By Danny Sullivan
A lot of PR people seem to be a little nervous when it comes to dealing with the blogosphere. There exists a sentiment that there is some kind of black magic at play – and if you don’t know the magic words you might end up spending the rest of your days as a toad flack.
Fear not. Bloggers are not really any different from the media – they have the same interests, in the same topics and, for the most part, respond to PR in a similar way to the media. If approached, they are not (usually) inclined to destroy your fledgling career with a casual flick of their wand.
There are certainly some ways to make your life easier when dealing with blogs, but none of these are unique to the space. Like the media, bloggers prefer to know about stories in advance, so embargoes are appreciated and usually honoured without question. And in the same way as the broader media despise receiving news that is irrelevant to them, so too bloggers rail against such indiscretions. Basically, if something usually pisses the media off, then you can be pretty sure it’ll piss off a blogger too.
In fact, continuing to refer to bloggers and the media as two separate entities is probably well past its sell-by date. The large numbers of media sites that have now recast themselves in a blog-style format is surely proof enough of this. They must be considered one and the same by PR people and should not be avoided out of fear of the unknown.
By Francis Moran
The official theme was “Ottawa’s digital media industry,” and the gamers, social networkers and content developers were there in spades. But what I heard at Wednesday night’s regular Start-up Drop-in put on by The Ottawa Network at LaBarge Weinstein had as much or more to do with propagating and supporting the entire start-up — indeed, the entire technology — community in Ottawa than it did with digital media per se.
In keeping with the format now well established by LWLaw partner and event host James Smith, we heard briefly from several different actors before the headline act shared what is billed as “words of wisdom.”
First out of the gate was a quartet of self-described “next generation” entrepreneurs who see themselves as having a serious role to play in cultivating and supporting their fellow tech entrepreneurs. Putting their blogging skills where their mouths are, they run StartupOttawa.com, an active blog by and about the start-up community. Mercury Grove‘s Scott Annan, Shopify‘s Scott Lake, TravelPod‘s Luc Levesque and Jean-Sylvain Sormony of Fuel all talked about the importance of cultivating “our generation of entrepreneurs,” as Lake put it.
Two start-ups whose very business model is all about propagation went next.
David Thompson described his company, Noleo, and its platform that hosts social networking applications, allowing them to simply and simultaneously run on a number of social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Alan Isfan’s FaveQuest is also all about propagating content across social networking sites, in this case taking broadcast television material and packaging it for redistribution to the social networking ecosystem.
Ben Houston, a fascinating young developer whose computational magic has been seen in several Hollywood movies, was an example of the propagational potential of the Start-up Drop-in itself since that’s where, a few months ago, he first met Keith Taylor, the business executive he has now recruited as president of his company, Exocortex Technologies.
I was momentarily stuck when Distil Interactive CEO Robert Thompson began to share his words of wisdom since it was not immediately clear to me how his comparison of Ottawa to other tech-savvy centres in which he worked would fit into my propagation theme. But his talk was really about challenging the 50 or so company leaders and managers in the room to propagate their obvious enthusiasm, commitment and empowerment throughout the rest of their company employees and, indeed, throughout the rest of the community.
It was a high energy evening, as have been the last several of these drop-ins.
By Linda Forrest
It’s true, a lot of a PR consultant’s time is spent writing; writing news releases, backgrounders, bylined articles, biographies, blog posts (ahem)… all in the hope that interested journalists or editors will take what we’ve written and repurpose it or use it as source material to develop their own coverage of our client or its product. But an integrated approach to media relations recognizes that while a lot of the stuff we’re pursuing is print or online coverage, there are other media channels and formats that strongly influence decision-makers in the B2B marketplace, including radio and television. Each format has its place in your program and can have valuable impact when properly incorporated into your media relations activities.
The Buggles had it wrong, I’m afraid – video did not kill the radio star, at least when it comes to B2B marketing.
According to a recent article from btobonline, radio is very influential in this arena. “A study by Media Audit found that 55% of business owners, partners and corporate officers listen to the radio between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m., compared with 45% of the general population. The telephone survey, which took the pulse of 6,860 business executives in 88 U.S. cities in 2006 and 2007, also found that on an average day, 75% of these executives tune to radio, compared with 68% of the general market. According to the survey, the top radio formats for reaching business executives are: news/talk (21%), public radio (17%), country (12%) and talk (11%).”
