I sent out a news release last week for NetCentric Technologies, an Ottawa company launching a new product, their PDF Accessibility Wizard, an MS Office add-in that makes documents accessible to people with disabilities.

I spent spent considerable time developing the right media list, one that contained many niche and specialty publications, so I knew the targets I’d be going after were appropriate and likely to be interested in this new product. Now, NetCentric’s PAW is not page one news and certainly will not be covered by the mainstream media. However, it offers real value, especially to the government technology crowd who are mandated by law to make their documents accessible, and a product brief or technology spotlight, customer case study or product review in a specialty pub catering to this audience would serve the company very well.

Launch day rolled around, the release was sent out, and I began to follow up with the highest value of the media targets to whom we sent the release. Phone calls, emails, Tweets, whatever channel our targets were using, I attempted to make contact. As sometimes happens, it was really (and I mean REALLY) difficult to make contact. For whatever reason, it was really challenging to get hold of people. In a moment of despair, I jokingly Tweeted that perhaps people don’t answer their phones anymore…!

It was time to pull out the big guns. If I was going to get some worthwhile traction for my client, I was going to have to resort to the time-honored, secret weapon that we PR consultants absolutely know will result in coverage.

Much like magicians who condemn one of their own for revealing trade secrets, I’m sure my colleagues in the PR business are going to be terribly chagrined if I expose the secret to success in PR. It’s something we’ve held dear for all of our years in the business, the surefire way to get a response from media targets.

Are you ready? Here goes…

It’s persistence. Tenacity. KEEPING AT IT.

I know, it’s not terribly exciting, but that’s the secret to success. Hard work. Though as my favourite teacher always used to say, “work smart, not hard.” So, rather, it’s smart work … with a little elbow grease thrown in.

There is no magic bullet in PR, it’s just a lot of work, putting the right resources in front of the right targets, in whatever format makes the most sense. Where the worst of our industry all too often falls down is where the rubber hits the road. The release is sent, if it doesn’t click immediately, that’s the end of it. “We sent it out, the rest is up to the media.” Wrong.

If it didn’t click immediately, why not? Perhaps, as in this case, the publications being targeting are part-time propositions, or the person who typically writes about such things is on holiday, or is focused on a deadline, or myriad other good reasons. Use common sense, obviously; don’t fill the inboxes of editors and reporters with umpteen emails and voicemails from you. Rather, be persistent without being annoying.

I’ve had some really high-value conversations in the last eight hours, ones that not only secured my client coverage that will no doubt move their market, but also that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t kept at it. Because of the research we do at the outset of a campaign, I knew that I had the right information for the right targets; it was just a matter of time before it all came together.

Technorati Tags: tenacity, PR secrets, NetCentric Technologies

Anecdotally, it seems that September is always a busy time for a PR firm. Executives are coming back from the cottage, relaxed, and ready to work. This can mean that they’re ready to either start or restart a PR campaign with gusto, outline objectives for the year ahead, and commit some budget to meeting those objectives.

We’ve talked in the past about the folly of suspending marketing activities over the summer, advice that still holds true. Regardless, the reality is that we’ve got a number of launches slated for this Fall. Some clients are new, some are renewing their commitment to PR. Either way, there are a few items to keep in mind as you launch your PR campaign in the autumn:

Some longer lead publications will already be planning 2010. This is a great time to get on the radar of editors who are working to shape next year’s editorial calendars. If we can influence their decisions at this stage, we have the potential to make pitching our clients easier later on. In addition to helping shape editorial calendars, we’ll be collecting calendars as they’re released and checking where we will be able to pitch our clients into stories.

Just as they maintain a longer view into what editorial they will be crafting for next year, monthly lead times for some trade publications and commercial magazines are well in advance of publication dates, so the work that you do in September may not see print until the end of the year. Most clients have a range of media that cover the spectrum from instant coverage in blogs and online news portals, to daily and weekly papers and newsletters, to those with three-plus months of lead time, so if your PR firm has a dynamic media list, your coverage will span a reasonable period of time.

Although the field may be crowded in September, with your partners and competitors also likely ramping up their PR activities, this can work to your advantage. If a journalist is receiving pitches from similar companies, they may choose to do a round-up in a particular space or a comparison of competitive offerings. If partners are reaching out to the media, you can coordinate efforts to beef up your offering to key outlets. Of course, if you can bring customers to the table as well, you’ll be in great shape.

I had better get back to work on content development for these upcoming launches. Best practices are best practices, regardless of the time of year, but the tips above hold particular value as the leaves change and the wheels on school buses resume their revolutions round and round.

Technorati Tags: back to school, editorial calendars, lead times, summer vacation

The last year for me has been filled with work of a different sort entirely.

It’s hard to believe that I bid a fond farewell to the blogosphere just over one year ago, as I went on maternity leave. We welcomed wee Parker in early September of last year and since he was last written about in this forum, he’s changed from a baby to a little boy, toddling around, saying first words, changing our world in so many delightful ways.

