By Danny Sullivan
Let’s set the scene: A technology company begins working with a much larger partner to deliver a significant new offering for the bigger firm. Everything leading up to the launch seems to be going great, and the partner has even stated that they will ensure you get some good media exposure as a result of their own public relations efforts. Then comes the launch and everything changes. The big guy hogs the limelight and you are left fighting for any scraps of media attention that come your way.
It’s not an uncommon situation, and one that I have witnessed on more than a couple of occasions.
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By Linda Forrest
A lot of our clients include conferences and trade shows as part of their market-facing activities. In fact, the last few weeks have been filled with such events for our clients across an array of sectors, including BioPartnering Europe, ECOC, Call Centre Expo, Consumer Healthcare Informatics Summit, the 2007 Financial Services Technology Forum and Fall VON.
These events provide various promotional opportunities that range from hosting a booth on the trade show floor to presenting a case study or participating in a panel discussion. Conferences and trade shows are a good way to collect leads and to gain some competitive intelligence but often vendors are not aware of, and so not taking advantage of, the best opportunities to promote themselves to the media and analysts who are in attendance.
If your company is participating in a conference, it is inferred that you have done the complex cost-benefit analysis and established objectives to allow you to assess your return on investment and return on objectives. Experts like Cummings Mitchell can provide you with the tips and tools to help make the most of your trade show investment. We feel that in order to truly maximize return on your trade show investment, it is important to pursue all promotional opportunities, including PR.
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By Jill Pyle
At inmedia Public Relations, we work incredibly hard to generate media coverage that will help our clients meet their business objectives. Being in the high tech B2B space, industry-specific publications often make up the vast majority of our clients’ Tier 1 media targets. While company and product-launch announcements sometimes spark some interest from local, business or daily media, coverage in trade publications, though it can take longer to come to fruition, has proven to generate a far greater ROI for our clients.
The 2007 Forrester Research Study on B2B Media & Marketing, released in October, has some interesting figures about the media consumption habits of business decision makers. This finding really stood out for me: “Business decision makers find industry-specific media invaluable for informing and validating their business purchasing decisions and helping them do their jobs better. 40%-45% rely on traditional industry-specific media to validate purchase decisions – again, more than other options”
Also interesting to note was business decision makers’ adoption of new media. According to the report, business decision makers rely heavily on digital media, with 70% relying on industry-specific web sites for their jobs and over 75% having used or planning to use emerging media at work. View the following chart for more details:
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By Danny Sullivan
This is the question facing many technology companies as they draw close to having a product reach market-readiness. And, while there isn’t a definitive answer as far as timing goes, the real question to bear in mind is, “Are we ready to support this?”
Let’s first think about timing. Waiting to spill the beans until you have secured some lead customers who are ready and willing to support your story certainly gives you a great chance to secure some quality media coverage in support of your launch. But for most companies, this kind of delay is unwelcome as it can mean lost ground on competing products, or simply a missed opportunity to hit the market early with a strong message to drive business development.
And, while I will always espouse the tremendous value that customer validation of a product has among the media, it is not this PR guy’s advice to wait either. Launching a product early can be a powerful strategy, but such a launch must be executed with a clear plan in place to support it with the additional elements of the story within a credible time frame.
A frequently committed PR mistake around a product launch goes something like this: Company X decides to announce its brand new product to the world. It conducts a successful media launch of the product and generates good immediate coverage and interest among its target media. The company then basks in the glow of the launch and says nothing more for six months.
In some cases, the six months of silence may be due to the fact that something happened in development and the product was delayed. But, in many instances, the real reason for the silence was that the product launch was the only PR initiative that had been planned, and PR then became an afterthought as so-called “more important” concerns took over. And guess what? After six months without communicating anything to the marketplace, by the time the company is ready to say something again, the entire introduction exercise needs to be performed again because everyone has forgotten what happened the first time around.
This is one of the greatest disappointments for a PR firm. To take a client through a successful launch exercise and then watch the great momentum established slowly disappear through a lack of commitment to capitalise on that initial investment.
If you are prepared to make the call to launch a product, make sure that you are also prepared to give it the support it deserves.
By Linda Forrest
Unlike a few of my colleagues here at inmedia, I fell backward into public relations. The first professional internship position that I held just happened to be in publicity and I quite unintentionally ended up staying on this career path. For the duration of my career, I have been working in media relations. And I have thanked my lucky stars day after day that I’m doing this job in the Internet age.
There is plenty of talk about the future of the PR business given the advent of social media. Some would even have you believe that PR people like myself are nearing extinction. This post isn’t meant to inspire people to take sides in a “where do we go from here?” conversation. Instead, for a moment, I would like to contemplate how PR was done in the past. Francis, our managing partner, tells us stories of his reporter days, typing with carbon in between sheets of paper to make copies. The hubris of my ever-receding youth screams aloud in my head, “you had to do WHAT?!?” Meanwhile, it boggles my aging mind that the younger generation can’t grasp the ethical connotations of the financial relationship between copyrighted material and the consumer. Kids today… but I digress.
I spend my work day in front of a computer – developing material, typing and editing, changing words on a whim, spelling things incorrectly (only very occasionally, of course…), absorbing the day’s news, researching material, learning about various subjects, blogging, reading RSS feeds and more. Now, remove the computer and the Internet from these activities. Truthfully, I have trouble even comprehending the mechanics of my job outside of the context of the Internet and computers. How would one do adequate and up-to-date research? Or develop an accurate and appropriate media list? Or not plough through large swaths of the rainforest because of the reams and reams of paper used every day? Or not constantly struggle with spelling and typographical errors?
Let’s say that one did, miraculously, develop and manage to type an error-free news release that took into consideration the information already published in the media marketplace, then how was it distributed? Sometimes our media lists have hundreds of contacts on them. Did my predecessors spend two days by the fax machine? What about in the time before fax? It is too much for me to comprehend.
I’m so glad that Al Gore invented the Internet. I would be lost without it.
