By Linda Forrest
There has been a lot of bad news coming out of the publishing sector in recent years and the latest segment of the publishing world to sound the alarm has been the business-to-business space, with the majority of high-profile publishers like Ziff Davis Enterprise, Nielsen and Penton announcing layoffs and restructuring.
This piece in Folio analyzes the recent spate of announcements and asks whether it’s time for B2B publishers to panic. The conclusion seems to be that those publishers that have already made a significant transition from print to online holdings will prevail, whereas those exclusively devoted to print will continue to struggle.
As noted in the article though, it’s important to realize that B2B readers behave somewhat differently than B2C readers in that they’re not sitting in front of their computers all day, meaning that print publications and portability play a more important role with these outlets.
Only time will tell how trade information is communicated in the long term. For the time being, however, there’s a healthy mix of both print and online outlets where our clients can receive valuable coverage and glean intelligence about their markets.
By Linda Forrest
I can’t help but share what I think is a brilliant PR campaign by Dr. Pepper. The company has agreed to give every person in America, except for Slash and Buckethead, two guitarists who have famously quit working with Axl Rose in various incarnations of the band Guns ‘n Roses, a free can of Dr. Pepper if the band, such as it is, puts out its long awaited album Chinese Democracy before the calendar year is through.
A little history on Chinese Democracy. It has been in production, supposedly, since the early 1990s. Every six months or so, Axl Rose says that it’s just about complete and that it will be released shortly. Then, some sort of internal strife or label struggle causes an incalculable setback and the album never comes out. Suffice to say that since Bill Clinton had just entered office when production began, Americans will have to find other ways to quench their thirst as it’s improbable, to say the least, that 2008 will be the year that the fabled album makes an appearance.
Okay, so it has little to do with B2B PR, but it is nonetheless a terrific strategy that’s circumventing a lot of the gatekeepers and barriers to coverage that would traditionally exist for a corporate behemoth like Cadbury Schweppes in reaching its target demographic of males 18-34. Kudos to Ketchum for developing and executing this creative campaign.
The tenuous connection between inmedia and a music-themed PR campaign is that in a former life, I worked in public relations for a variety of record labels and recording artists. For those of you playing the six degrees of separation game, I’m the link here, folks.
By Linda Forrest
This is one of those posts that as I’m writing it, I am second guessing my usage of both punctuation and grammar since in this post, I’m hoping to highlight the fact that everyone needs an editor. I need not worry too much since this, like all materials we write here at inmedia, will pass through at least one editor.
Though we are self-professed “word nerds” here at inmedia, we are also human and, as we all know, to err is human. Still, there are a number of ways to mitigate our humanity when it comes to content production, first and foremost being the review of all materials by a colleague before it is sent to a client for review.
In addition to the multiple sets of eyes that will hopefully catch any punctuation or grammar errors before the piece leaves the shop, there are many online tools that can be useful in building one’s skills as a writer and affirming one’s choice of punctuation or grammar before it leaves the desktop.
Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com are useful when you need to confirm spelling or want to branch out from repetitive terminology in a news release or article.
GrammarGirl endeavours to do the impossible — make grammar hip — with her Quick and Dirty Tips.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves is the definitive humorous book on punctuation and a favourite of the inmedia team. (Editor’s note: Linda scored major points in her job interview a few years back when she said she had this little tome on her Christmas wish list!) Online punctuation guides can be found around the web, including this one. It should be noted that a cheeky Gawker post on the death of the semicolon inspired today’s post. May it rest in peace.
Carefully review your own writing before sending it on, and refer to these online resources when determining whether your piece requires a there, their or they’re. Save yourself, your agency and your client the embarrassment of your news release ending up the butt of a PR joke because you confused your its and your it’s, or worse. Don’t let your materials be part of the reported 60% of business writing that contains errors.
By Linda Forrest
Today, I’m doing a lot of work that’s invisible to the client’s naked eye. Having previously posted on database maintenance, a “behind the scenes” task that is incredibly important to the integrity of the PR campaign, I thought I would post a few other tasks that your agency is regularly undertaking on your behalf, invisibly.
As we’re nearing the end of launch campaigns for some new clients, I’m starting to get a feel for the full range of opportunities that exist in the mid- and long-term for these clients. This means I’m researching the published opportunities available in editorial calendars for target publications for these clients, establishing a list of relevant tradeshows and conferences where company executives could be spokespeople or where there might be value in attending for business development purposes (let’s hope they bear no resemblence to the cautionary tales mentioned yesterday), and generally getting a feel for the PR opportunity outside of the Tier 1, or most influential, media with whom we had in-depth conversations on our clients’ behalf during the launch phase and within which we have a firm handle on the opportunities forthcoming.
This research will culminate in just a few short pages in the report to the client, but it takes a considerable amount of effort to aggregate the relevant data, weed through it for appropriateness and formulate it into a cohesive spreadsheet or report. Yet, all of this work is truly “behind the scenes” and typically, clients just see the finished product in the report and aren’t in the least aware of the hours we put in to get the raw data.
Once we’ve got a fulsome view of the opportunities and have discussed with our clients which ones they would like to learn more about, the process again becomes about the behind-the-scenes work of sussing out who is writing the piece on the editorial calendar, what their angles will be, what sort of shape the piece will take and then determining whether there is an intersection between where our client;s interests lie and the particular piece. It’s inevitable that sometimes, these pursuits go nowhere because the client is not a fit for whatever reasons. Still, all the data gathering and other hard work up to that point had to be done and is billable work. Like in the entertainment industry, there’s no such thing as an overnight sensation. A lot of hard work goes into getting results. Sometimes it pays off, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s as simple as that.
The process is similar for speaking opportunities – sometimes your spokesperson would be a good fit, sometimes they’re disqualified for any number of reasons. A considerable amount of hours were used, but unless there were results achieved, the work is invisible to the client. Because so many of our clients are such focused propositions, an immense amount of qualification goes into the establishment of the target media and conferences for our clients. Knowing the space and having a firm understanding where the opportunities are most likely to lie reduces the amount of negative outcomes at the end of the exercise, but like the little duck calmly floating along the pond, your agency’s legs are kicking like crazy underneath the surface in order to keep the program swimming along on a forward trajectory.
I would be interested in the input of the other PR practitioners reading this post and invite them to add in the comments to the list of tasks that although integral to the PR campaign, cannot truly be seen or measured by the client. What percentage of your time is spent on these tasks, versus the ones that the client can see?
By Danny Sullivan
I’ve recently been working with a client on the development of article discussing the economic downturn and how companies can profit by investing in customer-facing activities during this period, rather than the usual approach of cutting back in these areas.
The article isn’t going to appear for a while, but I wanted to raise the topic now, as it’s one that affects PR and marketing people directly.
Many of us who worked in this business during the years when the tech bubble burst will have stories to tell about the hacking and slashing of marketing budgets that were, in many cases, first in the line of fire. Unfortunately, marketing is often viewed as an area of business that doesn’t have enough impact on the bottom line to prevent the hatchet falling heavily on it.
But in the article I’ve been working on, my client references data showing that companies that chose to increase their investment in marketing during previous downturns actually vastly outperformed those companies that cut or maintained marketing budgets, once the economy started to recover.
It’s an interesting topic, and I’m sure it’ll be of even more interest as marketing and PR departments start making the case for their budgets in the face of the downturn.
Of course, I’ll refer back to the article when it’s published so you can all check it out for yourselves (some time in May).
