By Jill Pyle
In a business environment, people often give their immediate attention to the tasks and projects with the fastest approaching deadlines. Whether deadlines are set for internal purposes or imposed by clients, they often guide our priorities and motivate us to make the best use of available resources.
When more than one person or several groups of people are working together on a project, problems can arise if roles and responsibilities are not clearly defined. There may be a deadline by which a project is scheduled for completion, but if everyone has a different piece of the puzzle to contribute, you’d better hope they aren’t all delivered at the last possible moment. It’s incredibly important to leave some time for the puzzle assembler to work some magic.
When launching a client to the media or analyst community, there are many tasks that must be completed before the news release can be sent over the wire or the first reporter is called. In advance of the launch, the media kit and news release copy are drafted and approved, the media list is researched and contacts are confirmed, and customer quotes are signed off. The only way to ensure all of these pieces come together in time for the launch is to come up with a plan on which our team and the client can agree. We call this a critical path.
We use critical paths to outline all the tasks that need to be done in preparation for a launch, defining by when they need to be completed, and who is responsible for completing them. With a document containing all of this information, we can break up what might seem like a large project into small, manageable steps.
While critical paths may be a total nightmare for procrastinators, they are a godsend for the rest of us. They help to ensure that as long as everyone involved does what they have agreed to do, by the time they agreed to do it, all will run smoothly and deadlines will be met.
By Danny Sullivan
Any person working in technology PR has probably had to deal with a fair amount of rejection in their time. And no, I’m not trying to make some kind of controversial statement about the psychological make-up of the average tech PR practitioner (although wouldn’t that be interesting?).
I’m simply talking about news release rejection syndrome. It might sound something like this…
“You’re calling from who? About what? No, I can’t do anything with that.”
Show me a PR professional who says they’ve never had an approximation of that conversation, and I’ll show you Pinocchio.
Unfortunately, responding to that conversation with a mumbled “Okay, goodbye,” is as far as a lot of PR practitioners are able to go. And there is a good reason for this – they are often under-equipped in their understanding of the story to go any further.
It doesn’t have to be like that. What at first sounds like the utter rejection of your breaking news story may yet hold the promise of good quality coverage, if you have the ability to go beyond the words written on the pages of that release.
A knowledgeable, well-briefed PR person should be able to move beyond that initial exchange to explore additional avenues and opportunities that may exist for coverage. Perhaps these will not fall in the short-term, but gaining an understanding of your long-term opportunities is a highly valuable exercise.
Understanding and being able to discuss the whole story and not just today’s news should be a requirement for anyone trying to pitch a technology or business desk. Sure, it’s not going to save you from the rejection of your news release, but it’s going to give you the best possible chance of succeeding over time.
By inmedia
Earlier this week, Brodeur announced new findings on how blogs are influencing traditional journalists. According to Jerry Johnson, head of strategic planning at Brodeur, “While only a small percentage of journalists feel that blogs are helpful in generating sources or exclusives, they do see blogs as particularly useful in helping them better understand the context of a story, a new story angle, or a new story idea. It appears that reporters are using blogs more for ethnographic research than they are for investigative research.”
Here are some highlights from the ongoing research project by Brodeur in conjunction with Marketwire:
- The majority of journalists said blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested – except news quality: The biggest impact of blogs is in the speed and availability of news. Over half also said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting.
- Blogs are a regular source for journalists: Over three-quarters of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue.
- Nearly 70% of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis: Over one in five (20.9%) reporters said they spend over an hour per day reading blogs. Nearly three in five (57.1%) reporters said they read blogs at least two to three times a week.
- Journalists are increasingly active participants in the blogosphere: One in four reporters (27.7%) have their own blogs and nearly one in five (16.3%) have their own social networking page.
- About half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers” – reading blogs but rarely commenting.
By Danny Sullivan
Computerworld and others reported this week on Mozilla‘s launch of a viral marketing campaign.
“The campaign is a departure from Mozilla’s usual marketing efforts, which has relied on the Spread Firefox site and the host of fans who drum up support for the browser,” states the article.
Given the geeky nature of many of the key customers of technology companies, the viral marketing strategy is sure to be an increasing trend as emerging, “edgy” companies seek to set themselves apart from the incumbents.
And, let’s face it, it’s good fun too. “Engage your audience, don’t interrupt them,” is the marketing mantra I hear everywhere these days. Hear hear!
