Category: Technology PR

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tech pr Technology PR

Tech firms global marketing spend: events (22pc – $3.3bn); digital (12pc – $1.8bn); PR (5pc – $750m): IDC

IDC’s latest report on tech marketing spend came out a few weeks ago and offers some good insight into where the money is (and will be) going.

According to a story by Kate Maddox in US B-to-B magazine, IDC breaks down tech vendor marketing budget spending as follows: events will make up the largest share of the marketing budget (22%), followed by advertising (17%), direct marketing (16%), marketing support and sales tools (14%), digital marketing (12%), PR (5%), collateral (5%), market intelligence (4%), analyst relations (2%) and other (3%).

Within digital marketing, 33% of the budget will be spent on display ads, 16% on search ads, 15% on Web site, 15% on e-mail, 7% on search engine optimization, 6% on events and 8% on other activities.

Unsurprisingly, traditional advertising has fallen from its number one perch. What is perhaps unexpected is the fact that events appear to have taken the mantle of lead marketing activity, certainly in terms of budget. On the surface, this result seems to fly in the face of anecdotal evidence which suggests that tech marketeers have been finding it more difficult to justify ROI on events. Then again, the definition almost certainly includes vendor’s own events for customers and prospects. Or it may mean they are simply being more choosy about which events they go to – and upping their investment in those. Even so, for all the conventional wisdom about the rise of digital, the fact that tech firms seem to be placing over one fifth of their marketing budget on good old fashioned booths, bums on seats and “pumping the flesh” is worth noting. (IDC says total tech marketing spend is around $15bn globally – which suggests around $3.3bn will be spent on events and trade shows).

Even so, digital is clearly making significant gains, now taking 12pc of budget (or $1.8bn). Even so, the breakdown of digital spend is again insightful. Again, generally accepted wisdom suggests that SEO is one of key elements of any digital marketing approach, but tech firms seem to be continuing to place their faith in display ads, PPC and e-mail, with only 7pc of digital marketing spend going on SEO. Bizarrely, it seems the tech sector is lagging FMCG businesses in terms of SEO investment (certainly judging by the client lists of the top search marketing firms in the UK).

And what about PR? For some reason, it can’t seem to break out of its historical 5pc share of marketing budget. According to IDC, tech firms will spend just as much on producing old fashioned collateral as PR. And as Duncan Brown at the Infuse blog points out in his review of the IDC report: “in real terms, marketing spend is declining.”

Which means spend on traditional tech PR is in decline.

However, Richard Vancil, vice president of IDC’s Executive Advisory Group, does offer some clues as to what tech PR firms should do when he noted some key trends emerging within the tech marketing community: “Tech marketers are getting more input from all sides that greater transformation is required. Much of the corporate marketing agenda across the tech vendor community is really disconnected with the information or content wants and needs of the key constituents of marketing. The sales teams have never really climbed ‘on board’ to marketing’s agenda. And in IDC’s research with technical and business buyers, we see that most elements of the classic tech marketing agenda continue to fall short of how those buyers want to consume information today.” (my emphasis).

That last line seems to reflect David Meerman Scott’s mantra of: “most marketing communications activity is built on what the organisation wants to say rather than what the buyer wants to hear.” And also bears out what we’ve been saying here for some time – that much tech PR activity fails to reflect the real and significant changes in tech buyer audience media consumption and purchase behaviour. As we’ve said here on many occasions, PR needs to change if it is to claim a greater share of marketing budget and mindshare.

Having said that, IDC has some pointers for vendor side marketers too.

According to Michael Gerard, VP-Research for IDC’s CMO Advisory Practice (also in B-to-B magazine): “As we look at marketing organizations, they are far too top-heavy. There is too much spending at the corporate level and not enough in the field closest to the prospects and customers.”

IDC found that at tech companies with less than $500 million in annual revenue, 59% of the total marketing budget is spent on corporate marketing; 32% is spent on regional marketing; and 9% is spent on business unit marketing. At tech companies with more than $3 billion in annual revenue, 43% of the marketing budget is spent on corporate marketing; 36% is spent on regional marketing; and 21% is spent on business unit marketing.

