By Danny Sullivan
During the five-year period in my life when I made my home on the Western side of the Atlantic, I was always interested to note the subtle differences in the way that the general population responded to marketing when compared to my native Britain.
The UK is a generally more sceptical country and, in my experience, its inhabitants tend to expect a bit more effort from the companies that are trying to sell to them.
One memory leaps to the fore: Coca Cola’s miserable attempt to sell its Dasani water product in the UK. After quickly becoming the second-biggest selling bottled water product in the US, Dasani hit the shelves in the UK in 2004, only to be pilloried for being nothing more than purified tap water. It lasted only months before being pulled from the shelves, along with planned launches in France and Germany.
A study by GfK NOP released today puts me in mind of those days. Apparently the i-Phone isn’t doing as well in the UK as Apple might have hoped. Only 2% of those surveyed were thinking of putting the uber-gadget on their Christmas list this year. While the main reason for this is almost certainly the hefty price tag, I can’t help but feel that there are other factors at play too.
Richard Jameson of GfK NOP sums it up nicely:
“This is a highly competitive market and the mobile phone manufacturers have very strong brand loyalty. Apple needs more than cutting–edge design to penetrate this market and will have to work much harder in the UK than it did in the US to make iPhone a mass-market proposition.”
I wholeheartedly agree with Jameson’s perspective and would recommend his words be considered by any North American company that intends to target the UK market. Common language aside, the similarities end there.
By Francis Moran
We heard this one again last week.
Generating effective coverage of a client’s story is not all about the relationship I have with reporters; it’s all about the value of the story I have to tell.
This has long been the top-ranked of Francis’s Favourite Fictions, and for two good reasons. First, it’s incredibly widely held, believed in by clients and actively promoted by agencies. Second, it is so demonstrably untrue that after 30 years practice as both a journalist and PR guy, I remain utterly gobsmacked that it retains such unassailable currency.
Having worked the trenches of daily, weekly and monthly journalism, for both print and broadcast outlets, on both a local and national level and for both general news media and trade publications, some of my strongest and truest professional and personal relationships are with journalists. And I couldn’t lean on the best of those relationships to get a client of mine even a column inch of coverage that the client’s story didn’t merit. More to the point, I wouldn’t risk my own credibility by even trying.
But if my client’s story deserves to be in the New York Times, or on the BBC, or in EE Times, or on National Public Radio, or on the Richard and Judy Show, or in the most narrowly focused of trade media outlets, it matters not a whit whether I have any kind of existing relationship with the reporter, editor or producer who needs to be successfully pitched in order to get that coverage. It matters only that I have a deserving story to pitch and the ability to pitch it well.
And if the story doesn’t deserve to be there, all the relationships in the world ain’t gonna make it happen.
Here at inmedia, we demolish this fiction practically every time we take on a new client since we invariably are required to add new media outlets, new contacts — indeed, entire new industry sectors — to our outreach efforts. And even where we have an established record of success with any individual journalist or outlet, we don’t lever the relationship; we lever our ability to engage that journalist on the only issue of any interest to her or him: the story.
So why does this fiction persist? I blame the PR industry. Truth is, you sell what you’ve got. And if you don’t have the necessary grasp of how newsrooms operate to effectively pitch into them, if you don’t have the deep understanding of your client’s story that allows you to get past the initial objections reporters throw in your way, if you don’t have the strategic understanding of why you’re trying to generate coverage for your client in the outlet you’re targeting, then the only thing you can rely on is your so-called relationships. So you tell the prospect that relationships with the target media are a prerequisite to getting coverage and you hope the prospect is an unsophisticated buyer who will fall for that.
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By Francis Moran
Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC, is airing a special series on its national radio news programs called, “How may I help you?” I caught the first in-depth piece yesterday evening and I so badly wanted to call in immediately and share my endless stack of customer service horror stories. Many fellow listeners obviously felt the same way; as of late this morning, fully 279 (!) individual stories of lament had been posted to CBC’s web site.
The issue put me in mind of an article, authored by Graham Technology’s Frank Kirwan, that we secured in Customer Management magazine earlier this year.
As I was listening to the radio piece last evening and reading some of the horror stories posted online this morning, the key point that kept coming back to me from Kirwan’s article “Dissatisfaction is a greater driver of (customer) defection than satisfaction is of retention,” he said. And judging from the number of CBC listeners who wrote that they would never again do business with that bank, telephone company, travel agency or whatever, clearly it takes just a single outrageous example of lousy customer service to trigger that defection.It really doesn’t have to be that way.
