High-Tech PR Blog >> Beyond the Hype

All's Not Quiet on the Tech Marketing Front

For me the best aspect of social media is the ability to customize the news I receive, including news, links and updates from my Twitter feed as well as my RSS feeds through Bloglines.  Rather than relying on the broad and scary headlines in daily newspapers which scream about disappointing holiday sales portending cutbacks among retailers, I am able to zero into my marketplace -- technology -- and get a more accurate depiction of the state of the industry.  Techmeme pointed me to a VentureBeat article by Dean Takahashi, which gave a welcome, but guardedly positive preview of the upcoming CES show in Las Vegas:

The show will be smaller than last year, but not dramatically so, according to Gary Shapiro, executive director of the Consumer Electronics Association, which runs the show. There will be an estimated 130,000 attendees, down about 8 percent from 141,000 a year ago. The number of exhibitors will be the same at about 2,700, though the square footage of the show will be down 5 percent from 1.8 million square feet a year ago to 1.7 million square feet this year. The show is being held Tuesday, Jan. 6 to Sunday, Jan. 11 and is not open to the general public. I’ll be one of thousands of journalists attending.

It echoes what we are seeing in our office this week where a skeleton crew is busily at work on current and upcoming launches for our clients.  One of our technology companies decided to move up the launch of its major new product version by a month.  Despite the fact that many publications have down-sized, we are finding a lot of interest in a good old fashioned tour of NY, Boston and San Francisco.  The team believes that a recent recasting of the company's online newsroom and push into more social media approaches to communication have expanded the channels for their messages.  Regardless, though, it's a good sign that the tech marketplace is forging ahead and the press is still alive and well even if their numbers are fewer at the moment.

Another client does a fair amount of sports marketing and is leveraging commitments it made prior to the downturn in a cost effective way that is gaining good attention among customers and dealers for its products.  They are making the most of the visibility they can gain at competitors' expense.

So there has been some dialing back of programs within our client base -- sometimes just advertising - but they are doing it right in our humble opinion and not shutting down the marketing machine.  When I see some of the panicked slashing of budgets and programs and jobs happening within companies that otherwise are healthy and hitting their numbers, it reminds me of the scenes in movies where the hero or heroine is painstakingly flicking off all of the switches to shut down the engine or generator to stop the ship from blowing up.  I have often wondered how hard it was going to be to turn the engine back on and get it to full operating capacity after a hard shutdown.  I firmly believe that the companies that aren't succumbing to the fears and taking drastic steps will be stronger and more competitive as the economy improves.  Certainly in our segment of the marketing mix, PR is most effective when it is continuous and cumulative.  It always takes a lot more effort and resource (read: dollars) to restart a program than to keep it going, even at a slightly lower level.  

A New Year of Social Media

After the highs and, unfortunately, many lows of 2008, many of us are looking forward to the New Year that begins this Friday. As one of my colleagues just said, we are hoping for "that Obama bounce" for the economy and to settle people's nerves with his zen-like quiet confidence. We are hopeful that our families and friends will be healthy and happy -- and employed in good situations. We are ready for a steady stream of good news. Take it from someone who has real problems with perkiness -- we could even stand some perkiness in 2009 -- a good long dose of it.

From a communications perspective, we clearly are in the throes of true change regarding how companies are talking with their customers and prospects. More and more of our clients -- even those whose products are extremely complex and very far from the consumer -- are realizing the need to have more of an engagement with their customer base and industry via various social media tools.  Some of our CEOs have signed on to Twitter, just to check it out and to see if it yields value for their previous time allotted. A number have established blogs that either the CEO or senior team members are using to directly speak to their customers and contacts. Still more are social media-enabling their newsrooms to make them easier for the (increasingly) few, the brave, the tech media to access and use. And most of our clients are actively listening to the social media chatter to make sure they are aware of conversations about their company and their products and ready to participate in the discussion or dispell any misconceptions or slurs from competitors.

With the need to do more with less or even do more with no more, it is both prudent and cost effective to make sure that a smart social media program is part of your communications program in 2009. Customers are cutting to the chase when they make buying decisions and they want as much third party confirmation as they can obtain. They search Internet sites that aggregate reviews of products and services. They look for word-of-mouth endorsements or warnings. They fully expect to have a personal relationship with the companies whose products they decide to purchase.

