Following Michael Arrington’s pre-Christmas attack on PR embargoes, I think it’s a topic that is still worth exploring, particularly for those unfamiliar with how to use them effectively. 

Why would anyone agree to embargo a news story in the first place? An embargo is supposed to be a tool that makes things easier on the time-constrained reporters who cover breaking news, allowing them the time to build their story ahead of the release date. The company providing the embargo realizes the added benefit of helping insulate coverage of their story against the possible negative impact of bigger “on the day” news, and can also gain more detailed coverage as a result.

So it’s like an exclusive? No. An exclusive is given to a single outlet, whereas an embargo is a set date and time for release of the news that can be agreed upon with any number of media.

But how can you ensure that the embargo is not broken? Herein lies the rub. An embargo is not a legally binding contract and is entirely based on trust. As such, embargoes should only be taken up with media that can be trusted to adhere to them.

The growing problem with using embargoes in today’s online society is that there is now much more to be gained from breaking them. As Arrington explains, ”Traffic and links flow in to whoever breaks an embargo first.” This added incentive to break the agreement means that the trust element is ever more important.

So, are embargoes no longer a worthwhile option for the PR professional? On the contrary, I would argue that they are still just as useful as they have ever been. The point is not to use an embargo without due care and attention. Sending a news story to 50 media contacts with “Embargoed until…” marked on the header is not going to cut it. At a minimum, agreement has to be reached through personal contact with each target before any information is imparted. But it is also important to ensure that those contacts you are reaching out to are the least likely to break the story - for example, they should have an ongoing interest in your company and products, or you should have already dealt with them successfully in the past. Media that value the relationship they have with your company are much less likely to break an embargo than those that have little real knowledge of your story and will think nothing of damaging the relationship in order to be first with a story.

Technorati Tags: media relations, embargo, breaking news, Michael Arrington

Okay, I’m sure that headline reads like a naked sales pitch for our services here at inmedia Public Relations. And while it most certainly self-serves that function, it’s actually one of 18 tips on sales and marketing to help you recession-proof your software company published last week on softwareCEO.com. (I’m indebted to my good friend Jason Flick for bringing this article to my attention.)

We have consistently advocated that companies that maintain — or even increase — their market presence during a downturn emerge from the downturn stronger than their competitors and in a position to springboard into the new opportunities that the eventual recovery will bring. So it’s no surprise to us to hear other sales and marketing professionals echo that sentiment.

The softwareCEO.com piece, the second in a series that also includes 18 tips on finance and operations, is full of terrific advice. Within the piece on boosting your PR investment, it cites software marketing expert Judy Schramm of JMR Consulting and three low-cost ways in which your PR presence can be boosted. (We’ve been doing all three for some time now.)

I also liked the sales tips it outlined and I wasn’t surprised to see they came from Steve Kraner of Sandler Sales Institute. We’ve worked in the past with Sandler’s Ottawa-based sales-training guru, Terry Ledden who advocates that rather than trying to compete with other salespeople on price or feature set, you differentiate yourself from the outset by employing a highly consultative approach that helps you develop a thorough understanding of the prospect’s pain and the willingness the prospect has to address that pain.

I don’t know how many times over the past few months I’ve heard seasoned technology entrepreneurs say that downturns represent an opportunity, not a setback. The tough operating conditions wash the marginal players out of your way, force you to focus on where you create real value, and both reduce the cost and increase the impact of raising your voice in your marketplace.

Update: My Google Reader just fed me a post from the excellent Out of the Fog Marketing blog drawing attention to a Knowledge@Wharton article in Forbes titled, “Don’t skimp on ad budgets.”

Technorati Tags: Marketing in a downturn, public relations, software marketing, softwareCEO.com, JMR Consulting, Sandler Sales Institute

A trade show has “a carbon foot print that would leave David Suzuki twitching and reaching for his heart medication.”

That memorable line came Thursday afternoon from George McTaggart, VP of marketing at local cyber-security firm Third Brigade. He and Mark Emond, business unit executive, North American field marketing, at business intelligence software maker Cognos, now part of IBM, squared off at OCRI’s Zone5ive marketing event yesterday in a friendly tit-for-tat over the merits of using eight marketing activities and tools for lead generation.

At one point, Mark shot back at one of George’s tirades with the comment, “Pinocchio, your nose is touching the back wall.”

