Five kinds of public relations
I comment about public relations from two different standpoints:
- As a consultant to the technology industry
- As a target of public relations myself
Sometimes these discussions are very fruitful. But other times they are “Head, meet brick wall.” Perhaps this post will help.
This post actually started as a set of specific tips, the biggest of which is uncouple your PR from your press releases. I’ll put the others below — but first, I’d like to cover a little theory.
There are (at least) five different things you can try to do via public relations:
- “Sell” to the press (and bloggers and so on), by which I mean that you try to induce stories, and you probably measure success by a count of stories written (presumably weighted by the quality of the publication, the favorableness of the mention, and so on), and your activities are focused on contacting the press in pursuit of that goal.
- “Market” to the press, by which I mean that you try to create a favorable disposition toward having them say what you’d want them to. This can be measured in the same ways as “selling” success, but usually on a more long-term basis.
- Market through influencers to your end customers and prospects. Here I’m saying “influencers” rather than “press”, because social media, pure word of mouth, and so on can also contribute to success.
- Market through influencers to other influencers. It is now a regular consulting exercise for me to walk clients through the whole chain of which influencers listen to which other influencers. (If you want to work that kind of thing out for yourself, social media observation is a good way to start.)
- Market to potential buyers directly. This has become increasingly realistic as the internet has matured.
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Note to technology startups
The following was originally part of my post today regarding Groovy Corp, but I decided to post it separately instead.
Getting a favorable mention in a couple of prominent blogs should not be the be-all, end-all of your launch strategy. Rather, you should be laying the groundwork for getting enterprises to place significant bets on your unproven technology. Eliciting the “I’m interested in that if it works” reaction is only a very small part of your overall marketing challenge.
Related links
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Merv Adrian’s threads on analyst blogging
Merv Adrian offers two well-commented posts on analyst blogging. I think the whole thing was (probably not intentionally) framed in terms of large-firm analysts, leading to a lot of Golly gee whiz! Blogs aren’t the same as subscription analyst reports. Harm can occur when people forget this! And that led to various calls for things like industry-wide codes of how analysts should and shouldn’t write, etc. (Merv himself was the lead offender on that one.)
Grrr!! Any suggestion that there’s one right way to communicate rubs me the wrong way. Indeed, I’ve been arguing that there’s an evolving information ecosystem that will ever more depend upon there being healthy occupants of many different niches. Most particularly — and few vendors have yet wrapped their minds about this — it will increasingly be the case that primary news sources are analysts with NDA obligations. And yes — every once in a while it is important to be the one who breaks the story. Read more
| Categories: Analyst relations, Technology marketing | 3 Comments |
Paul Gillin on influencer marketing
Paul Gillin offers a pair of posts that in my opinion are spot-on about influencer marketing. Highlights include: Read more
| Categories: Analyst relations, Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 1 Comment |
Hilarious April Fool’s send-up of the analyst business
I’m not clear on who wrote it, but there’s a hilarious send-up of the analyst business. See in particular the “Magic Kingdom” graph, whose four quadrants are Adventureland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, and Fantasyland, and similar spoofs of the Forrester Wave and Geoffrey Moore’s Chasm graph.
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Social media done in a silo is social media done wrong
There are tons of self-appointed “social media experts” out in cyberspace. There’s also a growing backlash against same, usually focusing around ideas such as:
- Many of these so-called “experts” greatly overstate their expertise.
- A lot of what passes for social media “success” just amounts to these “experts” getting attention from each other.
I wouldn’t go out of my way to argue with all that. 
But I think there’s also a more fundamental reason why specialized social media “experts” should not be taken very seriously:
Social media done in a silo is social media done wrong. Read more
| Categories: Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 3 Comments |
Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics explained
Below is a three-year-old post of mine from a long-dormant blog, quoted in its entirety:
Maria Winslow notes that “Open Source” is an example of
Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics:
Bad jargon drowns out good.
Now, I won’t pretend that’s really original with me — but then, it’s based on Gresham’s Law, for which Sir Thomas Gresham apparently doesn’t deserve the credit he gets either.
The idea behind the “Law” is this: If a term connotes some kind of goodness, marketers scarf it up and apply it to products that don’t really deserve it., making it fairly useless to the products that really do qualify for the more restrictive meaning.
“Predictive analytics” sounded cool, and now covers a fairly broad range of statistical analyses, most of which don’t involve any kind of explicit prediction. Some “native” XML data stores are dressed-up tourists from either the relational or object-oriented worlds, while a lot of “thin clients” actually do their shopping at Lane Bryant. “Transparent” connectivity layers tend to be cloudy, and “portablilty” commonly involves considerable heavy lifting.
By the way, Monash’s Second Law of Commercial Semantics is much more technologically oriented: Where there are ontologies, there is consulting. I first said that at the Text Mining Summit, and it seemed to win immediate, widespread agreement.
| Categories: Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 2 Comments |
Always be marketing
Guy Kawasaki argues that you should always be selling. Specifically, he suggests:
Creating a successful business requires effective persuasion. This study shows that great persuasion sometimes occurs when people don’t expect it. This means that you should always be selling—you may persuade people when you least expect it. This is also a good argument for the potential power of tools such as Twitter and blogs. These new approaches can open doors for people who haven’t thought about a new concept.
If you think about it, what Kawasaki really means is: You should always be marketing.
Looking at him briefly from afar, I’d guess that Kawasaki’s priorities are something like:
- Keep building awareness.
- Stay on message.
Judging by the recent election season, most political campaigns would agree. In enterprise IT, however, I’d tweak and flip them, to:
- Stay on one or more of your messages.
- Build awareness in the right audiences — prospects and influencers alike.
| Categories: Marketing theory, Political marketing, Technology marketing | 3 Comments |
Do influencers think along the lines of the layered messaging model?
I originally came up with the more techie version of the layered messaging model
Enterprise IT product (sustainable-lead messaging stack)
- Tangible benefits
- Technical connection
- Features and metrics
- Technical connection
- Fundamental product architecture
because it’s a pretty good representation of how I think. But what about other influencers? Do they view things in somewhat the same way? Read more
| Categories: Analyst relations, Layered messaging models, Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 3 Comments |
Enterprise IT marketing — a layered messaging model
Two things matter about marketing messages:
- Do people believe you?
- Do they care?
It’s easy to meet one or the other of those criteria. What’s tricky is satisfying both at once.
Many marketing consultants, me included, would phrase the core messaging challenge in terms such as:
What’s the most compelling claim you can make that people will actually find credible?