Given that most tech firms have their origins in the US, IDC’s call for spending more regionally should be good news for those of us over here in the UK and Europe. At the very least, even if PR firms can’t get higher margin strategic work (because it’s already been done State side), at least getting paid for more on the ground executional activity won’t be sniffed at in the current climate. Of course, whether anyone pays a blind bit of notice to IDC in this respect is a moot point.

During the last recession in the early 90s, tech PR stood up very well – not least because the technology sector itself was a lone example of continued expansion amongst a general sea of moribund growth.

This time it is going to be different. However, there remains plenty of opportunity for those who are prepared to grasp the nettle of what really is happening out there in the world of vendor marketing departments.

Footnote

Respondents participating in IDC’s survey were from hardware companies (41%), software companies (40%) and services companies (19%).

The breakdown by company size was less than $500 million in annual revenue (30%), between $500 million and $999 million (12%), between $1.0 billion and $2.9 billion (26%), between $3.0 billion and $9.9 billion (17%) and more than $10 billion (15%).

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Humour tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

The Flackenhack Awards are back for 2008! Adopt-a-hack?

After the roaring success of last year’s inaugural Flackenhack Awards, the world’s leading alternative event for the UK’s technology PR and media community is back = this time on Weds, October 29th, 2008 at The Village Underground, 54 Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, London EC2A 3PQ.

Promising to be “bigger and messier than last year”, the organisers say they’ve come up with a genius plan to get as many technology journalists to attend without them having to put their hands in their wallets ie members of the tech PR industry can buy a hack’s ticket for them on eBay.

Make your way to the Flackenhack 2008 Awards blog for more detail about the event. You can even help decide which hacks should have their tickets auctioned.

And adding to the social media frenzy around the event, there is also a Facebook group.

Tickets are now on sale here.

Go on. You know you want to. Last year’s event was a lot of fun and a refreshing change – here’s to making the 2008 event event better. (There you go TWL, will that do?)

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General PR People Technology PR

How to test your media pitch with a tame journalist

I note that heavyweight UK business and consumer journalists Guy Clapperton, Sally Morris and Lori Miles have lauched a new PR training service called What The Press Wants.

As the name of the venture suggests, they ought to know better than most exactly what journalists are looking for. Among the various courses provided, I also noted that they are offering a “test your pitch” service to PRs.

In their own words: “About to launch an expensive, creative and high profile PR campaign? Why not give it a trial run in the privacy of your own building before rolling it out to an unforgiving audience? With full non-disclosure assurance, we can send a journalist with relevant senior experience into your office for a test run – to spot any glitches or highlight any positives you may have under-developed.”

I know this kind of thing has been tried before and I wish them all the best with it. However, I’ve always wondered who the real target customer for such a service would be – the client who has commissioned the PR campaign – or the PR company who has created the campaign? Perhaps it would be better to get the journalist involved at the campaign creation stage rather than spend time, money and effort building something only to find out it has as much chance of working as a chocolate fireguard.

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General PR tech pr Technology PR

“80pc of SEO consultants are scammers”: Peter Kent, author, SEO for Dummies

SEO for Dummies author Peter Kent has been making some pretty scathing comments about the SEO industry in a new interview:

“Over the last few years as I speak to more clients and hear their stories, it has led me to believe that 80% of the business is scam.” Kent qualifies this remarkable statement by adding: “By that I mean that 80% of people in the business doing SEO consultancy are either running an outright scam, or they thought it was good to get into SEO because it’s a hot area – but they don’t really know what they’re doing.”

Web designers also get it in the neck:

“I have never met a web design company or web design consultant who understands SEO,” he says bluntly. “Don’t trust web designers as far as search engine optimization goes – even if they tell you they understand it, they don’t. I used to say that a few understand it but I’m still waiting for them.”

I suspect he may be exaggerating for effect but you can tell that a number of UK PR consultancies have been seduced into building entirely Flash based sites – which effectively renders most of the content invisible to Google (I know that Google is supposed to be able to index Flash now, but I’ve yet to see the evidence).

However, Just to ensure the article isn’t 100pc tirade, Kent ends with a few tips:

1. Understand your keywords. Do keyword analysis, don’t assume. I always tell people to spend a few bucks and get Wordtracker, spend a few hours, dig around, and do it properly.