We are lucky in Ottawa that we have a supportive and interesting radio program in CFRA’s Business @ Night. We often have our clients appear on the show, capably hosted by Greg Hebert, and have had a lot of anecdotal feedback from interviewees that not only does Greg do his homework but that they’ve been approached by customers and prospects to say that they heard the interview. When targeting a local initiative, this penetration can be very valuable and help achieve goals relating to local investment, attracting and retaining staff, and building corporate goodwill by highlighting the company’s activities in the community, among others.
National radio programs, like the Business Network on the CBC every morning at 5:45am, hit a much larger audience both numerically and geographically, and can provide a useful venue for your company’s leadership team to demonstrate their subject-matter expertise or contribute worthwhile dialog to conversations about pressing business issues.
Television has not yet been eclipsed by the internet as a key influencer of the business elite in America, those top executives who have the final say on purchasing decisions. According to the Ipsos’ BE: USA 2007, The Media Survey of the United States’ Business Elite, 70% have watched network television and 60% have watched cable television in the previous day, where just over 50% went online. The convergence of video and the web, though, has gained traction with nearly half having streamed or watched a broadband video from their computers in the last month.
As other bloggers have previously reported, print remains king. “The business elite turn to national newspapers first for deeper understanding of the issues that matter to them, particularly financial and business news (18% of the projected C-suite universe), as they trust newspapers to have the best journalists (28%) and reliable reporting (23%) … For keeping abreast of technology, this group of decision-makers prefers business magazines (22%), such as weeklies BusinessWeek (20%), bi-monthly publications such as Fortune (18%) and Forbes (17%), and monthly publications like CFO (15%). Business magazines are also this group’s primary resource for informative advertising (15%), general business help (32%), and information to manage their career development (29%).”
When targeting your customers, keep all forms of media in mind, not just print and online. There may be other channels that are more appropriate to deliver your message and your PR agency should recognize and pursue these avenues to ensure that your coverage is having the greatest impact on your target audience.
By Leo Valiquette
Now we’ve got it, let’s put it to good use.
Last night was the official launch of TheCodeFactory, a private business accelerator/incubator intended to help fill the gap between a great idea and a commercial product gaining traction in the marketplace. It’s the cherished baby of business consultant Ian Graham and its launch attracted plenty of interest from the local business community, including remarks from Denny Doyle, the “Don Cherry of Ottawa’s tech sector,” Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, and Scott Lake, founding partner of both Jaded Pixel and Shopify and blogger on Startup Ottawa.
First up, I’ll freely admit inmedia‘s support of TheCodeFactory and my role as PR flack for its launch. But my personal interest and support for this project goes right back to my previous incarnation as editor of the OBJ and my favourite hot-button topics. We need to foster a culture of true entrepreneurship in this town defined by people who want to build a successful company versus those in search of a paycheque who are just trying to give themselves a job. Problem is, having that mindset is only half the battle. You need the means to get from the idea stage to the cash-flow stage. Plenty of great ideas with talented, committed people behind them wither and die thanks to a lack of support for the earliest stages of the start-up lifecycle.
That’s where TheCodeFactory comes in.
What Ian is offering up is a combination of office space for start-ups looking for a desk without all the administrative and costly aggravation of setting up their own office. That’s the fourth floor. What’s truly unique is what’s on the second floor. There he offers co-working space with the relaxed atmosphere of a coffee bar (with full connectivity, of course) where entrepreneurs at every stage and code warriors from local schools can network, collaborate, troubleshoot and refine their ideas, even connect for potential employment opportunities.
It’s this unique community approach, the emphasis on creating a “vital, vibrant, ecosystem” that truly sets TheCodeFactory apart from other venues that fit into the business accelerator category. And Ottawa couldn’t need it more. We’ve seen a host of anchor tech tenants of one stripe or another downsize, pull up stakes or get bought out over the past while. There’s plenty of volatility and uncertainty our there, the perfect breeding ground for startups as people decide it’s time take hold of their destiny and go into business for themselves. It’s been referred to as the “supernova effect,” as experienced and savvy individuals disperse their knowledge and expertise throughout the tech community like seeds cast to the winds.
