By Leo Valiquette
Small is the new big.
These words came from Jerry Everett, director of sales and founder of six-year-old conference services firm onconference Inc. Everett was part of a panel of speakers reflecting on six years of entrepreneurship in Ottawa at an OCRI event this week with the catchy title of “Blood on the Tracks.”
Small is the new big wasn’t the overarching theme of the event, but it certainly struck a chord with this nascent PR practitioner. Everett’s point was that consumers (and I’ll use that as the broad term for anyone on the receiving end of a service or product) have had enough with the kinds of customer-service experiences typical of large, monolithic organizations. They are ready and willing for a more customized personal approach typically found only with a smaller company. Peronalized service will increasingly become a key differentiator in the years to come.
We’ve heard this before, of course. A business strategy that focuses primarily on your product or service’s features likely has a short shelf life. New features and fancy bells and whistles come along all the time. It’s difficult to maintain an edge over the competition for long. As for price, well, somebody is always going to find a way to do something cheaper, be it with outsourcing, tightening up the supply chain, or simply focusing on volume over margins.
Service, on the other hand, falls into a whole other category where the emphasis is on behaviour and the relationships built with customers. When customers feel that their concerns and needs are being taken seriously and made a priority, they’re much more likely to become repeat customers.
At inmedia, our mantra is “global reach” with “high-touch local service.” How? By maintaining a laser focus on our client niche and the range of services we offer to them. By having a small, veteran team of counsellors who work together on each account to ensure continuity for the client regardless of who’s in the office. By holding ourselves accountable for the results of our media outreach efforts on behalf of our clients. Small is the new big has been a guiding principal for inmedia from day one.
Wake up call
But the emphasis of the event was much more specific to Ottawa. In an already-sour venture-capital climate, the question was asked, why has Ottawa fared so much worse in recent years than other tech centres across the country?
Panellist Debbie Weinstein, of tech-centric law firm Labarge Weinstein, spoke largely of the retooling of the Ottawa tech sector, from its heavy emphasis during the boom on telecom and semiconductors to emerging sectors such as clean and green, represented by firms such as Plasco, Iogen and Menova.
That may be part of it, but other tech veterans on the panel, namely David Vicary and Rainer Paduch, were somewhat more blunt: Most of the VC cash these days is coming from U.S. VCs and U.S. VCs will back a B-grade technology if there is an A-grade team behind it. The problem with Ottawa, is that the reality (or at least the perception, which often carries more weight than reality) is that we have A-grade technology but B-grade management talent.
(Then, of course, there was the argument from Everett of whether or not a company should even focus on VC capital for growth rather than bootstrapping, but that’s a topic all its own.)
Mr. Paduch emphasized the fact that as Canadians, we’re just too timid. We’re not ballsy enough compared to our American cousins.
Perhaps that’s partly to blame for the fact that we have this habit of hiding in a lab and engineering the hell out of a product before we even validate the need for it with potential customers. There’s too much upfront development cost and far too little initial marketing effort. We need to do a better job of getting out and selling an idea and gauging the market’s interest before putting all the money, time and effort into building the product.
“Entrepreneurship is part of the American dream. In Canada, an entrepreneurial economy is almost shunned,” Brian Hurley said in his opening remarks.
So why is Canada, and especially Ottawa, languishing when the experts say there is plenty of investment capital out there? What keeps us from building more anchor companies for the local tech sector that don’t end up a branch plant? Maybe the answer is only as far away as the nearest mirror.
By Linda Forrest
Having previously worked in the music industry where copyright was king and the profligate flouting of said rights has resulted in that industry’s expected implosion, I feel especially passionate about the issue, as any of my close friends will tell you should they admit in my presence to illegally downloading music… But I digress.
Copyright is a relevant issue for PR professionals and for our clients alike, as highlighted in a recent article on Bulldog Reporter’s web site. In a nutshell, the article gives an overview of the reasons for the increased attention that we must pay to copyright and to outlets’ more stringent enforcement of their rights in the hopes of quelling infringement. This is a stance that may not be popular, but certainly one that I wholly endorse; unfortunately, movements such as these come too late for a dying music industry, but if other industries where copyright forms the backbone of the revenue model hope to survive, a tougher stance is indeed required.