2. It’s interesting to hear that people are obsessed with abbreviations. They think it’s important but when they do proper keyword research they often find that the same abbreviation means something different to a different group of people.

Certainly agree on point 1 – never make assumptions about keywords (or anything for that matter. Point 2 has particular relevance to the tech sector which has always been riddled with acronyms and abbreviations.

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General PR tech pr Technology PR

Most PR people believe print coverage is more valuable than online: an exercise in cognitive dissonance?

Gordon Macmillan at Brand Republic reports on a new survey which claims that “most PR professionals still favour offline media coverage over digital despite recent consumer research identifying online as the more influential medium.”

He continues: “More than half, or 53%, see it as more valuable, but the real story is that it’s their clients who are still deeply attached to print. Apparently nearly two-thirds or 64% of PRs believe their stakeholders prefer print coverage more than online, television or radio and more than half or 53% believe their stakeholders are more influenced by print coverage than television, online or radio.”

He rightly picks up on the word “believe” and asks: “I mean, don’t they ask? Apparently not according to the Parker, Wayne & Kent survey. It seems to be all about the permanence of print. The fact you can hold it in your hand and turn the page (maybe they never heard to the printer?).” If you examine PWK’s own press release on it, the whole thing is predicated on the “belief” of PRs.

I continue to be fascinated by what appears to a widespread cognitive dissonance in the PR industry (an uncomfortable feeling or stress caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. Or to keep with the Orwellian sub theme of this blog, doublethink).

In this case, the two contradictory attitudes are: the belief that print media continues to be the dominant media influence and the fact that most of the real data on the subject seems to suggest the opposite.

Why is this happening? Here’s my theory.

In spite of claims to the contrary, the main reason clients still hire PR firms is for “media relations” (although as PR Week has previously reported, clients are spending most of their budget on account management, admin and reporting). And media relations still tends to be geared around getting print based coverage – because that is the skill set (inventory) that most PR firms still have to sell.

So you can see the temptation to try and justify what you have to sell by implying there is still a need for it. And I don’t deny that there is still a large education job to be done client side regarding what are the most effective techniques today. Some cynics might argue that if clients want print coverage lets sell what they ask for – even though we know it isn’t best solution. However, you get the sense from the PWK survey that no one is really asking the questions clients really want answering – namely, how can you help me understand how my target audiences behave, what really does influence them and what is the most effective means of delivering a measurable impact on those audiences?

Over the last 18 months I’ve tried not to miss the opportunity to quiz people about their media consumption habits. On a number of occasions, I’ve asked people to try a little test – basically, to write down what they think their average media consumption is over a week – and then to actually write down what they really do. Most of the time, people are very surprised about the divergence between their belief and reality. The most common is to over-estimate the time they spend reading newspapers and magazines and to underestimate the amount of time they spend online – as well as how online influences their decision making process.

However, before I get accused of being some kind of online obsessive, let’s be clear – I’m not saying print media is completely irrelevant. That’s patent nonsense – and my own recent experience bears out the role it can play in a purchase decision. However, to automatically assume that print is the most influential medium is more an act of faith than rational judgment. And don’t forget the shelf life of print coverage is a few hours.

The starting point has to be the data and evidence that justify an approach. When you actually start to gather real information about how people really do consume media – both on and offline – you build a picture of a very different world to the one that PRs in PWK’s survey seem to inhabit (the emphasis placed on buyer personas by search marketing agencies is an example of how PR could and should be helping their clients).

It’s a bit like when a relationship is going down the tube. Although logically he may know its over, he still clings to the belief that “she still loves him really.” Surely better to face reality and move on – the heartbreak will be more painful the longer you refuse to face facts.

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General PR Technology PR Web/Tech Weblogs

UK search marketing agencies vs UK PR firms (updated)

NMA recently published its “league table” of UK search marketing agencies – the equivalent of PR Week’s Agency top 150. Admittedly it only contains 36 firms, but it is interesting to compare with PR Week’s list – both for general PR and tech PR.

