By Francis Moran
When we launched this blog about 18 months ago, I blamed congenital social media addict Alec Saunders for persuading me that I and my colleagues here at inmedia PR had enough to say that we should be blogging. Nothing we’ve seen in the time since would persuade me he was wrong; our blog has hugely increased our online presence, vastly boosted the ratings for our corporate web site, and both brought us interesting business opportunities and helped validate our expertise on others.
Now we take the next step. Twitter.
And, as I wrote in my very first Tweet, if Saunders is to blame for making me a blogger, then Scott Lake has to take responsibility for making me a Twit. Scott has been pushing me to join the twitterati for a while now, and last week, I did. You can follow me at @francismoran. The tipping point for me was this blog post from the folks at Velocity about how they use many different social media tools, including Twitter, to gain the greatest possible leverage for good pieces of content they generate for their clients.
Now, much as I like to claim to be an early adopter, I’m not terribly early to this particular party. In fact, I’m not even the first person at inmedia to start a Twitter account. That honour belongs to my colleague Linda Forrest (@lforrestinmedia), who wrote her first update in May last year and has been a bit more active while on maternity leave. (We all know that first-time Mums with months-old babies have oodles of time on their hands, right Linda?)
Scott has promised to drop by and give me a crash course in how to make the most of this interesting social media tool. For my part, I think I’ll use it for all the quick comments that seem to occur to me in the course of a week, things insufficiently detailed or profound to warrant a full blog post. We’ll also add a tool to this blog that automatically issues a tweet when we write a new post. I’ll tweet about other posts I read in my hundreds-deep RSS feed, participate in some of the conversations that are going in the twittersphere and, like Velocity, draw the broader web’s attention to some of our clients’ successful content generation.
As with our blog, we’ll keep you posted on how this goes. As a newbie, though, I’d be keen to hear from readers who have had good or bad experiences with Twitter, and how you use it.
By Leo Valiquette
There is no question that we PR types are often taken to task for blitzing the world with news of little relevance or importance or, at least, for failing to ensure that the news is relevant and important to the hapless targets in range of our scatter guns.
In an ongoing series of posts chronicling his study of the pitches that flood his inbox, research analyst Josh Bernoff has been examining why three quarters of the PR email he receives is irrelevant. He makes the point of saying, “I really like working with PR people, I just don’t like all of their tactics.” After working for 14 years as an analyst and being barraged by tens of thousands of emails during that time, he believes his exercise in navel-gazing is well justified.
Among the points he makes is that far too much of the email he receives is related to research areas he covered years before, but is not relevant to what he is doing now. Obviously, too little research is done to ensure information in a contact database is up to date.
The simple fact is, things change. Publications fold and people move on to new jobs or assume new responsibilities. When it comes to those media contact and editorial calendar databases to which many of us subscribe, their accuracy and timeliness is often dependent on media outlets voluntarily responding to requests to update their information. I can say from previous experience as a business journal editor bombarded by irrelevant pitches that such requests often go unanswered.
In the end, the most effective way to verify if a particular journalist or editor is an appropriate target for the news you have to pitch is to visit their publication’s website.
Case in point. We recently re-engaged with a client after a two-year hiatus to put out some news for them. It had been a long time since we created their target media list and we emphasized the value of budgeting into the project the time and cost necessary to go through the list one name at a time to verify and update the information.
They saw our point, and thankfully so. Forty to 50 per cent of the contacts we had were no longer accurate for reasons that included staff turnover, defunct publications, and changes to the email addresses and phone numbers of those contacts who were still appropriate targets for this particular client’s news. If we hadn’t undertaken this process, up to half our outreach on this client’s behalf would have been a misfire.
Not all media outlets are forthcoming on their “Contact Us” or “About Us” pages with individual staff bios, beats covered and contact information, but most are. It can be tedious to visit dozens of websites to dig up and verify this kind of information, but without a doubt, it is the only assured way to get your client’s story where it needs to go.
By Francis Moran
Two inmedia clients, PIKA Technologies Inc. and Vocantas Inc., are finalists in two different categories of the 2009 OCRI Awards. Interestingly, both work with advanced voice technologies.
PIKA, a developer of media-processing hardware and software, made the cut in the Product of the Year category while Vocantas, which develops advanced interactive voice-response systems, is a finalist for Technology Commercialization Partnership.
We’ll be cheering on these favoured finalists and all the outstanding Ottawa companies that will be waiting for the envelope at the OCRI Awards Gala April 8.
By Danny Sullivan
Last week was a particularly uncomfortable one for four ex-banking bigwigs here in the UK. They faced a public grilling from British MPs about their roles in the events that led to two of the country’s biggest banks needing to be rescued with taxpayers’ money.
The extensive media training that each received was widely reported on, and was even raised during the session itself. “Are you expressing sympathy because your PR advisers have told you to do so?” queried one MP.
