This is the first article in a continuing monthly series that will chronicle the growth path of Screenreach Interactive, a startup based in Newcastle upon Tyne in England’s North East. Screenreach’s flagship product, Screach, is an interactive digital media platform that allows users to create real-time, two-way interactive experiences between a smart device (through the Screach app) and any content, on any screen or just within the mobile device itself. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
We first encountered Screenreach Interactive and its founder, Paul Rawlings, several months ago when we featured Jon Bradford, the man behind U.K. startup accelerators The Difference Engine and Springboard.
Rawlings and Screenreach completed the first cycle of The Difference Engine’s 13-week program in 2010. When we asked Bradford for an example of a successful graduate from that program, he was quick to sing Rawlings’ praises.
“He was not proprietary about his ideas, he was very open to new suggestions, new directions and wasn’t wedded to, ‘Look, this is what I’m doing and I’m not going to listen to anybody else,’” Bradford said.
“I think having an open mind, being able to listen, to react in a positive fashion was probably the making of him. He was also not very selfish about bringing in other team members, making sure he had a good team around him beyond the program itself. One of his mentors (Sam Morton, pictured right in the photo below with Rawlings) became one of his members of staff.”
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This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from October, 2008. We welcome your feedback.
By Francis Moran
“I’ve just come to expect that my (public relations) agency can’t write,” was the astonishing admission I heard a few weeks back from a vice president at one of Ottawa’s larger technology companies who called us to see if we’d be interested in participating in an agency review process.
(I’ve promised not to name him (or her) for reasons that will be obvious as you read the rest of this post.)
I could hardly believe my ears. But yes, he said, it had long been his experience that the PR practitioners he had been dealing with from a range of different agencies and across a number of companies just weren’t very good writers, and so it fell to him to write most of the materials used in his campaigns. One of the key reasons he was approaching inmedia, he told me, was our very strong reputation in the marketplace as superb writers, a reputation he said was confirmed when he read our blog and web site.
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By Linda Forrest
There’s a famous adage in our industry that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. I beg to differ. Your PR resources are doing you a disservice if they fall into any of the following five categories.
1. They’re poor writers
We’ve actually had prospects tell us that their PR agency can’t write. Superior writing skills are essential to good publicity, especially in the technology realm. Technology is complicated and if you don’t clearly articulate what it is your technology actually does, your market won’t know its value and you’re subsequently hampering your market opportunity. Those media targets on your list who are interested in and write about hardware, for instance, may not give a fig about the software components of your offering. Speaking from experience, I’ve visited websites, read press releases and other marketing materials that fail to communicate the value proposition of whatever’s being written about. The death knell for your communications effort is sending out materials that leave the reader scratching their head, no clearer about what it is your company actually does, who for, at what price, why, and where they can learn more about it. The five Ws (and two Hs: how and how much) are essential to communicating effectively with your marketplace. Your PR resources must be able to articulate the important details of your offering, no matter how technical. If the technology is not well understood by your PR team, then they will be unable to write about it effectively.
Bad grammar and spelling are simply unacceptable.
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This is the next commentary from guest blogger John Craig, a veteran of commercializing mobile technologies. We welcome your feedback.
By John Craig
One thing that has guided Purple Forge more than anything else since our inception is our product philosophy. We develop mobile applications around a high-level concept called mobile community engagement. Sound catchy? Well, as it turns out, it is and has become both a point of market differentiation and a guiding mantra for those customers we choose to work with and the business verticals we target.
In 2010 the mobile application market was filled with companies offering custom mobile application development and do-it-yourself development services. It was a “Is there an app for that?” culture and everybody had a hot app idea they needed you to build. The problem was that when you dug a little deeper into the idea, there was no guiding philosophy. Over and over again, customers would tell me they wanted the same thing – a flashy, five-star app that would make them millions of dollars. These customers all had what I call “Angry Birds envy,” which is a condition where you think you have an app idea that is simple and addictive like the massively popular game Angry Birds.
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By Alexandra Reid
I have discussed thought leadership here before, but never laid out just how important it is and the critical social media steps entrepreneurs can take to establish themselves as, and tap into the minds of, thought leaders in their industries.
In a study conducted for The Society for New Communications Research called New Symbiosis of Professional Networks, 44 percent of respondents said the primary reason they visit online networks and communities is to access thought leadership and information they couldn’t get elsewhere, while 43 percent said the primary reason is to showcase themselves or their companies.
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Where is our blog going next?
September 12, 2011 by Francis Moran
Over the past six months, our Commercialization Ecosystem series explored what works, what doesn’t and what must change to get technology to market. We featured the perspectives of dozens of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers from across North America and the U.K. So what’s next? Starting next week […]
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If your company does something and you didn’t tell your marketplace about it, did it actually happen?
September 09, 2011 by Linda Forrest
Outbound news is just one aspect of a company’s PR program, but it’s an important one. While there are ways to generate coverage without making announcements, it’s likely that your company has plenty of newsworthy announcements to share with its marketplace […]
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Social Media Breakfast Ottawa: Sam Ladner and the mobile work life
September 08, 2011 by Alexandra Reid
At Social Media Breakfast Ottawa yesterday, Sam Ladner presented her research on mobile work life, which seeks to add to our current understanding of the smartphone, with a keen eye on their effects on the work/life balance, both practically and symbolically […]
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Make like a duck: Paddle hard, paddle often
September 07, 2011 by Leo Valiquette
Surveys can be used effectively to position a company, but not if the company is perceived simply as a sponsor of an external survey. Francis cited the example of one IT consultancy that, on inmedia‘s counsel, did away with its external survey of CIOs and instead […]
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30 considerations for getting tech to market: Part III
September 06, 2011 by Francis Moran
While there will no doubt be the occasional post that will still fall into the Commercialization Ecosystem category, today marks the official end of this series with which we launched our new blog back in February. Next week, we will introduce several new series, but first, let’s conclude our three-part recap of what we have learned about getting technology to market […]
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August roundup: What does it take to get technology to market?
September 02, 2011 by admin
Thank you for being with us for the seventh month of our blog. In case you missed them, here is a recap, in chronological order, of our posts from August, which covered a great swath of topics, including intellectual property, planning your 2012 fiscal budget […]
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Fiction: PR can’t be measured – Take 3
September 01, 2011 by Francis Moran
As part of my continuing series of Francis’s favourite PR fictions, subtitled “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives,” I have written a couple of posts on PR measurement addressing the common myth that straight […]
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File early, file often to accommodate changes in U.S. patent law
August 31, 2011 by David French
In about 18 months, U.S. patent law will undergo its most dramatic change since 1952, possibly since 1836. These changes will have an effect on Canadian businesses who seek to obtain U.S. patents, but those changes are not so profound as to require a significant […]
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By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
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