Although it had its genesis in a consulting practice that was already several years old, and its first employee had been in place for several months, inmedia Public Relations Inc. was legally incorporated on November 5, 1998, and so today is our tenth birthday.

I would be less than forthright if I said that 10 years after launching a technology focused PR firm that I had accomplished what I thought would be in place a decade out. The tech meltdown damn near put us under and the continued severe contraction of Ottawa’s tech sector means we have slim pickings here at home. And my initial business proposition, that we could create an agency of excellence and extract a premium from the marketplace for that excellence, has proven to be a tough pitch in a market that too often has yet to be weaned off mediocrity.

But we survived the meltdown, the only exclusively B2B technology PR practice in the city to do so. Today, we get very well paid for our excellence from clients who have come to understand the difference. And our deliberate business development strategy over the past three or four years has been to embrace Ottawa clients certainly, but also to aggressively pursue business anywhere and everywhere we see a good opportunity.

My excellent colleague Danny Sullivan’s self-repatriation to his native Scotland a few years back opened a whole new front for us, and our far-reaching Google Adwords campaigns and this blog have brought us amazing opportunities from many other corners. With Ottawa accounting for about 35% of our revenues, we have embraced clients and projects in Calgary, Toronto, Montréal, Fredericton, Moncton and St. John’s; in Boston, Jersey City, San Jose and Chicago; and in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Farnborough and London.

If the business outcome has not been everything I hoped for 10 years ago, the experience has been nonetheless incredible. Most noteworthy has been the extraordinary people who have come to work with me here at inmedia. In an industry where average employee tenure has been pegged at less than a year, inmedianauts tend to hang around for much longer, with the average tenure here topping three years and some having spent five, six and even seven years on board. The consultants who work here are the real product that we sell, and I have had the unmitigated pleasure of consistently being able to bring to market the very best product in the PR industry, period.

Similarly, we have worked on some amazing projects with some of the brightest minds in technology, business and marketing. Our web site lists nearly 90 clients with whom we have worked over the past 10 years, and each and every one of them has represented a unique story, a unique set of market dynamics and a unique set of media and analyst targets to whom that story needed to be told. It is this ever-changing nature of the business that makes PR consulting so fascinating to me.

It has been rewarding, challenging and frustrating, as most any worthwhile venture inevitably is. It has also been a period of considerable personal and professional growth, and I look forward to learning even more as this little PR company continues.

Technorati Tags: inmedia Public Relations, public relations, technology, entrepreneurship, birthday

While we here at inmedia have long maintained there is little difference between bloggers and conventional journalists when it comes to pitching, we do appreciate that many bloggers do not care at all to be pitched by us PR types. That’s not usually an issue for us; as an agency specialising in business-to-business marketing public relations for technology companies, we’re interested only in those bloggers who have real influence in our clients’ markets. These folks are often journalists who have simply moved to this new channel, or de facto technology news sites, like engadget or gizmodo, that welcome properly crafted pitches.

Still, many bloggers are looking for a nice, polite way to tell us PR folk to stay away and Todd Defren is again advocating that bloggers be explicit about their wishes. It’s an approach, as Defren says, worth looking at.

Technorati Tags: bloggers, blogger relations, pitching bloggers, Todd Defren

I originally wrote this post for DangleTech, Canada’s largest community-sponsored website dedicated to the issues surrounding Canada’s technology sector, where I contribute a weekly blog called “In the media: It’s where you need to be.” But my editor here at inmedialog, who’s been itching all week to see a post on this subject, decided we should also post it here.

One of the most frequent and, to tell the truth, most boring and least helpful, themes in the blogosphere is the all-too-common declaration by one blogger or another that PR is dead. With all the authority of his well-read blog, Robert Scoble started the ball rolling again this week with a post Monday that celebrated the fact that he actually heard about a new company – more of a raw beta concept, really – from some source other than a PR or corporate flack.

Leaving aside for the moment the question why this should be so noteworthy – Hey, Robert: It’s a rare day I don’t learn something new or hear about a new company, product or service with no involvement whatsoever from a PR or corporate flack. I call it waking up, opening my eyes and walking down the street! – he went on to extrapolate from this that PR is dead.

I’m not going to weigh in with comments on all the arguments raised both pro and con the silly idea. If you really have nothing better to do, if Canada’s not doing well enough at the Olympics to draw you in to all the TV coverage and you have time to kill, then you can see a good round-up here.

Notwithstanding the tediousness of this apparent fixation on the part of a lot of the blogosphere to bury PR and speak its eulogy, two useful points emerge.

The first is that when it comes to understanding public relations, the full scope of activities that fall under its rubric and the even fuller scope of marketing activities of which PR is merely a subset, Robert Scoble is strictly a blind man touching an elephant. Like many of his blog brethren, all Scoble ever sees (touches) is the story pitch. And since they are on the receiving end of a staggering number of poorly written and badly targeted pitches, it’s no wonder these guys see no value in what most PR people are doing with them.

In fact, the pitch is the very end of a lengthy and intensive process that, if done properly, creates tremendous value, both for the idea being pitched and for the person to whom it is being pitched. It’s merely one arrow in a PR quiver that, in turn, is merely one weapon in a marketing armoury.