I returned from leave to find some new clients in the stable, some familiar clients with new stories to tell and a heavy schedule of releases and launches slated for the Fall. It’s a busy time here at inmedia and I’m glad to be back on board to help lighten the load of my colleagues, connect with clients new and old and get back in touch with the media and analyst targets on their behalf.

As Francis has said, we’re renewing our commitment to the blog and look forward to reconnecting with our readers and with other writers in the marketing and PR realms online.

No matter how busy we become and how far flung we are from the people we need to communicate with to carry out our work, there is still no substitute for good old-fashioned face-to-face contact.

In recent weeks, I have been working on a series of business profiles that will run in an upcoming supplement in the Ottawa Business Journal. These are largely 350- to 500-word pieces for which I must interview the principal of each business and perhaps a couple of reference customers. (Nothing validates your business more than a good reference customer).

Considering the size of the articles I must produce, I could easily garner the information I need over the phone. It would be quicker and more efficient from a time-management perspective. But I’ve chosen to visit each of these businesses in person.  They are all local businesses, so why not take advantage of the opportunity to interview the principals in their natural environment?

So much of the work I do at inmedia is with clients outside Ottawa and with trade and industry media spread across the continent and beyond. It’s refreshing to actually put a face to a name and enjoy the interaction of meeting in the flesh. A face-to-face meeting is by its very nature much more intimate and dynamic than two bodiless voices communicating across wires and networks. There is definitely something lost when you can’t look into the eyes of the person who is speaking to you. Body language is a critical part of any human interaction.

Nonetheless, we frequently have little choice but to conference by phone, (as I am about to do with inmedia client Xsilva Systems of Montreal, thanks to a service called Calliflower). And while communicating in this manner may not be as ideal as in person, there are ways to make the most of it. Richard Laermer at the Bad Pitch Blog offers plenty of helpful advice on the subject, and it all begins with planning ahead and staying focused on the matters at hand during the call.

Technorati Tags: communications, conference calls, clients

Two inmedia clients, PIKA Technologies Inc. and Vocantas Inc., are finalists in two different categories of the 2009 OCRI Awards. Interestingly, both work with advanced voice technologies.

PIKA, a developer of media-processing hardware and software, made the cut in the Product of the Year category while Vocantas, which develops advanced interactive voice-response systems, is a finalist for Technology Commercialization Partnership.

We’ll be cheering on these favoured finalists and all the outstanding Ottawa companies that will be waiting for the envelope at the OCRI Awards Gala April 8.

Technorati Tags: OCRI Awards, PIKA, Vocantas

If “location, location, location” is the axiom of real estate agents, then “reference customers, reference customers, reference customers” is the public relations equivalent.

Customers who have deployed a vendor’s product or service provide validation and demonstrate uptake in the market. They can speak in dollars and cents terms about why they adopted a particular product and the benefits and return on investment they have derived from it. This, more often than not, will make an editor sit up and take notice.

I’ve seen promising editorial opportunities with big name media outlets drift away for the simple reason that a client could not provide a happy customer willing to stand up and provide that third-party endorsement.

But is having the platinum, diamond-encrusted reference customer eager to shout your praises from the rooftops the ticket to piles of positive media coverage?

It certainly helps. However, that customer story must still be developed and presented in a manner that fits the current editorial needs of the media being targeted.

One of our clients, for example, has an enthusiastic reference customer on board who can articulate the pain points that were addressed by our client’s product and how it contributed to the overall growth and success of the customer’s business during a dramatic market boom.

However, the industry in which both client and customer operate is, like so many others right now, experiencing a downturn. Several of the media that I contacted no longer have the appetite for the growth and success story that was the obvious angle to pursue during the market upswing. That’s yesterday’s news. The angle that is timely and relevant now is how the customer is going to weather the downturn and how our client’s product will provide the operational efficiencies and cost savings that will improve margins and boost the bottom line.

As one editor put it, “It’s easy to succeed during a boom. The real test of a company’s viability is how it survives a downturn.” For many media outlets, that’s the story that is relevant now. Can we deliver that angle? Yes. But only by directly contacting the media most important to our client with a solid story angle and having an informal chat with each editor were we able to determine what elements of the reference customer’s story are the most important to garner the ink we want for our client.

Technorati Tags: pitching, reference customers, media relations, public relations

At inmedia, we frequently position ourselves against those whose perspective is that PR is “all about relationships.” And, while I wholeheartedly stand by our mantra that it is the ability to convey a story and not the relationship that dictates PR success, it cannot be denied that relationships are still important. They are even more relevant from the perspective of a PR firm’s clients than for the PR firm itself. PR firms come and go but, assuming a company sticks around, its relationship with its target media will last forever.

This week, one of my clients traveled to New York to meet face to face with a group of editors from a key trade publication that covers his company’s market. Was this meeting at the request of the editors? No, we brokered it from our end. Was it for an article they were working on? No. So why was this meeting happening? Simple. It was for the relationship.

While our client had some exposure to the publication, the relationship was very much the domain of inmedia, the PR firm. This is, of course, perfectly understandable - the very reason you have a PR firm is to maintain your relationship with the media, and this remains a core part of our business - but huge value can be gained on all sides from extending the media relationship to include the client at a deeper level.