In this environment, TheCodeFactory is just the kind of place we need for those seeds to sprout into new ventures or for that kind of experience to be made available to others. As Scott said in his remarks last night, it’s “a place for innovation to grow.”
By Francis Moran
A fascinating array of new applications, ranging from a web site allowing private pilots and other airport nuts to share their enthusiasm and knowledge, to a sophisticated new system to reduce intellectual property contamination while writing software code, were demonstrated to a standing-room-only crowd last night at Ottawa’s ninth DemoCamp.
A new twist on the well-established forum for code jockeys and entrepreneurs to show off their latest projects was its move to the second-floor Velvet Room in the Byward Market, a literal and figurative step up from the grotty basement venue in which it had appeared in the past. While there were a couple of glitches, most notably a speed-challenged internet connection, the new room was a great venue.
As an inveterate traveller and wannabe pilot, my favourite demo of the evening was David Megginson’s Our Airports. David’s information-rich web site, clearly a labour of love, features details on virtually every airport in the world, with the site’s users adding their own particular insight, everything from the cheapest aviation fuel and reviews of the customs facility to where the closest java can be obtained, the latter being critical information for what David called “coffee-starved” pilots.
You don’t have to be a pilot to enjoy the site. Anyone can join, create a list of all the airports they’ve ever been to, and plot those airports on a map of the world.
A presentation by SIMtone CDU of what it called a “virtual personal computer” had at least one member of the audience scratching his head. I missed a good bit of this first demo but others clearly were wondering about its utility. The concept seemed sound and a logical extension of utility computing. Put everything — storage, CPU, applications, printing, the works — in the cloud and allow access to it from a browser, soft client or hardware terminal. Problem is, you need a computer to access your virtual computer which kind of obviates its value proposition.
Protecode, an Ottawa company that rolled out a few months back, demonstrated its intellectual property management system that allows every piece of code, whether originally created or imported from some other source, to be reliably classified and tagged, with code that might create IP contamination issues down the road flagged as soon as it is imported. The benefit, its developers argued, is that the exact provenance of every line of code is established.
An interesting application, Stockify, allows value investors to calculate whether a stock is fairly or over-priced, or represents a buying opportunity. I remain a bit confused by the application’s ability to amend an inputed growth rate for the company being researched, with the tool altering the growth rate both historically and going forward. I have promised to get together with the developer to further thrash out our competing math theories.
And, finally, PicSphere appealed to the former commercial photographer in me with its nifty browser-based application allowing on-site shooters to swiftly organize and offer for immediate sale the pictures they take at sporting and other events.
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Building small companies that roar
May 20, 2008 by Leo Valiquette
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 […]
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How may my technology help you? Take 2
May 13, 2008 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran I’ve written here before about the abject failure of most technology implementations intended to assist in the delivery of customer service. And I know criticising customer service is such an easy target that it makes shooting fish in a barrel seem a highly skilled undertaking. Still, my experience last night with Rogers, […]
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Copyright compliance
May 12, 2008 by Linda Forrest
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 […]
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Finding anchors in the chaos
May 09, 2008 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette Print is dead. That was the sentiment floating around when I returned to school to study journalism in 1997. The internet will be king, was the thought of the day, and that was still years before the pervasive, bandwidth-sucking web services we take for granted today. But here we are and print […]
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Tech community disagrees that BDC should ‘abandon its dogs’
May 08, 2008 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran I have been soliciting opinions all this week on a story by the Canadian Press, carried in the Globe and Mail on Monday, that said the Business Development Bank of Canada‘s venture capital wing had been urged by a federal government-ordered study to “cut its losses more often, abandoning the dogs in […]
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ITAC IT Hero Awards seeks nominations
May 07, 2008 by Linda Forrest
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 […]
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Media getting even more social
May 07, 2008 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan I’ve written a couple of posts recently about social networking and its link to PR, but its growth in this area was firmly driven home to than by a recent conversation with a reporter at a leading US trade magazine. We were discussing a client and the relative merits of the company’s […]
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The benefits of an agency having a horizontal account structure
May 02, 2008 by Linda Forrest
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 […]
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