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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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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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?
| Categories: About this blog, Analyst relations, Barack Obama, Layered messaging models, Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 10 Comments |
I’m not the only one who thinks vendors underdisclose
Here’s a real-life example of something I talk about all the time — the need to not just tell a story, but to give simple and persuasive reasons why it is true. David Raab is a huge fan of QlikTech’s QlikView, as both a reseller and blogger. Precisely because he is such a great advocate, he is frustrated by the company’s lack of technical specificity and disclosure. To wit (emphasis mine): Read more
| Categories: Analyst relations, Technology marketing | 2 Comments |
Restoring sanity to technology news embargoes
Technology news embargoes are a mess.
- Companies insist that news should be embargoed until press releases hit “the wire,” then don’t live up to their planned schedules as to when the releases will actually hit.
- Embargoes are commonly broken by bloggers working from home, online trade press working in non-US time zones, and the like.
- Companies are often maddeningly indecisive vague as to what parts of a briefing are or aren’t embargoed.
Basically, a custom that worked fairly well in the age of heavily staffed weekly and monthly print media has not been adapted well to the up-to-the-minute, fragmented online age. Here’s what I propose to at least partially fix things. Read more
| Categories: Analyst relations, Technology marketing | 3 Comments |
How to pitch me
In a good new trend, analysts are putting up explicit “How to pitch me” notes. (Carter Lusher has links to some of them.) Here’s mine. Read more
| Categories: Analyst relations, Technology marketing | 2 Comments |
Know your audience
I just had one of the most ridiculous meetings I’ve had in a long time. A vendor about whom I and various other press/blog/analyst outlets had already written asked to meet with me. Three top executives schlepped out for a loooong dinner. Unbeknownst to me in advance, the company expected to hold the meeting under embargo. When I asked at the end of the meeting “So, what about that is embargoed”, they responded (in effect) “everything” — notwithstanding that they had received substantial coverage already, and that in 3 hours we hadn’t talked about any details of the sort that normally would be NDAed. No customer names, no product announcements, nothing. They just didn’t want coverage until their “launch date” 3 weeks hence.
Despite that investment of time in meeting with me, they’d obviously done little or nothing to prepare. Read more
| Categories: Analyst relations, Technology marketing | 2 Comments |