So what happened in this meeting in New York? Well, they shot the breeze. Discussed the state of the industry, talked a bit about the company and what was going on with it, but no hard pitches for stories, no Q&A, no pressure to come up with the goods.

So where was the value in this meeting, you might ask. Why not ask my client, who left the meeting full of enthusiasm for the people he had just met, and excited about the future prospects for working with them. Or why not ask the editors, who expressed delight at the meeting and a desire to do so again at some point in the near future. Value was seen on all sides from a meeting that accomplished little in hard results.

Sure, inmedia could have handled this meeting ourselves, but our preoccupation with achieving results for clients would no doubt have created a different atmosphere. Sometimes stepping back from the day-to-day hard selling of stories and constant attempts to generate coverage can result in a far more rewarding result - a blooming relationship.

Technorati Tags: public relations, media relations, pitching, networking

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

It’s not uncommon to sit down with a startup technology company for an initial discussion about a potential PR engagement and have a conversation that goes something like this:

Tech company exec: “I think we need to start doing some PR and I’d like you to present us with some ideas.”

PR agency: “Er, okay, but can you first give us some idea of why it is that you think PR will help your business at this time?”

Exec: “Well, I was hoping that you could tell us that …”

Of course, at this point the conversation typically becomes an exercise that should really have been started before the agency even entered the equation. That is, to explore what are the primary reasons for engaging a PR program, and what it is ultimately supposed to achieve.

Yes, the PR firm brings the expertise needed to plan and execute an effective program, but they are not the experts in your business … you are. Can you really expect a PR agency to sit down at the first meeting and tell you how they can help you achieve your goals or overcome certain challenges, when they have little idea what those goals and challenges are? Of course not. PR is not a cookie-cutter proposition, and its practitioners work best when they can apply their knowledge to a specific scenario, which invariably changes dramatically from company to company.

This doesn’t have to be an extensive exercise, and the information needed to get things rolling is probably common knowledge within your organization. Simply ensure that you have a fairly clear idea of what it is that you expect from doing PR, and then you can expect to have a valuable conversation about what the experts can do to help you.

Technorati Tags: public relations, strategy, business plan, technology company

“I’ve just come to expect that my (public relations) agency can’t write,” was the astonishing admission I heard a few weeks back from a vice president at one of Ottawa’s larger technology companies who called us to see if we’d be interested in participating in an agency review process.

(I’ve promised not to name him (or her) for reasons that will be obvious as you read the rest of this post.)

I could hardly believe my ears. But yes, he said, it had long been his experience that the PR practitioners he had been dealing with from a range of different agencies and across a number of companies just weren’t very good writers, and so it fell to him to write most of the materials used in his campaigns. One of the key reasons he was approaching inmedia, he told me, was our very strong reputation in the marketplace as superb writers, a reputation he said was confirmed when he read our blog and web site.

I chalked this one up to what I assumed was just an unfortunate experience on the part of one technology marketing executive until I relayed the story to a colleague last week, a CEO at another technology company here in Ottawa and an insightful marketer in his own right. I was again utterly gobsmacked when he said he didn’t view writing as a core requirement in the PR function, that the ability to pitch the story was far more important.

“And what do you do,” I asked him, “When the pitch is initially well received and the next words out of the reporter or editor’s mouth are, ‘Sounds good, send me something about it.’?”

Here’s the thing. To work at inmedia and, I believe, to be an effective media relations practitioner anywhere, you must be able to write at an expert level and you must be able to effectively pitch what you’ve written. There is no hierarchy between these two fundamental skills. Lack one, and you’re out of the game.

And here’s why.

To believe, as these two otherwise successful technology marketers clearly do, that writing is either not terribly important or that your PR function, whether internal or an agency, can be permitted to be lousy writers, is to completely beggar the entire communications process.

In the first instance, despite all the wonderful new communications tools at our disposal, most journalists still want to see something in cold, hard black and white, even if it is delivered electronically. And even if they don’t ask for it, it’s just gotta be in your best interests to give them well-written material so they have the complete story, with all the relevant facts and accurate spellings of company, product and people’s names to which they can refer. This is just so basic I’m staggered it needs stating.

Second, how in the heck does a PR practitioner demonstrate her or his understanding of the story without writing about it? Yes, a properly written document proves the communicator can — gasp! — communicate. That is, the words run together in some sort of comprehensible order, everything is spelled correctly and the commas and periods are in the right places. But it still won’t be any good unless the person writing it actually has a thorough grasp of the subject matter.

Effective writing is not a case of cutting and pasting bits and pieces from other documents to make a different document and it needs to be more than a merely technically accurate use of words, grammar and punctuation. Effective writing is the process of distilling what has been learned — from other documents, certainly, but also, and critically, from interviews with a range of subject-matter experts — into a new piece of work. It not only communicates the story to all who read it, it also demonstrates understanding.

Bottom line: If your agency can’t write about it well, they almost certainly can’t pitch it well. And even worse, they probably don’t even understand it well.

So, did we get the business? Well, that’s another story that I cover here: The Ottawa inferiority complex theorem strikes again.

Technorati Tags: writing, pitching, media relations, business development