It’s safe to say this was the most entertaining OCRI event I have ever attended, and not only because moderator Kelly Kubrick, owner of Online Authority, also threatened to upstage the debaters with her own presentation skills. The content from all was crisp, informative and candid, regardless of whether one agreed with the viewpoint on offer.

George and Mark each had 90 seconds to make the case for or against each of the eight tactics, with the audience voting on who emerged the winner. The eight were trade shows, white-paper syndication, direct marketing (by either e-mail or snail mail), webinars and seminars, search-engine marketing, a website, telemarketing and social media.

Both men argued their points well, labeling each of the eight as either “naughty” or “nice” in keeping with the spirit of the season. However, once the dust had settled, all had earned a “nice” endorsement from the audience, with the exception of white-paper syndication. “Who has time to read what too often comes across as a blatant sales pitch?” appeared to be the point that earned the one “naughty” nod from the audience.

In retrospect, however, the overwhelming “nice” result shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The tactics under scrutiny in this debate are only individual tools in a complete marketing toolbox. It’s a matter of choosing the right tool for the job, which begins with an understanding of what that job is. What works in one context may not work in another. It all depends on the company, its product, its market and how one particular marketing activity can reinforce or complement another. A social-media channel, for example, may be an excellent means of lead generation for a company targeting a specific age group or market vertical, and be a dismal failure for another.

What’s important is that the effort, in whatever form, is:

1. Current and relevant to an organization’s business-development objectives and has been identified, through market research, as an effective way to reach a desired category of customer.

2. Focused and targeted, again at a desired category of customer or specific market vertical.

3. Revisited, evaluated and revised. Which, of course, requires that some kind of metrics or analytics are in place from the get go to confirm whether the effort is generating the desired impacts and outcomes.

4. Expendable. If it’s not working, scrap it and try something else.

Technorati Tags: marketing, lead generation, Cognos, Third Brigade. OCRI, Zone5ive, David Suzuki

Seeing the forest for the trees
Francis is fond of describing our roles here at inmedia as “advocates in the court of public opinion.” That’s a much more appropriate and accurate label than “spin doctors.”

But the role of advocate is more than simply conveying our clients’ stories to the outlets that matter. We must also be willing to impress upon clients the agendas, or the simple realities, of the markets we are trying to reach on their behalf. What elements of their story must we have to effectively attract and retain the attention of the media we are targeting? What works? What doesn’t? How is the way the client wants to approach things more of a hindrance than a help to our efforts? To adequately serve our clients, we must deliver frank and honest counsel that sometimes includes feedback from the marketplace that may be painful to hear.

Over at the PR Conversations blog, Kristen E. Sukulac offers an interesting perspective on this by citing a classic exercise in inattentional blindness and change blindness.

PR helps raise venture capital
Bottom line here: good PR pays. Don’t take my word for it. This post at PR Squared may be a couple of weeks old, but the findings of the study it cites are timeless. A survey of 300 U.S. startups that received funding in the past three years found a clear correlation between employing a PR program and greater success in securing new financing.

Time well wasted?
And over at really practical marketing, Mark Nagurski gives a no nonsense primer and how to create, and derive value from, an effective online presence and the pitfalls that come of looking at it in terms of traditional advertising. In his view, less can be a whole lot more.

Technorati Tags: public relations, media relations, social media, venture capital, financing

It’s that time again for PR practitioners everywhere. With the end of the year looming, attention turns to the next year and charting a fresh plan of attack to take our clients’ stories to the media outlets that matter.

With our emphasis here at inmedia mainly on the specific trade and industry media that move a particular client’s market and care about our client’s story, an easy starting point is the editorial calendar. This typically charts specific topics, trends and issues that a publication plans to cover throughout the coming year. Editors need content and this is a ready means to get a bearing on what they will be looking for and when.

More often than not, however, details are scarce and a followup with an editor is required to validate, or disqualify, the opportunity before we can even see if we can get the client’s foot in the newsroom door.

But while the edcal is a good starting point, it’s hardly exhaustive. For one client, my colleague Danny is engaged in active discussions with an editor about a Q&A-style article. However, in reviewing this particular publication’s edcal, I didn’t see one opportunity for the entire year that appeared to be a fit for the client.

The morale of the story? An edcal only paints part of the picture. It is a great starting point, but no substitute for real person-to-person communication with an editor or journalist.