Because we have been working with Graham Technology for about a year and a half now, and with other companies like PIKA Technologies and Vocantas whose products and services can help companies sharpen their customer service, we know that the effective deployment of the appropriate technology solution can dramatically improve what seems to be a near-universally dismal record. The irony is that technology implementations are often cited by customers as the most egregious part of the problem. (Bell Canada’s voice avatar Emily surely would be hung in effigy from city to city across Canada if she was anything more corporeal than the ultimate in service-preventing disembodied interactive voice response (IVR) systems!)
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By Danny Sullivan
ScotlandIS, the trade body for the Scottish IT sector has been in the news this week as it seeks to drive more students to take up IT-related courses at University. As the Scotsman reports, “Figures showed a 47 per cent drop in UK applications to university courses in IT between 2001 and 2006.”
ScotlandIS’s Polly Purvis said, “I think the perception is that, after the dotcom crash, there are no technology jobs left in Scotland. That is just not true. There is a massive shortage of UK students taking up places on related degree courses.”
By Danny Sullivan
Just as we thought we were starting to get a handle on Web 2.0, the next installment, imaginatively titled “Web 3.0,” is emerging as the next big Internet thing.
I read a couple of articles this week that helped make things a little clearer. First, Yahoo!’s Julien Lecomte wrote Is This the Birth Of Web 3.0? for Jupiter Media, and then I read Ruth Mortimer’s piece on the same topic in Marketing Week. The semantic web, eh? Ooooh, aaaah!
Of course, after realizing that Web 3.0 is clearly well understood and in some ways already here, I just had to take a look around to see what comes next…
Well, you can try your own search for that, but I liked Alain Sherter’s lighthearted observations for The Deal.
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Engaging technology analysts as part of a PR program
November 22, 2007 by Jill Pyle
By Jill Pyle Lately, I’ve had the opportunity to work with several clients whose PR programs have an analyst relations component. It’s been a great experience getting to know the ins and outs of analyst relations and learning about the many ways it can create value for a client. We reach out to technology analysts […]
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Wikis in the workplace
November 21, 2007 by inmedia
eWeek just published an article about companies that are using wikis to share and manage knowledge. According to the article, “Wikis’ flexibility and versatility make the technology a potential solution for an array of business requirements. From bare-bones content collaboration to Web-based project management, wikis can adapt to the team requirements of many organizations.” The […]
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Best practices for collaborating on content development
November 21, 2007 by Linda Forrest
By Linda Forrest Media relations is a collaborative process. The client and the PR agency should clearly define objectives for the program at the outset and a plan should be formulated to reach those goals. It’s important to consider that one of the predominant reasons for outsourcing the PR function is to gain efficiency. We […]
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Phone vs. email
November 20, 2007 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan In keeping with the “versus” theme this week, I’ve decided to take a quick look at the challenges faced by technology PR folk when deciding which method of communication to employ when following up with the media on that all important news release. Do you try endlessly for that (ahem) wonderful moment […]
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The hacks vs. flacks war
November 19, 2007 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran It is with no small amount of trepidation that I leap into the latest eruption of a long-standing conflict that, invisible to most, has waged between journalists and PR practitioners ever since ink first spilled on paper. But when the New York Times itself is driven to comment on how things have […]
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Online content free for all
November 19, 2007 by inmedia
By inmedia There has been a trend emerging with online content in the past months: sites that had previously allowed only paid subscribers to access full content have opened access to everyone. The latest site to do so is the Wall Street Journal. It’s exciting as technology marketers to see the content that results from […]
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Thanks, BarCamp
November 19, 2007 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran Just a quick note of appreciation to all those who hung around for the very last session of the day at BarCampOttawa4 on Saturday and heard my colleague, Jill Pyle, and me talk about this very blog you’re reading. To get a two-thumbs-up for what we’re doing from inveterate bloggers like Alec […]
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Apple’s new Get a Mac ad: “PR Lady”
November 16, 2007 by Jill Pyle
By Jill Pyle David Jones just pointed me to one of Apple’s latest Get a Mac ads, “PR Lady.” Linda is right, PR really does get a bad rap.
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