Archive for June, 2008

Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer

By Linda Forrest

As we here at inmedia are coordinating our upcoming vacation schedules and as next week has two major holidays in North America that kick off in earnest the sorts of summer activities that Nat King Cole envisioned in the song whose title is above, we begin to hear the common summer rumblings from clients and prospects about whether media relations efforts are best left to the Fall.

There’s a common misperception that summer media consumption drops away to almost nothing and that your investment is better spent holding off until the Fall. This very topic was explored in detail last year at OCRI’s Zone5ive, by Veronica Engleberts of Vector Media, a media planning and marketing agency here in Ottawa. The presentation has really stuck with me because it provided effective proof points to support the idea that marketing needs to be a year-round activity and that those companies that go fallow as the mercury rises are losing momentum by sending their marketing efforts on summer holidays.

Consider this, from Veronica’s presentation: “If every one of your prospects took a vacation at some point in July or August, it would amount to an average of 11% of prospects in any given week. Can you afford not to advertise to the other 89%?” Excellent point. Yes, people do take holidays, but not all your customers or prospects are away for the entire season. Why miss the opportunity to make some noise when perhaps your competitors are taking the summer off from getting their messages out?

With regards to media relations in particular, which is our bailiwick, there are even more compelling reasons to carry through with your campaigns. A lot of the media outlets that we target on behalf of clients are trade publications, some of which are glossy print publications with long lead times, sometimes three months or longer. So, by ceasing the conversation with these publications in the summer, we would, in essence, be scuppering our chances at seeing some coverage in the Fall editions. Our actions now are targeting opportunities through the balance of the year and beyond. Effective media relations is a consistent effort that is cumulative; it’s important to maintain regular contact with our targets through myriad tactics as you can never be sure when the tipping point will be that will secure the most impactful coverage available with that outlet. It’s quite possible that the editors are suffering from a content famine in the summer, prior to the feast that is that Fall when everyone ramps up their efforts once again.

Does this mean that I’m advocating sending out a news release on Canada Day or on Independence Day? Of course not (unless it’s really bad news, of course, and you’re hoping to bury it…) But to take the rest of the summer off is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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Posted by: Linda Forrest on June 27, 2008

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Dealing with the media ain’t rocket science

By Leo Valiquette

OCRI’s last Technology Executive Breakfast of the season this morning featured three media figures well-known in the local business community, commenting on how to successfully engage the media.

With the catchy title of “Evaluating your media technique: Are you a hooker or a pusher?”, CFRA‘s Rob Snow, CTV-Ottawa’s Paul Brent and the Ottawa Citizen’s James Bagnall discussed what it takes to grab and hold the attention of the media, from the perspectives of radio, television and print.

Despite the fact that these local outlets are far more horizontal than the majority of the trade and industry press we predominantly deal with on behalf of our clients, there are plenty of worthy points that apply across boundaries. Many of these points, I’ve commented on before (Engaging the media: Part I and Part II), drawing on my own years as a business journalist. The messages from the fellows this morning boiled down to the following points:

1. Know the outlet you are pitching. Is your story the kind of material a particular media outlet is looking for? Easiest way to find out is read it or tune in to see what kind of news has been covered.

2. Make your message clear, crisp and comprehensible by the majority of people. These aren’t engineers you’re pitching to. In one example offered by the speakers, a long-winded pile of techno-jargon was distilled down to ”It makes your cellphone battery last longer.”

3. Appreciate the value of an informed public relations intermediary who can speak with the media to provide more background, context and explore additional story angles if a journalist interested in the story needs more information.

4. Consider the medium. Print, radio and television all have different needs. Print can devote inches to detail and background. Radio needs clear communicators who can hold an audience. TV demands graphics, images and descriptive video. As Paul Brent says, a viewer should be able to understand what a broadcast story is about without having to hear the audio.

5. Be available. This one struck the greatest chord with me. As a journalist, I can’t remember the number of times we decided to act on a press release, only to find that the contact listed was on vacation. Or PR people who offer a source for comment on a given issue or topic, then act as if it’s a hassle for them to set up the interview when you take them up on the offer. Even more important is the willingness to respond to bad news as well as good news. It’s the only way to have any part in a story that will likely get written regardless of your participation. For some reason, bad news just won’t go away if you ignore it.

Having been on both sides of the fence, I remain convinced that the vast majority of journalists are looking to provide accurate, factual and compelling content for the readers to the best of their ability. But they’re also working under tight deadlines, often with little time to devote to research. It’s in the best interests of any PR person, therefore, to do their own research and ensure they taking the right story to the right outlet and have readily available the information and sources the journalist needs to produce a quality piece by deadline. You can’t control what a journalist ultimately writes, but you can work with them to ensure you have provided everything you could to prevent any unwelcome surprises when you pick up the paper or turn on the TV.

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Posted by: Leo Valiquette on June 26, 2008

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Determining the right level of investment in PR

Danny Sullivan

For companies looking to establish a PR program, there is a burning question that rises above all others: how much should I invest in PR to achieve the best return? Every company is different, and simply throwing more money at a program is not necessarily going to improve results.

Is it reasonable to expect a PR firm to be able to determine the optimum workload that a new client will require, without having truly tested the opportunity that exists to tell the story? I think not.