And even the story painted by the edcal can deceiving. In a call with a client earlier this week, I presented what appeared to be the low-hanging fruit: edcal opportunities coming up in January for which the client appeared to be a perfect fit. Prior to this meeting, I had already pinged the editorial contacts of these publications about discussing their January issues in more detail. No sooner had I told the client about what appeared to be particularly well-suited opportunity that she thought was fantastic, a message popped into my inbox that began with, “Hmm… must be some sort of error.”

Turns out someone had made a mistake and the publication’s focus for January was, in fact, a completely unrelated topic unsuitable for the client.

Easy come, easy go.

And it’s a rare edcal that doesn’t carry the caveat in fine print, “Subject to change without notice.” Edcals are often driven by the advertising department. Sure, the editorial content may be at arm’s length and independent of the sales department’s agenda, but advertising revenue is what keeps the lights on and the paycheques rolling in. While the editorial department must come up with relevant content to fill the page, the advertising department must find advertisers who see the value of plugging their related products or services in amongst the news articles. One is needed to pay for the other.

It just goes to show that effective media relations is a process in a dynamic state of flux. To get the client’s story told requires active and ongoing engagement with the media, all 12 months of the year.

Technorati Tags: editorial calendars, media relations, public relations, pitching

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I spent four childhood Christmases in Lesotho, the tiny mountain kingdom in southern Africa where my father worked for the country’s newly independent government. I have vivid memories of our very first Christmas there, which came scant weeks after we first landed in this strange new land. So I know first-hand that several things we take for granted at this time of year simply don’t happen in Lesotho, a country that struggled with poverty and chronic drought when we lived there and whose problems have been endlessly compounded since then by the ravages of HIV and AIDS.

The most obvious difference at Christmas time is that it is hot and sunny in Lesotho, not cold and snowy. Contrary to many people’s imagined vision of Africa, however, it does get extremely cold and snowy in Lesotho during its winter since the country lies at 5,000 feet above sea level and higher. Being in the southern hemisphere, Lesotho’s winter corresponds with our summer, and vice versa.

The next most obvious difference is that very few families in Lesotho will be tucking in to a feast of good food following a frenzied burst of present openings this, or any, Christmas morning. Many families will be led by the oldest child, or a surviving grandparent as AIDS has cut a swath through a generation of parents and wage-earners. And while most will take time to celebrate with joyous song and dance the religious aspects of Christmas in this deeply devout nation of church-goers, very few will be able to join in the secular aspects that, for most of us, now take precedence.

This childhood connection to Lesotho and an awareness that this tiny nation of incredibly resilient and warmhearted people was bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of HIV and AIDS led me a few years ago to look into a unique Canadian charity, Help Lesotho. We have supported Help Lesotho and its unstoppable dynamo of a founder and director, Peg Hebert, ever since. Through the year, we use our media relations skills and do what we can to help Peg spread her message of hope, and at Christmas we forego sending cards and gift baskets to our clients and colleagues in favour of giving the money to Help Lesotho. We will do so again this year.

But I also want to draw the attention of our Ottawa readers to a fundraising sale of Christmas gift items that Help Lesotho will be holding at its offices over the next couple of weeks. Here you can buy one-of-a-kind gifts that will not only delight their recipients but will also help Peg and her team continue their work. You can see a full catalogue of the items on offer here, and the sale itself will be held at Help Lesotho’s offices at the Keller Williams Building, 610 Bronson Avenue (just north of the Queensway) from 4 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, December 4; Friday, December 5 and Friday December 12; and from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday, December 6.

For those of you not in Ottawa, the same gifts can be bought and the same contribution made to Help Lesotho by clicking on the link in the previous paragraph and shopping online.

Technorati Tags: Help Lesotho, Christmas gifts

In case you missed them, here’s a roundup of our posts from November.

Francis:
Nov. 5: Happy birthday to us
Nov. 5: Breathtakingly audacious
Nov. 18: Customer service so bad it wins an award
Nov. 26: Velocity students showcase projects

Danny:
Nov. 7: Sometimes you just never know…
Nov. 13: Getting covered by Tier 1 business media
Nov. 17: Top tech PR cliches
Nov. 28: The balance of power

Leo:
Nov. 3: When to speak up and when to keep your mouth shut
Nov. 10: Getting attention in the 500-channel universe
Nov. 21: Boldy going where we’ve gone before … sort of
Nov. 25: When the iron’s hot, strike!