So as you dust off last year's New Year's resolutions and see how you fared and start to build this year's list, put an assessment of your engagement in this critical aspect of your communications program on the list. At the very least, check to see if your direct competitors are participating more than you are.  Those that consider themselves techy savvy within the general population is growing rapidly, evidenced by the after-Christmas crush at the Apple store compared to the relatively calm aisles at Macy's and Nordstrom. That means more and more consumers of products and services are gaining digital access to information.  

One of my other collegues told me before the holidays began that the current revolution is similar to the Internet explosion where companies felt they absolutely had to have a web presence to compete.  Now they have to have a voice as part of that web presence. Let the two-way communicating begin in 2009.

We are on Alltop

If you haven't yet checked out Alltop, a new venture started earlier this year by Guy Kawasaki, you should. I have found it a very useful service based upon its model of mashing up RSS feeds for blogs by specific topic areas. I've moved to get client blogs fed into Alltop as part of a blog visibility plan, and finally got around to submitting the feed for our own blog to the PR Alltop topic area.

Alltop calls itself the "digital magazine rack". I call it an uber-RSS feed for content from top blogs by numerous topics, with more being added all the time. For example, the IT Alltop topic has feeds from many of the IT publications, but there are a few individual vendor blogs sprinkled in as well. I read and heard from several bloggers about how Alltop quickly becomes a leading traffic source for them, so if you are looking for visibility for your blog, why not submit to Alltop?

Santa's checked his list; now he's going out for a jog

One of the funnier holiday-related posts I've read this season came from the Scholarly Kitchen blog. It's contention that "being naughty has a network effect" swung its sites around to Jolly Saint Nick himself who may be judging naughty or nice, but isn't setting a great example himself for the children he visits.

"Santa is out of step with the times. Does he even realize what his own obesity, smoking, and break-ins represent within the community built around him? His self-awareness is limited, indicating that he too has fallen prey to a social network effect — a plump wife, fat little elves, pipe smoking, sneaking through chimneys, and the images of himself reinforcing that obesity, smoking, and crime are acceptable."

This got me thinking about that naughty versus nice list vis a vis communications. San Francisco agency Fineman published their 14th annual PR Blunders of the year list last week and it included some real beauties -- a couple of which I had been thinking would have made Santa's list for sure, including the Automakers private jetting to D.C. with their begging bowls in hand.  But I think there are a few more that Santa probably has tacked up over the fireplace next to Mrs. Claus' knitting basket.

We'll start with the "Nice Communications List" first, with the full disclosure that I am not including any of our agency's campaigns or clients on either list (to quote the character Tex in the movie Charade, "My mama didn't raise any stupid children."):

John McCain defending his campaign nemesis, Barack Obama, from charges he is a terrorist voters should be frightened of was a nice PR moment and reminded me of the McCain I had always respected.

Ray Ozzie Takes to the Clouds (Cloud Computing, that is) was a successful PR move, well-executed and a great platform for the elusive genius. Can't you just hear angels singing in the background?

The U.S. Election by Comedy, in which SNL and The Daily Show broke the tension of a never-ending presidential campaign.

The creation of Joe the Plumber during the election. This one can fit under both categories. At first it was "nice" and got people talking, which is good PR, but then it turned naughty when Joe's background was fully revealed and he began morphing into a bit of a PR monster to control.

Yes, I had to scratch through the election to find these. Santa's Nice list is a lot shorter this year.

But his Naughty List of Communications Moves could be a lot longer. Here are just a couple:

As the Yahoo Turns, starring Jerry Yang, with guest villain Steve Ballmer. Like my favorite soaps, it was predictable and ultimately became fast forward material, particularly when Yang's character was killed off and came back as his identical twin in a different role.

The Nikita Kruschev "we will crush you, DEMO" take-off by TechCrunch, which sparked a flurry of blog postings and comments, but mostly drove attendance at Fall DEMO.

The Morbid and Inaccurate Swirl of Reports that Steve Jobs was gravely ill because he looked too thin at an Apple event.  It forced Apple and Jobs to practically do their version of Cary Grant's famous response to the telegram asking "How old Cary Grant?" --  "Old Cary Grant fine, thank you."