Thank goodness not many PR folk will ever have to prepare their organisations to face such a high-profile public dressing-down, but media training is still an important element that serves its purpose well, no matter the profile of your company.
Unless you are partly responsible for the near-collapse of a major bank, you probably don’t need to go through the kind of rigourous training that the four chaps in London doubtless endured in the lead up to the grilling. In general, media training should not lead to the detriment of personality.
The golden rule of speaking to the media centres on the fact that they can only print or broadcast what you tell them, so stay on message. Yes, certain subjects and situations require more focus on key messages than others, and the bigger you are, the more careful you need to be. For the majority of tech companies, however, building a successful ongoing rapport with their target media is just as important as ensuring your top three messages make it into print.
Stifling an engaging and entertaining orator to try and exert control over the resulting coverage will serve only to irritate the media or, at the very least, make for an unmemorable interview. Far better for the interviewer to encounter an executive who is happy to explore additional areas of discussion in a more casual manner. This may mean that you lose some of the focus of the message, but you’ll have left behind a much happier reporter, and hopefully one who’ll want to come back and talk again some time.
By Leo Valiquette
A recent example of how not to manage the hack-flack relationship provided some entertainment value for the Twitter crowd and profound embarrassment for the National Post earlier this week.
The war of words between marketing consultant April Dunford and Post writer David George-Cosh in such a public venue (though as you can see for yourself, most of the venom was flowing one way) demonstrates the importance of keeping one’s rants private. That’s what e-mail is for.
This whole stink seems to have been sparked by the perception that a phone call was not returned quickly enough. Well, striking while the iron is hot are words any PR practitioner should live by when opportunity comes knocking. Be that as it may, tact, courtesy and professionalism should rule any interaction between those with stories to write and those with stories to pitch.
Thanks to social media, any one of us can easily find ourselves in the public eye. We will be judged by how we act and conduct ourselves toward others. It’s your image, your personal brand, that’s on the line.
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Straight from the dragon’s mouth
February 06, 2009 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette “Even if there’s blood on the street there’s always somebody making money. You just have to make sure you’re on the right side of it.” The son of poor Croatian immigrants, he sold his first company for $100 million in 2000. His second company, launched in 2003, is now the largest privately held IT […]
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Having skin in the game
February 05, 2009 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette “What we’ve done is turn our people into raving capitalists.” Not the label one might think to apply to the employees of Canadian airline WestJet, but that was how Duncan Bureau, WestJet’s vice president of sales, characterized the company’s singular focus on customer service while delivering the opening keynote at the 2009 […]
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January roundup: Murder, just rewards and straight talk
February 02, 2009 by inmedia
By inmedia In case you missed them, here’s a recap of our blog posts from January. Francis Jan. 16: Why is a startup like murder? Jan. 30: ‘It’s just unbelievable how far customer service can go.’ Danny Jan. 12: Could recession spell the end for print? Jan. 23: The value of shooting the breeze Leo […]
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The start-up Scotts of Ottawa take it on the road
February 02, 2009 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran Ottawa’s two start-up Scotts — I refer to their common first name, not their nationality, which would be spelled with just one ‘t’ — are in the middle of a six-city, two-country roadtrip to visit co-working spaces in each city and to spin the gospel according to Dex, the nifty CRM application […]
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‘It’s just unbelievable how far customer service can go.’
January 30, 2009 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran The quote in my headline comes from a beautiful little story that is warming the hearts of Canadians today. Jorma Hogbacka was a regular customer at the Tim Hortons coffee shop in his hometown St. Catherines. Apparently, he had a colourful way about him, part of which was to ask the coffee […]
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Business building blocks
January 29, 2009 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette It was business building 101 this morning at OCRI’s monthly Technology Executive Breakfast, with three executives representing different stages of a company’s growth offering pearls of wisdom and insights learned at the School of Hard Knocks. Mark Edwards, president of Bent 360: MediaLab represented start-up companies; Rob Woodbridge, CEO of Rove, spoke […]
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Reaping the rewards of a good reference
January 27, 2009 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette If “location, location, location” is the axiom of real estate agents, then “reference customers, reference customers, reference customers” is the public relations equivalent. Customers who have deployed a vendor’s product or service provide validation and demonstrate uptake in the market. They can speak in dollars and cents terms about why they adopted a […]
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The value of shooting the breeze
January 23, 2009 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan At inmedia, we frequently position ourselves against those whose perspective is that PR is “all about relationships.” And, while I wholeheartedly stand by our mantra that it is the ability to convey a story and not the relationship that dictates PR success, it cannot be denied that relationships are still important. They are even more relevant from the perspective of […]
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The Future of A&R – Walabe : [...] http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/top-10-questions-every-strategic-communicator-should-ask... [...]
Traditional Marketing is Dead – Long Live Bikini Waxer Marketing | Scalexl : [...] pointed out by Alexandra Reid on the Francis Moran website content marketing is becoming more and more like journalism. So, it is not just about the content, [...]
It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]