For example, the number one search marketing agency is The Search Works recording an £88m turnover for 2007. Quite impressive when you consider that the company was only founded in 1999 and employs a mere 64 staff. Number one in PR Week’s league table is Bell Pottinger with fees of £52.5m and 467 people (and before anyone asks, of course, we aren’t comparing like with like ie turnover with fees – but I’ll come to that in a minute).

Number five search agency Steak Media was only founded 3 years ago and has already raced to over £20m annual turnover. Number 5 PR firm Citigate Dewe Rogerson turned over £25m last year – though it has been around considerably longer.

According to my calculations, the combined turnover of the UK’s top 36 search firms is around £330m, employing around 1300 people in total. Contrast that with the top 40 UK tech PR firms who brought in around £71m in fees last year and collectively employ around 850 people.

Of course, the billing model for search agencies and PR firms is different. Search firms business tends to fall into three broad camps – paid search, natural search and other stuff (which can be a mix of anything from e-mail marketing, affiliate networks, etc). Based on the NMA figures, the average search firm seems to get around 50pc of its sales from paid search, 25pc from natural search and 25pc for other activity.

Paid search is renumerated either via commission or management fee basis. As far as I can glean, commission varies between 5 and 15pc (though Google Best Practice Funding is due to end at the beginning of next year). This is a traditional ad agency model and you can thus begin to see a correlation between those agencies with high turnover and the majority of their revenue coming from paid search. For example, 90pc of The Search Works business comes from paid search – likewise Steak Media (around 80pc).

Natural search is much more akin to the PR fee model – so those agencies that tend to do more natural search may well have lower turnovers, but have higher margins than paid search. For example Netrank has a turnover of £1.3m and 35 staff – but 100pc of its business is in natural search.

Various sources have pointed out that some search firms that rely upon paid search (and specifically the Google BPF rebate) may be in trouble come next year. However, those that have taken a management fee approach or are moving more work into natural search seem well placed. Interestingly, the move to a fee based, natural search offering seems to parallel issues for PR agencies. It requires more human beings ie brains to do it properly – and thus you hear from various quarters that there is a growing demand for people with the right kind of skills to be able to deliver on natural search. As far as I know, unlike PR, there are no MAs in SEO and online marketing yet – so the search firms are having to train people themselves.

Nevertheless, it is easy to see why the worlds of search and PR are going to get closer together in the future – to borrow from Deep Throat in All The President’s Men: “Follow The Money”.

As far as I can see at the moment, the profitability of search firms is generally better than PR agencies. Whether that will last remains to be seen.

NOTE: This is an updated version of this post – my thanks to Nick Clarke at Profero for pointing out that I’d got the figures wrong for the percentage volume of their natural search business. I have thus replaced it with Netrank as a more accurate example.  My sincere apologies to Nick and Profero – it’s called looking in the wrong column on the spreadsheet with tired eyes.

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tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech Weblogs

How freelance journalists and writers can use Google’s Keyword Tool to get work

I’ve already blogged about Google’s Keyword Tool now displaying absolute search volumes. I thought it would be worth looking at a practical example. I keep hearing from various freelance journalist and writer friends that it is tough finding commissions these days – not just journalistic work but also PR and general copywriting. It occurred to me that perhaps they could put their writing talents to good effect by testing the water with some PPC advertising (this presumes of course that they have a blog or website – and that it is properly set up to capture and convert traffic).

Here’s a quick look at some fairly obvious keyword terms – the first figure shows the search volume in the UK for June 2008 and the second figure the expected cost per click for a 1 – 3 ad position.

Copywriting 33,100 £1.29
Copywriter 14,800 £1.02
Media training 8,100 £2.01
SEO copywriting 1300 £2.76
Web copywriting 1,000 £1.85

Clearly not all of these searches will be from people seeking paid-for copywriting work – but surely some of them will be. Even gaining a tiny percentage of response from some of the more popular terms would hopefully convert into work that would justify the ad spend (I’d certainly suggest setting a nominal initial budget and test from there).

The media training result was also interesting. I know a number of journalists offer media training services – over 8000 searches in the UK last month suggests there is clearly a lot of interest in it – and surely a percentage of that must come from people seeking to buy media training?