Red Sox Sometimes-Slugger Manny Ramirez's successful, but baffling, campaign to run himself out of town on a rail well padded by a big contract that Sox management gladly ate to have Manny be Manny in Dodger Blue.

Plaxico Burress. Enough said.

We need to build out that Nice list more in 2009. Let's start things off right by leaving raisins and pomegranate juice for the Big Man this year to give him a head start on his New Year's resolution.

Renewables - Investing and Building Gets Us Only So Far

Om Malik's post today on the group think mentality running rampant among technology venture capitalists. I just visited a some VC firms in the Bay Area a few weeks ago, and it was interesting to hear the complaints about the recession and see the similarities in the questions and interest levels between the firms. But one of the more uplifting things noted in Om's post was speculation about clean tech investments.  It still looks positive for next year, despite the doomsday economic news about which we are all tired of reading.

Austin made a pretty significant clean energy/tech announcement earlier this month that captured national attention by rolling out the country's first comprehensive smart-grid project. The initiative aims to figure out how to handle distributed power when people start producing more of it in their homes versus depending on a centralized power plant.

I was sitting in an Austin Clean Energy Council meeting last month listening to our City Council member Brewster McCracken explain the "Pecan Street Project" - or what he referred to as the "The Power Internet" - and he made an interesting analogy to the technology industry. 

For those following clean tech investing trends, you are probably aware that energy storage is the "next big thing." Storage is the next frontier because if renewables start making up more than 3 percent of the domestic energy mix, storing the generated power when it doesn't need to be used is going to be a real issue. McCracken explained in the meeting, "Similar to storing data on a servers for consumers to pull when they want it, we need to translate this model to the electric grid." And this is enormously complicated being that energy is distributed by regional utilities versus a national entity. As he explained during a press interview earlier this month"

"Several other cities are testing clean-generation or efficiency products,” McCracken says. “We’ll do that. But we’ll also test the software, storage and business models we need to make it all fit together."

Austin is really onto something with this concept (maybe I'm biased, I'll admit), but it has already attracted the support of the Enviromental Defense Fund, GE Energy, Cisco, Freescale and Dell. We'll see how it comes along, but I'd keep an eye on it if your interested in seeing renewables become integrated into our energy structure. It's one thing to build and invest in them, but if they can't integrate into our energy system, developing them won't do us any good.  

Actors Without a Script Really Need Media Training

  The much anticipated "rematch" of Today Show host Matt Lauer and Tom Cruise occurred this week, It came about 3.5 years since the dustup in which Cruise passionately decried Brooke Shields' use of anti-depressants for post-partum issues and called Lauer "glib" for his defense of Shields and psychiatry in general.  If people were expecting fireworks, they were sadly disappointed, as news reports and blog posts including one from Gearlive.com noted.

Now over three years later, the Valkyrie star is proving that he actually does care what other people think about him. In this morning’s sit-down with Lauer, the 46-year-old tried embarrassed about his behavior from that day. “In looking at myself, I thought I came across as arrogant. It’s one of those things you go, ‘OK, I could have absolutely handled that better’,“ Cruise acknowledged. “I didn’t communicate it the way that I wanted to communicate it. And also, that’s not who I am. That’s not the person that I am.“ (So you don’t use the word “glib” in your everyday life?)

If Today’s anti-climatic interview (Cruise actually seemed a bit, uh, sedated) had you yearning for that 2005 conversation, you’re in luck. You can relive the fun below: [note that the blog post includes a video of the entire interview.]

Reviewing the interview, as I always do, as a long-time executive trainer of executives, I must say I am stunned at the lack of preparation Cruise had for questions that absolutely anyone could have anticipated.  Matt Lauer was trying to be a good celebrity interviewer and not be too edgy this time.  He asked what I thought were softball questions like, "What was the reaction to the last time we sat down," after he commented that the Today Show got more calls after that interview than they usually do.

Cruise should have had a response ready for that one.  Instead he stumbled and rambled, seeming almost incoherent in spots, and finally admitting he came across arrogant then and should have handled it better.  What took about 60 words could have been said more clearly in no more than 20.  He had a very humble demeanor, however, which may have been the primary goal, but it went beyond humble to, frankly, boring and flat.

Lauer commented that Cruise has been in the entertainment industry for 25 years and that, before the Today Show interview debacle in 2005, had been a "golden boy" that interviewers vied for.  After that interview, he said, the same interviewers began taking shots at Cruise rather than lining up to talk with him.

