By Leo Valiquette
Last week, I spoke about how many PR practitioners fear to pick up the phone or otherwise attempt to engage with media beyond simply hitting “send” on a media release.
I want to follow up by emphasizing that, for a PR program to be effective, it must be consistent, persistent and applied over a period of many moons and fiscal quarters. Because, frankly, there is no telling where a story may stick or when a notable journalist may come out of the woodwork asking for the perspective of your organization’s brain trust on some timely and relevant issue.
Public relations or, to be more precise for our purposes here, media relations, can be broken into two general categories. First, there is the transactional effort, where the goal is to get media to pick up on a breaking news item that doesn’t have much of a shelf life. The second is building a rolodex factor by positioning your organization, or key individuals within your organization, as go-to resources the media can rely on for comment and insight on specific subjects.
These two categories are not silos. Every time you reach out to a journalist the effort contributes to building that rolodex factor, even if the justification for your call is a news item that will be as stale as month-old bread by tomorrow.
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By Peter Hanschke
Welcome to the third installment of my blog on product managing myself. To recap, the first installment dealt with why I would even think of writing a mobile app. The second installment revealed the platform for my app and the importance of getting a name that is available and befits the app.
Today we’ll get into a meatier topic. Something that is fundamental to being a product manager – managing the intersection of product requirements, user experience and implementation AND remaining within a reasonable release window.
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The problem isn’t too little smart money, it’s too many dumb deals
By Ronald Weissman
The meme of the month is “The Series A Crunch.” According to Crunch Theory, many worthy seed-funded startups lack follow-on capital because VCs now have smaller funds or have moved later stage. CB Insights estimates $1 billion in seed financing will be “incinerated” and at least 1,000 companies will be orphaned. Other data suggest that the number of orphans could be much larger.
Those who say the problem lies with VCs (CB Insights isn’t one of them) must argue that the number of Series A deals has fallen sharply. This is not true and the problem lies elsewhere. Whatever the cause, there is, certainly, a capital crunch for seed-funded startups and it is likely to get worse, as the backlog of seed-stage companies needing Series A funding continues to grow.
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By Daylin Mantyka
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are: Techvibes, Fast Company, StartupNorth, Velocity and Convince & Convert.
Lessons learned the hard way: Canadian angel investor reveals his million-dollar mistakes
Joseph Czikk summarizes the eight biggest mistakes Canadian angel Greg Isenberg made as an entrepreneur and what he would have done differently. Number one item on the list: “Good copywriting is underrated.” Isenberg spoke Tuesday at the first GROWtalks event in Montreal.
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By Linda Moran and Francis Moran
Hey there, small or medium B2B technology company: Have you thought about what your actions are saying to your customers? Even if you don’t think you can afford a big company’s expensive embrace of high-touch customer service, at least you can stop shooting yourself in the foot. Here are six little things you might be doing, all of which tell your customers you don’t really care about them.
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The traditional corporate presentation is dead!
February 20, 2013 by Anil Dilawri
I saw close to 300 business presentations last year – lucky me. Unfortunately, most of them were not very good […]
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Do your PR people suffer from telephobia?
February 19, 2013 by Leo Valiquette
Just when I think it’s a dead horse that has been well and thoroughly flogged on this blog, I have a conversation with someone who gives it a fresh gasp of life. It comes back to this: The real effort in a public relations launch begins when you hit “send” on the media release […]
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Time for a little break
February 18, 2013 by admin
Our blog is taking a break today as we enjoy Family Day in Ontario and our U.S. readers observe President’s Day. We would like to take this opportunity to express a warm thank you to all of our readers. Our blog recently passed 1,000 posts thanks to your continued interest and support […]
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Great articles roundup: Creativity, female entrepreneurship, going viral, Silicon Valley
February 15, 2013 by Daylin Mantyka
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Fast Company, Startup Professional Musings, Velocity and Memeburn. […]
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Why I heart tech marketing
February 14, 2013 by Francis Moran
Ah, tech marketing. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways […]
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Getting to the point in drafting a patent application
February 13, 2013 by David French
Inventors often aspire to draft their own patent application. This is something that they can and should do. But they should never go through the process of filing a patent application without consulting with and using the services of a patent professional […]
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Do you have the key ingredients for an effective board?
February 11, 2013 by Denzil Doyle
The recruitment and retention of a good board of directors can be formidable tasks in any company, particularly in a high technology company where a knowledge of the technology as well as an understanding of corporate governance is required […]
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Great articles roundup: Startups, MVP, customer development, content marketing
February 08, 2013 by Daylin Mantyka
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Mark Suster, PandoDaily, Jason Cohen and MarketingProfs […]
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By Leo Valiquette
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