That is not to say that media coverage is of no useful marketing value; quite the contrary. As in the entertainment fields where copyright infringement is rampant, it’s merely a case of the proper copyright owners receiving fair and appropriate a) recognition and b) restitution for their works.
The next time you are thinking about posting a clipping to your site or photocopying and distributing at a trade show that great article in which your company was mentioned, pay close attention to the guidelines set out in the Bulldog Reporter piece to ensure that you’re not illegally distributing copyrighted material. Your PR agency should be able to help you navigate these rules and guidelines and make recommendations to make certain you get the most value out of your clippings while staying on the right side of the law.
By Linda Forrest
We’re doing a bit of work for the Information Technology Association of Canada, helping to promote the organization’s IT Hero Awards program. The ITAC IT Hero Awards celebrate and recognize creative applications of information technology that significantly improve the lives of Canadians and readily demonstrate social and economic benefit.
Nominations are being accepted in both community and corporate categories until May 9 and the winners will be announced at the ITAC Chairs’ Dinner in Toronto on June 26. The nominees’ work highlighted in the submissions so far is impressive and truly making a difference in communities across the country.
Are you aware of a company or individual that might be worthy of a nomination? If so, please submit an online nomination form. A full set of guidelines and nomination criteria is available on the IT Hero Awards web site. We’re working to get media coverage for stand out nominees like Paul Gillespie and Dan Babineau, and could potentially promote outstanding work that is being done in your community to the media as well. Good luck to all of the deserving nominees and keep up the good work!
By Linda Forrest
This week has been a perfect case in point for why inmedia has a horizontal rather than a vertical account structure. What I mean by that is that our agency, unlike a lot of agencies, puts at least two senior consultants on each account. It is these consultants, with support from the balance of the team, that do all – and I mean all – of the work on a client account, from initial briefings with the client to developing the media list, to writing the materials, to pitching the story to the media and so on. That way, if one of the consultants is unavailable or out of town on business as is the case this week, the remaining consultants can capably manage any and all requirements for that client because they’ve been involved from the outset and have the same knowledge about the client as the other consultant.
In agencies that employ a vertical account structure, the most junior of consultants with the least experience is typically tasked with outreach to the media, having had little to no involvement in the procuring of the client, the learning of their story or development of the materials. If a journalist has a question that requires additional knowledge beyond the news release that the consultant has been handed to pitch, well, let’s just say that it’s this lack of full understanding of clients and their stories that has given our industry such a bad reputation.
This has been a busy week, with a number of our consultants doing international travel, new clients coming into the fold, big projects with upcoming deadlines in production and preparations to be made for several major campaigns getting underway next week. Still, despite being far flung across time zones and countries, the team has been able to keep all of the proper plates spinning because of our account schema. This provides both our clients and consultants with peace of mind, knowing that the needs of clients are not superseded by out of office requirements and that work continues seamlessly on their behalf.
That said, it’ll be nice to have the Ottawa team assembled once again when two of our consultants return from overseas, to hear of their most recent adventures and determine whether any of them picked up a detectable brogue on their travels.
By inmedia
Here at inmedia, we’re big believers in monitoring the media to not only capture coverage of our clients but to scan for issues upon which our clients might have a worthwhile perspective, to see what competitors are up to and to get a general sense of what the media is covering. A more in-depth monitoring of the media, and a capability that inmedia also offers, is content analysis. This comprehensive monitoring of the media provides quantitative and qualitative data on the coverage that appears in the media and can be useful to organizations that are hoping to manage their reputations through media coverage. It is this methodology that seems to be behind the Cision Corporate Media Reputation Index for Q1 2008, released today.
According to an article at PRWeek online, “Cision’s Corporate Media Reputation Index ranks the largest 100 US companies based on positive and negative reputation-driving attributes in nationwide daily media, as well as business and news magazines.” To find out who the media darlings of the corporate world are this quarter, see the PRWeek piece; for last year’s lists, visit Cision’s web site to view the news release that includes several top ten lists for 2007.