Cruise interrupted him here, seeming to disagree with the assertion that the interview was a tipping point, but he blathered so much that it was hard to figure out what he was actually trying to convey.  He did talk a little about the giants of the silver screen he had worked with during that period, but he certainly could have had a stronger answer.  For heaven's sake, Paul Newman, whom he used to race with and who he acted with, just passed away.  He could have done a tribute to the man.

If you read any of the coverage of the interview, it was very short with only a one-line quote from Cruise.  This isn't because space was short in the publications or on the blogs.  It is because it was hard to find a sound-bite in Cruise's blather.  You really had to extrapolate that he was sorry that happened, but felt he learned a lesson, and now he thinks his life with his wife and daughter is great.

Interestingly, when Cruise switched to promoting his movie -- the purpose of his current tour of the TV couches -- he was more articulate.  He still wasn't passionate or terribly interesting, but he could at least string a few sentences together.  It seems his publicists did a good job of feeding him lines about the movie he could repeat over and over and he remembered them.

It was an odd interview overall, though, and did not do a lot to change people's view of Cruise or intrigue them to go see a movie on Christmas day about an (obviously) failed plot to assassinate Hitler.  One wonders if the choices the publicists faced were "manic Tom" -- he of the jumping on Oprah's couch fame -- or the "boring, inarticulate Tom" and chose the latter.  A mock interview with someone simulating Matt Lauer at his worst could have given him the help he needed to come up with a few crisp answers that would have made the interview much more interesting.  And if he was too exhausted or, as the blog post suggests, sedated to do a good job with the Today Show, it might have been better to reschedule, as this one will live on in YouTube and online forever, right alongside the "crazy Tom" videos from 2005. 

Customers leaving marketing behind?

That is an assertion made in the subhead of an article in a special section of today's Wall Street Journal on Web 2.0 and marketing.  While it may be exaggerated (what headlines aren't?), the article -- written by professors from Babson College and Bentley College -- drilled into the fact that consumers (including those of enterprise products and services) are getting the information, knowledge and valuable interaction with peers online in order to make decisions.  The implication is that this decision-making increasingly is taking place without the influence of marketers.

Based upon research among marketers that have tried to harness social media marketing, the authors offer a "guide" to marketers that still are trying to determine where to start.  It covers some well-trodden tactics:

• Give customers a forum to offer ideas for new offerings
• Allow customers the opportunity to interact among themselves on a company-branded community
• Determine where the peer influence is taking place outside the company's site and join carefully
• Don't sell; solve
• Let go of the urge to control the conversation

The article explored the topic of social media marketing in a way I've been talking with a lot of clients lately -- namely that it should be done mainly from a customer-centric perspective.  This needs to be done within the context of a strategy to ensure that the tactics used are going to provide the return on what is mostly a time investment.  Based upon this last point, I disagreed with the last piece of advice the authors of this article provide:

One Web 2.0 strategy does not fit all, and sometimes the best way to find out what's best for a given company is to try some things out and see what happens.

I've found when working with clients that that is an approach many companies take only to find that initial social media efforts are not successful.  Throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks will almost never provide that return.

12 Days of PR Value

Since today marks the twelve day mark before the Christmas holiday, it's only fitting that we reflect back on the year using the "12 days of Christmas" song as the theme for today's post. Given the recent scrutiny around the true value that PR brings to businesses, this is a fun reminder of the the value we bring to our clients day in and day out.

On the first day of Christmas my PR Agency gave to me...

12 bloggers blogging

11 twitterers tweeting

10 feature stories

9 Facebook fans

8 well-trained spokespeople

7 products launching

6 keynote speakers

5 golden leads

4 perfect press releases

3 jargon-free key messages

2 measurement proposals

And the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

What do you think? Did we miss anything?

Why don't people trust corporate blogs?

Josh Bernoff caught some attention today with the release of new Forrester research data on the trust factor of various information sources.  Corporate blogging came out on the bottom of the list.  I'm still reading the full report that accompanied the chart on Josh's blog, but I reflected on it and shared it with a client with whom I've helped just start a blog.  I thought I'd convey the essence of what I shared here as well.