On a different tack, I looked at a few phrases containing “How to start a (insert company type)”

The results below are the searches for last month along with the trend:

How to start a publishing company (73) Falling
How to start a record company (46) Falling
How to start a clothing company (36) Rising

I wonder who those 73 people are out there dreaming of starting their own publishing company? I wonder how many journalists are in that number? However, it would seem the current trend is down – as is starting a record company (no surprise there I guess). Though rag trade interest seems to be rising – albeit from a very small base.

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Books People Technology PR Web/Tech

Dan Roam’s “Back of a Napkin” approach to visual thinking (and how I bought the book).

Dan Roam’s “The Back of the Napkin” book about visual thinking is a novel approach to problem solving (and deserves a blog post all of its own)

Informative blog too.

However, I thought it worth examining how I went from not knowing a thing about Dan Roam at midday on Saturday, to understanding a lot more about him and buying his book nearly 11 hours later – as well as finding out a few other interesting things along the way.

Here’s the text based version of events (the diagram above is my own pen and paper effort based on Roam’s tips).

1. My wife buys a copy of The Guardian on Saturday. Leaves me the Sport, Money and Work sections.

2. I look at the front page of the Work Section. Feature entitled “Sketch It Out”. I read about Dan Roam’s book The Back of The Napkin – all about visual thinking and how to use drawing as a highly efficient aid to problem solving (Key message: you don’t need to be able to draw). Note: Guardian offers book to readers for £14.99 – I decide to do more research before committing to buying – and will certainly check Amazon first before buying.

3. Intrigued, I decide later that evening to Google Dan Roam. Top result is for Digital Roam, his own company. Spend a few mins looking at website – then check out his blog. Some very interesting posts

4. Download some PDFs of his visual thinking toolkit – Napkin Tools.

5. Watch Youtube video of Dan Roam presenting to Google staff.

6. Subscribe to Dan Roam’s RSS Feed

6. Decide to buy book (£9.99). Go to Amazon.co.uk to purchase. End up buying another book – Garr Reynolds Presentation Zen – purely on the back of Amazon recommendations (and because I was in book buying mood).

7. Via Dan Roam’s blog, go to Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.org and Ted.com video – now that’s how to present data!

You may think this is an extraordinary effort to decide whether or not to buy a book. But it is only when you detail all the various elements that went into this particular buying process that you begin to understand some of complexity of PR and marketing today.

And Dan Roam and Garr Reynolds both got a book sale out of me – although the routes to each one were very different. And Hans Rosling’s work was a revelation. What a wonderful world we live in.

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General PR tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

Google reveals keyword search volumes – and why you should care

Don’t know how I missed this one, but last week – and without much fanfare – Google announced that it would now reveal approximate search volumes from within its Keyword Tool.

The excellent Jason Baer at the Convince and Convert blog makes some very good observations as to why this is going to have a big impact on digital marketing. In particular when he says:

“If Google makes the marketing and advertising business as transparent as travel planning and stock purchases, the only agencies that will be able to survive are those that can add real value in messaging, creative, and integrating data into actionable tactics.”

I would of course include PR in the above too. So why should the availability of search volumes bother the PR community? (Or at least the tech/B-to-B world?).

If you accept that 95pc of B-to-B purchase decisions involve search, then you can now put a real figure on just how many people are actually searching on terms that you believe they find important – and are relevant to your business.

Let’s take an imaginary example. The Borked Corporation makes dilithium consoles. Av. profit on a console is $20. The company is aiming to make an additional $1m in profit over the next 12 months. That means selling an extra 50,000 consoles – or just over 4000 consoles a month. All marketing to date has been based around the key term “dilithium consoles”. The company has invested a lot in PR-ing the term dilithium console. Their digital agency has persuaded them to invest heavily in PPC. As of last week, Borked Corporation can see actual search volumes on “dilithium console” – a mere 1000 for the month and an average of 1500 for the last 6 months. It doesn’t take much to work out that Borked needs to answer some major questions – what terms ARE our potential purchasers searching on? How we can understand and influence the non-line buying process and incorporate the most relevant and impactful content at the appropriate juncture? Or more fundamental, is there a big enough market for our products at the current price/profit point?