The second useful point is that in many ways, Scoble and his colleagues are right. PR is dead. At least, PR – as it has been practiced by too many for far too long – is dead. That old way saw (mal)practitioners source huge lists of so-called contacts from commercial media directories, mail-merge them with their news release or story pitch, and then blast it out to hundreds, if not thousands. It didn’t work in the old days any better than it does now. All that has changed is that the targets of those useless pitches are naming and shaming those who do it. (I did weigh in on the death of the media directory.)

Far from the blogosphere sounding the death knell for PR, it has focused attention on the most egregious practices of the industry. While I still find most of the arguments tendentious and silly, at least they’re serving this one useful public service.

Technorati Tags: Death of PR, public relations, marketing communications, Scoble

In business circles, defining what is social media is immediately followed by the question of how can it can be turned into an effective marketing and communications tool. But who owns this function in an organization? Is that even a valid question? Over at A Shel of My Former Life, Shel Holtz gives a comprehensive rundown of who can, and can’t “own” social media and why.

Chris Brogan, meanwhile, provides a handy list of 50 online applications and sites to consider when developing a social media presence.

Lastly, Robert Geller at Flack’s Revenge discusses user-generated content options for organizations trying to build presence at a time when the number of traditional media channels is on the decline. Youtube anyone?

Technorati Tags: user-generated content, public relations, social media

Today is my last day of work prior to going on maternity leave. In Canada, we’re incredibly blessed that we have the option of taking one year off to be with our new arrivals, so I’m taking advantage and plan to be off until mid-August 2009 doing work of a different sort.

It’s been an interesting introduction to blogging these past months and I think that I’ll miss having a venue to regularly voice my opinions on topics pertaining to PR and technology. (I should watch how loudly I say that in front of my editor, for fear that he posits that I can easily blog with junior on my lap…)

‘Til we meet again, blogosphere…

Technorati Tags: maternity leave, blogging

Is it surrealist to blog about blogging? It’s not my intention, but should this post turn into an Escher-esque experience, I’ll ask you to please bear with me.

There has been considerable media coverage in recent days about corporate blogging and blogging as it pertains to B2B marketing. Forrester, a well respected technology analyst firm, recently released a study analyzing the role of blogs in b2b marketing and survey results that indicate, “The number of business-to-business (B2B) firms that started blogging in 2007 plummeted compared with 2006 as corporate bloggers ran into roadblocks stemming from a misalignment between invested effort and expected returns. Rather than cross blogging off of the marketing communication list, B2B marketers would do better to embrace one of the four strategies prominently used by bloggers to attract readers, build conversations, and engage community members in sharing their experiences with their online peers.

Four Blog Strategies Produce Community Marketing Value

Strategy One: Be A Conversation Starter, Not A Spoiler

Strategy Two: Make Blog Content Entertaining, Easy To Digest And To Use

Strategy Three: Connect The Dots Between Events And Community Involvement

Strategy Four: Invite Thought Leaders, But Coach Them On Community Etiquette”

According to The Leading Edge, a PR technology trends blog, “infrequent and boring content” is what ails the high tech companies that responded to the survey. This blog has some interesting statistics from the study and I would encourage you to visit the link above to find out more.

The bottom line is that blogging, like any other marketing activity, should adhere to best practices. Those companies that are not deriving value from this particular communication channel are probably not meeting all of the challenges inherent with utilizing a new method of communication to reach customers, influencers and prospects. Since blogging was the “hot, new thing,” you would be hard pressed to find a company that hasn’t at least considered hopping on the bandwagon and starting its own blog. Those that are likely to be successful, though, are the ones that carefully considered the reasoning behind the blog, the objectives that the companies were hoping to accomplish by starting their blogs, and how this channel could support their full range of marketing activities.

Coming up with fresh, intelligent, conversation-starting blog posts with regularity can be challenging, to be sure, but whether the effort and potential return on investment are worthwhile is a question that each company must answer for itself before diving headlong into blogging.

Technorati Tags: blogging, public relations

One of this morning’s newsletters directed me to a fellow blogger’s post on all of the silly reasons you don’t need PR. The post was written with the blogger’s tongue firmly in cheek and had me chuckling, but I’m sorry to report that, silly as they may seem in this context, we hear these points all too frequently as arguments against the business case for engaging with a PR company like ours.

ITWorld Canada has put together what it considers the country’s 10 top bloggers on the subject of technology. If you’re looking to add to your blogroll, perhaps some of these will be of interest to you.

A shout-out is in order to our favourite Ottawa blogger Alec Saunders, who made the list at No. 7. (We blame Alec for getting us into this.)

Technorati Tags: Technology blogs, ITWorldCanada, Alec Saunders

Wired has announced that it will be releasing a style manual exclusively for web journalism, addressing the etiquette and ownership issues that aren’t covered by traditional style guides like the Chicago Manual of Style. The line between journalism and blogging, something we have long considered a fiction, becomes even more blurred.

Today on MediaBistro, I was directed to a piece on Portfolio’s web site that talks about WashingtonPost.com’s tinkering with its links on several microsites to enable instant pop-ups of additional data on mouse rollover that doesn’t necessitate leaving the site. This is nothing new to those of us familiar with WordPress blogs as the Snap feature currently used on this site and others does the same thing. Some grumblings in the media about the glut of interactive content on online news sites fly in the face of the theory I introduced yesterday in my post about online news and the process being the product. Is this indicative of a widespread dislike for too much dynamic content or a holdover of viewing the new media with old media sensibilities, the very point of the Buzz Machine article that spawned yesterday’s post?