As Josh rightfully points out in this post, companies that don't take the time and effort to approach blogging in the right way will not get a return on the effort.

So, what should you do about this?

Make no mistake. This is not a plea to give up on blogging.

It is a plea to be thoughtful in how and why you blog.

This means that if you blog, your goal should be to create a blog about which people say “I like that – I don’t think of it as a company blog.” For the most part, that’s a hurdle you need to jump to gain their trust. I don’t mean to hide who is writing the blog. I mean it has to be more about your customers than it is about you.

Blogs exclusively about companies and products are what I think generate these low trust ratings. So don’t do a blog like that.

As I see it, so many companies that start blogs don’t go through a proper exercise -- which is undertaken only after determining the objectives of the blog as part of an overall marketing approach.  At that the point, the exercise involves thinking about the premise for the blog, understanding that it is not a place to talk about products or the company, determining a unique voice, and talking almost always about customer problems and solutions.

Many companies see a blog as a checklist item and use it to post press releases, webinar notices and material straight out of white papers.  Unfortunately this has created a perception that I believe is born out in the research.  This is a good reminder that the approach companies take needs to be as authentic, transparent and altruistic as possible.

At the same time, I believe that some of this should be taken with a grain of salt because of the fact that the survey sample represents the general online population.  The general public has a low trust in companies in general, so are pre-disposed to answer negatively when asked about a company blog.  The amount of trust that exists between individual companies and their customers vary, and companies may have a less steep hill to climb.  However, that is yet another reason to start blogging the right way and use it to build more trust over time.

Do-it-yourself Corporate Publishing -- the new trend?

     Social media has had enormous impact on our society and the tech industry in general. The fact that you are reading this blog post right now signals that we all are now aggregating and analyzing information and events in a different way. We are choosing our filters. We are gathering viewpoints from sources we trust. Those sources are not always the vehicles of trust from the past, the traditional publications. 

This week in my Twitter feed, I saw a reference from Tim O'Reilly to Ford's PR Blitz around its CEO's quest for support in Washington for the auto industry bailout. The link he provided was to a section from Ford's corporate webpage which packaged nicely, if slickly, the plan Ford was presenting to the government, along with other data anyone interested could download and several videos from Ford executives, including the CEO, elaborating on the plan. Anyone trying to cover or understand this news story could get additional nuggets and context, including the full text of the plan being presented. Corporations are becoming their own publishers is what came into my head when I saw this. When I went back to look for it for this blog post, I found it fairly buried on the busy home page of Ford's site, however, so I think you'd need to be very motivated to dig this out. And it was a bit too polished to not seem like market-speak, so I would assume journalists would brush on by it or view it as an online press release.

Just this morning, I was meeting with a former colleague who told me about General Electric's recent foray into corporate publishing, GEReports.com. This goes beyond a segment of the home page, although you can quickly get to it from the home page (which is much cleaner and easier to navigate than Ford's.) GEReports looks like a news report and bills itself (on its home page) as "your source for what's happening at GE." A few weeks ago a Reuters report on the new approach to making many announcements cited some concerns about how this satisfied corporate governance and the fact that it required Wall Street types and others to go get the news themselves rather than spoon-feeding it to them via releases on the various business wire services. They were reacting mostly to the fact that the company chose to use GEReports to announce some major corporate news, which was a novel approach. In my humble opinion, it's a great way to communicate with just about anyone, as it includes snippets of information from shows GE is attending, from technical experts in various divisions, from executives, from customers in videos, blog postings and very short articles (Rupert Murdoch would approve.) Interestingly, GEReports has been quoted in coverage of the company by Reuters and others, which seems to give it the stamp of a true information source like a publication.

Now GE is a mammoth company which has enough news content on a daily basis to pull this off. They certainly have a smart vision for creating this alternative channel to their various audiences. Smaller corporations cannot pull this off exactly, but they certainly could create a variation on it and some of the ones we work with already have used their CEO's blogs to release or at least position even corporate news to their constituencies.

It's an interesting development and I've chosen to follow GEReports both on Twitter and through my Bloglines RSS Reader to see how it evolves (which they have smartly made very easy to do, by the way). If I were a journalist assigned to cover GE, I'd be doing the same -- both to make sure I didn't miss anything and also to make sure this type of corporate publishing isn't going to put me out of a job.