By Francis Moran
My colleague, Linda, wrote a post yesterday about the reality that virtually every market niche imaginable has a media channel that reaches it. She managed, but only with great difficulty, to avoid referencing one of our favourite expressions here at inmedia. I am not as disciplined, so let me explain what the title of this post means.
When you have two professional marketers in the family, some casual conversations can take a peculiar bent. Such was the case when my wife, a seasoned marketing communications strategist, and I were driving along a city street here in Ottawa a while ago. Up ahead, I spotted a car, with a canine passenger whose head was sticking out the window, as dogs love to do. Being a dog owner myself who often indulged my pooch’s enjoyment of high-speed scent sniffing, I said, “Hey, there’s a dog lover.”
We got a little closer and saw a flag on the car bumper featuring the French tricolour but with a yellow star in the upper left corner. I’m a bit of a flag nut and a Maritime Canadian, so I was easily able to identify it as the flag of the Acadian nation, people of French descent who settled in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick starting in the early 1600s. In 1755, refusing to surrender the neutrality they had been granted in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht that ceded their territory to Britain, more than three-quarters of the Acadians living in Nova Scotia were forcibly expelled from their land and deported, many to Louisiana where they became known as Cajuns, a term that is derived from Acadian. It was arguably an early example of what today is called ethnic cleansing. Still, the Acadian culture persists in many parts of Maritime Canada today.
“Oh, it’s an Acadian dog lover,” I said to my wife.
We got even closer, and saw there was a rainbow stripe above the license plate. “Oh, it’s a gay Acadian dog lover,” I said.
“Now that’s a market niche,” my wife quipped. “Yup,” I agreed, “And I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a Gay Acadian Dog Lovers Monthly that reaches that niche!”
There isn’t, of course, but you know what I mean. We now consistently use this story to illustrate that segmentation can be endless, that clear market niches can be identified, and that, the non-existence of Gay Acadian Dog Lovers Monthly notwithstanding, there almost always is a media channel or channels that reach any niche you can identify.
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There’s a publication for every niche
January 09, 2008 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest At inmedia, we work within a pretty specific niche – we do media and analyst relations for business-to-business technology companies. Period. This does cover a wide spectrum of technologies working in a variety of sectors, but most of our clients have a very well defined business and tend to be focused propositions […]
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Fiction: Public relations can’t be measured
January 08, 2008 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran Francis’s favourite fictions is a continuing series of posts on common myths surrounding the practice of public relations. When I give this as a presentation, I subtitle it, “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives.” Today’s fiction comes courtesy of a chief financial officer at such […]
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Blogging is stressful!
January 07, 2008 by Jill Pyle
By Jill Pyle Over the past few days, news of Om Malik’s heart attack has been spreading throughout the blogosphere. Inspired by the story, the New York Times published a piece about blogging as a source of stress. I have to agree, blogging can be stressful. During the weeks when deadlines are looming and inspiration […]
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Links to Canadian, US, international and online newspaper lists
January 07, 2008 by Jill Pyle
By Jill Pyle More often than not, influential trade media represent the majority of our clients’ top tier media targets. However, in recent months there have been several occasions where I was asked to track down contact information for editors at relatively small newspapers, as well as international newspapers. We all know that media databases […]
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O&P Edge speaks with Francis Moran about marketing
January 07, 2008 by inmedia
By inmedia O&P Edge, an independent media company that covers the clinical, business, regulatory, and human aspects of the orthotic and prosthetic community, is featuring an article about marketing O&P practices. The article is a Q&A with our managing partner, Francis Moran. He provides insight into why marketing is important for this group and shares […]
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‘You have no privacy. Get over it.’
January 03, 2008 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran The line above is a statement by former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy that was quoted by Canadian novelist Guy Gavriel Kaye in an article in the Globe and Mail‘s Books section just before Christmas. Kaye wrote about how technology, and especially the everyone’s-a-publisher-now phenomenon of the internet and its pervasive blogs, […]
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Happy holidays
December 21, 2007 by inmedia
By inmedia We are going on hiatus for the holidays. We will be back in the New Year.
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May your New Year be crisis-free
December 20, 2007 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan After reading the recently unveiled 101 Dumbest Moments in Business of 2007, assembled by the recently defunct Business 2.0 Magazine, I was struck by the thought that most of the events likely resulted in extensive hair loss for the PR folk involved. Crisis management is a core competency of any decent PR […]
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