BBC technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, posts an interesting piece on the dot.life blog about the slating of the new BlackBerry Storm by English comedian, Stephen Fry. No, this wasn’t part of a stand-up routine, but rather a series of messages on Twitter, where Fry apparently has a following of thousands.

I note Fry’s comment at the end of the post, essentially stating that he thought one of the results of the Net and social networking has been to make everyone more equal in their influence. But has this truly been the case?

Certainly in Fry’s case it is partially true, but while his newfound influence in the field of gadgets and consumer technology can be attributed in part to the social networking revolution, it is also true that he is a man who had a considerable public profile before the Internet was even considered a medium of any significance.

The web and its associated technologies have certainly given a voice to millions, but in terms of real influence, the masses still invariably turn to those who have commanded attention beyond the four walls of the internet.  Of course there are some exceptions to the rule, but the notion that we all have equal influence is generally only as true online as it is in the world at large.

Technorati Tags: social media, Internet, BBC, Stephen Fry, BlackBerry Storm

An application that allows users to create their grocery-shopping lists online and then see which of their local stores has the lowest total or individual prices for the items on the list was the debut project to be presented at the first-ever exhibition Monday of projects developed by students at the unique VeloCity incubator-residence at the University of Waterloo. With an objective no less ambitious than to “organize the world’s food information,” Grocerus is a nifty app that, covering a limited array of foodstuffs and listing stores only in the immediate Waterloo area, still has a distance to travel before it meets that ambition.

Indeed, the same could be said for virtually all the projects exhibited, where ambition outstripped — sometimes vastly outstripped — their implementation to date. But considering that these are student project teams that have been working just scant weeks, the dozen and a half ideas on display were an impressive array of creativity, imagination and, for at least a handful of standouts, well-engineered product development.

Some, like Grocerus, were strictly local in their initial iteration. For example, Find It Off Campus, which matches available student housing with students looking for accommodations, and Class Album, which helps students coordinate their schedules, both focused exclusively on the University of Waterloo for starters, but their founders expressed every intention of broadening their horizons once proof of concept was established.

Some of the applications are trying to dig value out of social networking trends. Gruup aims to use Facebook and other sites to bring consumers together for group discounts on products while Emoshion wants to lever social networks to help people uncover rare or hard-to-find fashion items such as limited-edition sneakers. Giftah, whose site is not yet live, wants to capitalize on the 15 to 20 per cent of gift cards that never get used by making a convenient marketplace where they can be bought and sold.

One of the more polished presentations was InPulse, a so-called “smart watch” that will use Bluetooh connectivity to convey key information about incoming emails, SMS messages and calls from your mobile phone to your watch. “Send me an email directly to my watch,” founder Eric Migicovsky said in what had to be the most original line of the day.

The judges bestowed their blessing and $1,000 on Sparknav, which will allow users to download to their phones content about their surroundings, such as directions, tour information or even exhibit details at museums, art galleries or zoos.

Two other good reports on the day’s activities at GlobalNerdy and StartUpNorth provide excellent analyses of how the students’ shortcomings in terms of effective business models and presentation skills can be addressed by getting executives and technology professionals more involved in VeloCity, something to which inmedia is committed as a partner of this fascinating endeavour.

Technorati Tags: University of Waterloo, VeloCity, student entrepreneurship, Grocerus, Find It Off Campus, Class Album, Gruup, Emoshion, Giftah, InPulse, Sparknav

As a former journalist, nothing warranted a head shake more than PR folks who weren’t interested when opportunity came knocking.

Sure, there are always situations in which a journalist is a burr under the saddle, pricking away at tender spots that an organization would rather keep out of the public eye. But I’m talking about positive media opportunities or, in some cases, followups on pitches that have been made by the PR practitioners themselves. As a journalist, I personally experienced situations in which a PR person would make a pitch, then disappear or stonewall when we expressed an interest in pursuing the opportunity.

Michael Hammond, a reporter at the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and former colleague from the Ottawa Business Journal, pinged me today about three separate examples of apparent PR apathy towards the media this week that caused a great deal of teeth grinding and hair pulling in his shop. And again, these were positive story opportunities that were brushed off.

I invited Michael to appear on our blog with a guest piece about these incidents, but he was so incensed  he had already published his rant on the Record’s blog, which you can read at A necessary evil.

The moral of the story? Take all the good press you can get. Duh!

Technorati Tags: media relations, pitching, Kitchener-Waterloo Record