Category: Technology PR

Link: Blog.

Says Guy Clapperton – I feel flattered. And very old.

Link: BI software market set for steady growth.

The above story on Computer Weekly’s website piqued my interest – not just because we have a major client in the BI arena – but for the fact that I noticed that the phrase "business intelligence" in the editorial was in fact tagged with a sponsored link for an Oracle ad.

This is a curious development – and further shows how the lines are blurring between editorial and advertising. I don’t know how this actually works, but presumably the commercial side of Computer Weekly must have some prior knowledge of what phrases are likely to appear in the editorial in order to offer them for sponsorship. I guess it is conceivable that Oracle simply want to sponsor the phrase "business intelligence" and will not see which articles their sponsorship will appear in beforehand. But if they are paying for this as a service, it raises the thorny issue of how they get to choose which phrases and which articles they  sponsor.

Imagine they are told there is a piece about a major competitor due to be published that talks about business intelligence? Will Oracle be told the content beforehand to allow them to decide whether or not to sponsor?

I wonder what CW readers will make of this – will they like sponsorship and advertising encroaching this far into editorial?

I’d be interested to know what people’s views on this kind of thing are.

PR Surgery – Trust Me, I’m A Spin Doctor

Doctor Spin is now always "in" to help diagnose and offer possible cures for PR ills – both for agency staff and in-house.

This is a free service – however, all advice given here comes with a
PR health warning. Only you will be familiar with the details of your
case. The Doctor can only provide general guidance and takes no
responsibility for any future outcome should you choose to act on his
advice.

I was told that Cheap Ambien was quite a popular drug, popular with insomnia.

If you’d like the Doctor to take a look at your PR problem, email him at prsurgery@gmail.com.

Link: Experts issue stark Valentine’s Day press release warning | The Register.

This made us laugh – Press Release Filtration Inc – nice one!

Ken Young, in his piece Lies, damned lies and IT mumbo-jumbo
in today’s IT Week, bemoans the fact that case studies rarely talk about the bad things that happen in IT life.

Says Ken: "Customers love case studies, a PR person informed me recently. No doubt true, but a lot depends on how much information the studies provide, who they are about, and how sanitised they are. Who wouldn’t want to read a no-holds barred case study on EDS’s involvement with the Child Support Agency?
"

Journalists love case studies too – or rather they do like talking to real world users of technology.
And from a PR perspective, case studies that don’t just present the "everything is rosy" view of life actually have more credibility with both press and readers. As someone said to me recently, "according to all the case studies you read about in the IT Press, no IT project has ever gone over budget, been implemented late, failed to deliver on the functionality in the original brief, or caused both IT department and end users to tear their hair out in raw frustration."

So Ken’s plea for more real world case studies seems to get the thumbs up from pretty much everybody.

However, I suspect the number of "warts and all" case studies is not about to rise any time soon.

There are a number of reasons for this. And an example I was personally involved with recently perhaps illustrates this best.

We were interviewing a client’s customer for a case study. The customer company had been in a pretty bad way around 3 years ago – close to insolvency. However, with a brand new management team, new strategy and investment in technology, the company had seen a pretty remarkable turnaround. The story crying out to be written was how the management group had effectively saved the company – and how technology had played a key role.

However, they didn’t want to make any reference to this in the case study. The thinking was that they didn’t want existing customers and investors to get "spooked" by just how close the company had come to going under. Even though they hadn’t hidden any information regarding the company’s position, the thought of bringing up again the subject of "how bad things were" was too much for them in the context of a case study.

Which was a shame. On the one hand, you would have thought this kind of turnaround story would be just the kind of thing people would want to read about – and would present the current management and business in a very favourable light. However, this is one the one of the lesser known impacts of Sarb-Ox, etc – that companies will not take any kind of perceived risk with case studies, lest it comes back to haunt them (rightly or wrongly) in the future.

So, sorry Ken – looks like you may be waiting some time for your ideal case study.

David Meerman Scott has written a small e-book on the subject of press releases in the Web 2.0 world.

You can download it here:

The New Rules of PR

One of his arguments is that press releases aren’t just for journalists – that they can be used as a direct end user communication tool. Lets read that again – press release – ie a release for the press. If you send it to a someone who isn’t a journalist, then surely it is not a press release?

I can (sort of) see where he is coming from – that PR should be about Public Relations in its widest sense rather Press Relations. But what he is really saying is that you don’t just have to target journalists – you can target your end user customers and/or other relevant publics – but this feels like a semantic argument – if you send a communication direct to your target customer, then this is direct marketing by any other name – why call it a press release? It also ignores the fact that press releases are still presumably conceived and written with the needs of the press in mind (I fully accept that the intention and the reality of press releases generally may diverge widely on this point).

Perhaps we are moving to a point where traditional marketing disciplines are all going to merge into one.

Reading between the lines (and in spite of his comments to the contrary), you do get the impression that what he really means is that journalists don’t really matter anymore. I’d welcome comments from members of the Fourth Estate on this viewpoint 😉

A story from the ad world today, but one that has parallels for PR. EasyJet has moved the goalposts in its current 8-month pitch process for its £50m ad budget. The two agencies apparently involved – O&M and Saatchi & Saatchi – are both said to be fuming – and both £100K down in terms of pitch costs. EasyJet are allegedly claiming that they said all along that they wouldn’t necessarily appoint one of these agencies – and that the agencies were aware of the business risk involved.

Clearly not being privy to the dispute at first hand, it would be unwise to comment further on this specifically. However, the trend for this kind of behaviour does seem to be on the rise. In PR, there are increasing stories of agencies being invited to pitch – often requiring large amounts of time, money and effort, as well as the sharing of creative ideas and information – only for the prospect to “do it themselves” or give it to the cheapest agency.

Unfortunately this kind of thing has happened since the dawn of time. There was a very large IT company in the 90s that would put its PR account up for review every year – agencies would duly pitch, only to find that the incumbent was reappointed – and certain ideas mysteriously being subsequently used by them.

Some have argued that the practice today is a reaction to heady dot com era when clients felt they were pitching to the agency to take on their business – if you hadn’t got at least £10K a month to spend on PR, you wouldn’t get past the initial phone call. However, the pendulum does seem to have swung a little far the other way.  Nobody would dispute that pitching is one of the opportunity costs for any PR company doing business – but this is on the basis that there is a real opportunity to be persued – as opposed to clients attempting to get a load of ideas and information for free.

Again, the idea of asking prospects to pay a pitch fee has been around for a very long time – unsurprisingly, it is an idea that has not caught on – and probably never will.

In the end, there has to be a level of mutual trust between prospect and agency – if either side feels they are being taken for a ride, then nobody wins long term.