Let’s not forget that Google’s Keyword Tool can be segmented by geography. For example, here’s the results for the UK last month on the terms digital PR and online PR.

It makes for interesting reading. For example, the keyword term digital PR was searched for in the UK 480 times last month. Online PR got 2400. Exactly 5 times the volume. Or thought of another way, a total of 2880 searches for combined digital/online PR. Or around 100 times a day. And how many of those searches are from people looking to buy digital/online PR services? This is the kind of thinking that helps to bring a forceful clarity to all PR and marketing activity.

Why not see how many times your company/product name was searched on last month? The results may surprise you.

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Technology PR Web/Tech Weblogs

“Online journalism is about more than just writing”: Chris Green, Editor, IT Pro

IT Pro Editor Chris Green has written a very good post regarding the changing nature of online journalism.

(In tune with the zeitgeist, he says he was prompted to write the piece after he made a Twitter comment about his traffic/contributor analysis – and I and others asked him for more detail).

Specifically, he highlights things that he believes freelance writers will need to consider and change their working practices to incorporate. If you substitute the term “PR” for freelance writer, much the same principles apply.

For example, on SEO, Chris says: “This is key to the future of online publishing. All writers, whether they are in-house or freelance need to understand the importance of making copy search engine-friendly. That means understanding how search engines interpret content, how they look for keywords and what relevant keywords are popular at the time of writing and publishing. Writers also need to track the online zeitgeist to understand what search terms, themes and trends are popular, in order to incorporate them, where relevant, into an article.”

PRs also need to adopt a similar methodology and mindset.

On Content Seeding – CG: “With publications looking at the audience traffic an article receives as a measure of success (as well as looking at traditional elements such as whether it is well written, accuracy, relevancy and how current the information is), the writer needs to take on some of the responsibility for promoting that article and extending its reach. That means seeding links to content to relevant locations where the links will bring in additional traffic. Also, think about whether the piece you are writing will appeal to the audience of the popular social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Slashdot, StumbleUpon and Reddit. We want readers to submit your content to these services, and it is in the interests of the writer as well for readers to do this.”

The role that PR can and should play in “promoting” relevant editorial content is an interesting one. Or what role PR can have in helping the journalist create the content in the first place.

On comment Generation – CG: “Your piece needs to spark debate among readers. It needs to encourage them to post comments, engage and debate other readers on that site. The conversation should not end with your final paragraph, but should stimulate the reader to participate in the conversation, add knowledge and share alternative viewpoints.”

The PR debate about “conversation” has raged for some time. PR will have an increasing role to play in encouraging and helping clients to get actively involved in these kinds of fora.

On Multi-skilling CG: “Online journalism is about more than just writing, it is about providing complete coverage in the most appropriate media form, and doing it in as timely fashion as possible. You are covering an event for a publication; you need to consider visual elements as well as written. Think about how you can incorporate video, audio and images into the piece to maximise the effectiveness of the piece. Waiting for images to be sent over from a company or PR agency may be counterproductive to publishing a timely and informative piece, so be prepared to take your own photos, shoot your own video and record audio content for inclusion in a podcast. You don’t need thousands of pounds of equipment to create audio or visual material that is suitable for publication.”

I absolutely agree with Chris that the tools to produce multi-media content are now cheap and easy to use (as are many of the traditional tools used in PR). But the tools are only 10pc of the issue = it’s the 90pc of skill/training to produce quality content that matters – and who is going to fund the training in these new areas? Simply taking a good print journalist and asking them to suddenly acquire top notch audio and video content skills is a big ask. And is everyone capable of being a great all-rounder? Eg I have a great face for radio.

Some other thoughts:

I wasn’t sure from Chris’ post whether he is assuming that all traffic is equal? eg in the case of IT Pro, are IT Directors more “valuable” in traffic terms than a junior developer? i.e. is it possible to reward a writer who attracts a smaller but high value audience (in terms of value to potential advertisers and/or marketing partners)?

I also wondered whether the traffic/performance measurement analysis and reward process applied to Chris and his editorial staffers rather than just freelancers 😉

Anyway – read Chris’ full post – it is worth the effort.