By Leo Valiquette
Nothing develops deeper familiarity with the lay of the land than on-the-ground reconnaissance, a truth that was impressed upon me over the weekend.
Last week I spent several days in Atlanta with one of our clients, Touch Bionics, maker of the world’s first fully articulating prosthetic hand, the i-LIMB. We were attending the annual conference of the Amputee Coalition of America.
Now, in the two months since I joined inmedia Public Relations, I’ve been familiarizing myself with, and working fairly extensively on, the Touch Bionics account. In fact, it’s the first client account with which I was involved. My second week with inmedia was spent on a road trip to the U.K. that included a stop at Touch Bionics’ corporate headquarters in Livingston, Scotland. I’ve worked on media lists for Touch Bionics, coordinated media opportunities, including a live segment taking place this morning on the CBS Early Show, interviewed i-LIMB users and written profiles from those interviews.
It’s been a hands-on learning experience, but hardly exhaustive. In fact, spending a few days at the conference in Atlanta, where I could speak with other prosthetic manufacturers, distributors, amputees and clinicians and see the i-LIMB in use, provided insight and context to match, even exceed, everything I had learned in the preceding two months. It’s an invaluable experience that has dramatically increased my understanding of the Touch Bionics story, the competitive market landscape and the amputee community.
Most importantly, and this was my primary reason for going down there, it’s allowed me to cultivate face-to-face connections with new media channels beyond the obvious ones. It’s intelligence that could only have been garnered on the ground.
There are a lot of PR shops out there that lure their prospective clients with lines like, “Well, we already have all these contacts,” or, “We have all these existing relationships” with the key trade or industry press in which the client’s story needs to be told.
Considering that in any given scenario the key media could number in the dozens and be scattered across a country or eight, it’s hard to see that as anything but a line of bull. What’s important in a PR agency is its ability to seek out and cultivate the media channels that best serve the client’s interests beyond the warm and fuzzy comfort of whatever relationships already exist. It’s our specialty at inmedia and it can only be accomplished through research and no small amount of cold calling. And as I learned last week in Atlanta, it can’t always be done from behind a phone and a desk.
By Linda Forrest
One of this morning’s newsletters directed me to a fellow blogger’s post on all of the silly reasons you don’t need PR. The post was written with the blogger’s tongue firmly in cheek and had me chuckling, but I’m sorry to report that, silly as they may seem in this context, we hear these points all too frequently as arguments against the business case for engaging with a PR company like ours.
By Linda Forrest
Prior to the release of an announcement, there is a lot of work to be done. Not only must we develop the content, but often times we must run the potential content past a series of third-party gatekeepers. This is where things can slow down and timelines can get pushed out.
The good news is, you’ve gotten this far and your partners or customers have agreed to talk on your behalf or participate to some degree in your media activities. This third-party validation opens up a range of PR activities, from customer win announcements to case studies and speaking opportunities. When it comes to distributing a release though, a document that will live in your company’s newsroom for considerable time and be found by any Googler searching for a company name, those parties involved want to ensure that materials are on message and accurate.
To that end, understandably, often times our clients’ partners and customers will want approval on the information and/or quotes being attributed to them prior to dissemination. Sometimes, this can mean that materials need to run the internal approvals gauntlet at third-party organizations.
Depending on the size of the organization, or how high up the chain of command your information needs to be vetted, this can take considerable time. Typically, though not always, the larger the organization, the longer you’re going to have to wait for sign off. There’s a good chance that the materials will have to float up through a sophisticated communications department to a c-level executive, and come back down through the ranks back to your hands. These departments are busy with announcements and initiatives of their own and so sometimes your news will have a lesser priority in the sign-off pile.
Still, getting the facts straight and the endorsement, implied or explicit, of a third-party partner or customer will go a long way for your public relations campaign. The best advice comes from the Boy Scouts – be prepared. Begin the conversation early and be prepared to hold your announcement or pitch until all of the stakeholders are on the same page. Most of the time, it’s worth the wait.
For those of you in the midst of playing the waiting game, in the meantime, ensure that all of your other ducks are in a row, so to speak – the media list is prepared and updated, the balance of the media kit is ready to go, and once you’ve got the approved materials, all that you need to do is hit send.
By Danny Sullivan
Nobody in PR really likes to talk about managing expectations (we’d all like to believe that we can get any story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal) but it is a vital component of a successful program, whether you’re client-side or with an agency.
The fact is that every story has a natural news value and, while it’s important for PR people to understand what this value is, it’s even more important that the client understands it too. Without mutual agreement about what level of media traction can be expected, you’re flying blind and all too likely to crash.
Determining the level of expectation to set can be tricky. An experienced PR practitioner should have a good idea of what constitutes a successful story, but it can sometimes be challenging to cut through the marketing rhetoric that is assembled and wholeheartedly believed by technology companies. Terms like “world’s first,” “fastest” and “smallest” are great to put alongside a new product, but are they accurate? It’s always beneficial to do some digging and ask the difficult questions early on, rather than finding out the hard way later.
Of course, even after careful analysis, it’s still possible that a story will not make the kind of impact you had hoped for. This happens, but if you’ve done the research and asked the questions, and been transparent with the client at all times, then you have given yourself the best possible chance of avoiding a painful post-mortem.
By Linda Forrest
A few weeks back, I wrote a post on copyright compliance, a subject near and dear to my heart given that I used to make my living in the music industry, a business that once derived much of its revenue from the proper and fair restitution for copyrighted musical compositions and master recordings. The fact that neither I nor my husband, both music industry veterans, make our current livings in music should speak volumes and somewhat inform readers as to where we stand on the issue.
Yesterday, Canada’s media was aflutter with the announcement of the introduction of new copyright legislation, meant to quell the tide of copyright infringment in this country and to update an archaic law that was in effect long in advance of the past decade’s digital revolution. Just what this means in terms of its application to PR and the appropriate handling of clippings remains to be seen but as the big hole in the plan at this point seems to be the lack of a clear plan on how to enforce the law. This has always been the challenge in the music industry as well. A running joke amongst my former music industry colleagues used to be the vision of the SOCAN police charging into Mom and Pop shops to collect tariffs and license fees for playing CDs. Rightfully, the owners of the copyright should have been paid for the “public performance” of their works, but in reality, it just wasn’t feasible to “catch” everyone infringing on these rights, so the industry let it slide. It’s been an excedingly slippery slope…
I could go on all day, but I won’t.
I did also have a comment about Francis’ post about the interview never being over and wanted to say that this extends to PR folks as well. More than once, early in my career, my name ended up in the paper when I thought that I was just having a casual, off-the-record conversation with a reporter or journalist. The last thing you want as a PR practitioner is to be caught unawares and having to respond to your client’s concerns when they read in the paper “company spokesperson, YOU, said (something that hadn’t yet been announced or ananecdotal quote that’s off message… or worse).” Always remember you are the steward of the relationship between your client and the media and act accordingly.
When dealing with the media, always ensure that the boundaries are clear. If you’re going to spill the beans on an announcement early, make sure that the reporter understands the terms of the embargo and get them to agree to the embargo in writing, if possible. Embargoes are not necessarily water tight, but they’re useful for communicating to the media that you’re keeping an announcement under wraps until the appointed date and for communicating to your client that you aim to protect that information or, (if this is the unfortunate case) that you had written agreement with the reporter or editor or outlet and that they breached that arrangement and there will be stern words and potentially further action on your part for them breaking that agreement.
Just like in life, it boils down to a) watch what you say and b) watch who you say it to!
