community and I’m very much looking forward to it.
Also on the list of firsts for inmedia was the foray I made down to Waterloo a couple of weeks ago to attend the official launch of the University of Waterloo’s VeloCity residence and to also drop in on the exciting and so-successful-it’s-bursting-at-the-seams Accelerator Centre. I blogged about this visit and will keep you up to date as I return to VeloCity October 16 for a presentation on public relations.
And, last but not least, my time at the Red Herring Canada Conference 08 at the beginning of last week yielded not only a well-read blog post on the antics of organizer Alex Vieux but also introductions to a couple of dozen new companies.
Bottom line: We’re less than a month into the new networking season and this PR guy has one full dance card. Let’s hope these trade winds steer me into some high-value ports.
By Danny Sullivan
Industry events, such as conferences and tradeshows, can be a great place to connect with the media that cover your market, but is there any point in meeting with them if you’re not announcing anything of note?
For many organizations, the media are viewed as a channel for communicating news, and little else beyond that. Of course it makes complete sense to arrange media meetings at events when you are launching a new product or have some other major milestone to talk about. But don’t forget the tremendous value that can be gained simply by meeting face-to-face with a key editor, reporter or analyst.
PR is a business where “relationships” are constantly being touted as being key to the success of a program. Here at inmedia, we believe that the strength of the stories you bring to the media has the most bearing on the success or failure of a PR program, BUT we certainly still recognize the significant additional benefit that can result from developing healthy relationships with key contacts.
Meeting with the media at events provides that relationship-enhancing experience, where faces are put to names, and topics of mutual interest can be discussed without any of the hard-sell agenda of a story pitch done over the phone or by email.
And, in my experience, the media are just as happy to meet with companies that play in the sector they cover, whether they have something specific to announce or not. They can also benefit from the relationship factor, which for them can result in exclusives or advance notice on key news, to say nothing of the increased potential for securing commerical opportunities.
By Francis Moran
The Chicago Manual of Style, that is. And, believe it or not, it’s often quite the humorous journey.
Those of you who are regular readers of this blog will know that we take considerable pride in being word nerds, and that strong, effective and precise writing is the hallmark of our work here at inmedia. But even the best and most practised of us needs to refer to an unimpeachable expert every now and then. We make heavy use of dictionairies — my Pocket Oxford Dictionary has been my desk-side companion through four decades, and its missing spine and dog-eared appearance is testimony to my continued reliance on it — as well as style guides such as CP Style Book, and all the online tools we can get our cursors to.
The best of these is the Chicago Manual of Style, or simply Chicago, as its devotees call it. We regularly go to Chicago, if you will, to check the finer points of grammar and punctuation and settle the very occasional difference of opinion that might crop up here between writer and editor.
As subscribers to the online edition of this style guide, we get monthly emails listing questions that have been put to its editors by readers. They reply with a certainty and conviction that is reassuring, while maintaining a cheeky sense of humour; many of their answers are good for a chuckle.
Take this recent exchange, for example:
Q. The assistant editor of my local newspaper wrote the following sentence in a column: “My parents had my little brother and I later in life.” I said I believe it should be “my brother and me.” She remains adamant that she is correct and referred me to your book. How is this possible?
A. It’s not possible; she’s flat-out wrong. (And we rarely say that anything is flat-out wrong.) Ask her if she would write “My parents had I.”
Or these two that had the word nerd in me chuckling:
Q. I’m going to have signs made for the tennis courts at my rather academic club. I want one of them to say something like this:
Tennis Players:
1. Please sign in at front desk.
2. Groom your court after play.
Thank you.
I have lots of questions! Is it fine in an application like this to omit articles to save space? How should I capitalize and punctuate? Is it awkward to have a list like that? I wanted to make it absolutely clear to the reader that he has TWO duties (that is, I don’t want him to stop reading one long sentence and not register his second duty).
A. It’s easy to answer when the writer already has everything down just fine. It’s all fine—really! Sticklers might think that having “your” would mean you have to have “the” to be parallel, but I would argue that “your” isn’t optional and that adding “the” on a sign like this isn’t necessary or even conventional. Maybe you could have another sign pointing that out, just in case.
And:
Q. In a technical proposal, would you say “400-ton-per-day scrubber” or “400-tons-per-day scrubber”? Thanks a bunch!
A. The first construction is the more usual one. (Btw, what is a 400-ton-per-day scrubber, exactly? And where can I get one?)
Who says grammar can’t be fun?