Sure, doing some initial analysis of the relevant media landscape, editorial calendars, and so on, will help give you an idea of the potential that exists, but you can never be confident of this without a comprehensive exercise that truly tests the story among its target media.

Here at inmedia, we insist on conducting an initial “ramp up and roll out” exercise on behalf of almost every new client, even if they have executed a PR program prior to our engagement with them.

While immediate media coverage is invariably a valuable byproduct of this exercise, its real purpose is to allow us to assemble the detailed level of understanding required to be able to confidently describe the optimal PR program for the road ahead. The feedback garnered from conversations with the top media targets provides us with insight into the kinds of opportunities that can reasonably be expected over the course of an extended program, and thus gives us the ability to recommend a level of investment that will allow our clients to take advantage of those opportunities.

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Danny

Posted by: Danny on June 26, 2008

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If you’ve got it, use it

national.post.logo If youve got it, use it

By Leo Valiquette

This may be a little off topic for a public relations blog, but it’s one of those issues that can have far-reaching consequences for any organization, impacting productivity, staff morale and the retention of top talent.

I’m talking about vacation time. We want it, we count the days till we can take it, and yet, many of us find one reason or another not to indulge. At least, that’s the conclusion of a report in the news today which you can read at the The National Post, which found that 29 per cent of us are not taking our full allotment of vacation time each year, despite that fact that increased and more flexible vacation time is a big magnet for getting new bodies in the door, especially with the 20-something crowd. According to the study, $6.3 billion worth of vacation time is being given back to employers each year, the equivalent of about 41 million discarded vacation days.

This is creating a condition known as “vacation deprivation,” most often sparked by fears of missing important meetings and being perceived negatively by co-workers and superiors.

Get over it. If you are a valuable contributor to your organization, your allotted vacation time is your just reward. Sure, there’s always a measure of inconvenience when a member of the team is away for a period of time, but that shouldn’t be seen as a barrier to a deserved break that will help one recharge the batteries and return to the job rested and renewed. It’s a short-term pain for a long-term gain. The alternative is burned out employees who no longer perform at their optimum level.

At my previous employer, staff were not allowed to carry over vacation time, or take cash in lieu. The emphasis was on giving staff the break they needed, in no small part because of the liability issue if someone ended up on a stress leave and could blame it on the employer and vacation deprivation.

So as we head into the hot and hazy days of summer, don’t begrudge yourself, or your staff, the right to take that much needed break. I’ll be at the cottage myself next week.

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Posted by: Leo Valiquette on June 25, 2008

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The best earbud ever and outstanding customer service, too

By Francis Moran

I have written a few posts (Take One and Take Two) about the generally lousy job too many companies do at taking care of their customers once they’ve made the sale. It’s a phenomenon that frustrates the customer in me and utterly bewilders the marketer in me.

The customer frustration bit is obvious, and I doubt there’s a fellow citizen who has not railed against robot voices that answer the phone and can’t help, so-called customer-service agents who eventually come on the phone and can’t help, or web-based “Contact us” forms that never generate a reply or that generate a meaningless reply that can’t help.

The marketer in me is bewildered by a strategy, so widely deployed it has come to be accepted as the norm, that has companies treat their only source of revenue as something icky that has been scraped off the bottom of their shoes and must be disposed of as swiftly and cheaply as possible. A large forest of trees has been pulped to print all the studies that prove that superior customer service is clearly the most potent differentiator in an era when your technology advantage can be leap-frogged, your cost advantage can be evaporated by an offshore competitor and brand loyalty means increasingly less and less.

So I am one cynical and unhappy old crank, both personally and professionally, when it comes to any expectation that any customer-service experience is going to be a happy one.

Which makes it all the more enjoyable to report on one that went phenomenally well.

While in Las Vegas a few months back, I bought a Jawbone ear bud for my iPhone. I’m an early adopter, remember, so having a Bluetooth wireless earbud is nothing new for me. I bought an early product from Jabra many years ago that created an unholy echo on the Treo I used at that time. I replaced it with a Treo-branded device that squashed the echo but had a lot of trouble holding its pairing with the phone. I had heard a lot about the Jawbone, and I held off until I was able to visit an Apple store to buy it because I wanted to make sure it would work properly.

Man, was I delighted. It is easily one of the best pieces of new technology I have ever used. It is gorgeous in design, brilliant in feature and utterly reliable. What a standout.

Except I broke it.

Okay, I broke one of the little ear loops that come with it. (They give you four, two of different sizes for each ear. They also give four little snap-on buds so you’re sure to find one that fits comfortably in your ear. This recognition that one size does not fit all is just one very-well-thought-out element that makes this thing such a standout.)

So I went on Jawbone’s website to see what could be done to replace the broken loop. I fired off one of those “Contact us” emails and assumed I’d never hear anything back.

Well, turns out their customer service is every bit as brilliant as their technology. Ben, from the Jawbone Support Team, emailed me back. My first surprise was that he had actually read and understood my full email. He knew I had recently bought the device but couldn’t prove it since Apple, in a breakdown in its customer-service department, had failed to email me the receipt for my purchase as the Apple store clerk had promised. No problem. Turns out there’s a small date code etched on the Jawbone. I sent that to Ben, and he said he’d need a delivery address. I gave him one, and he promised I’d get a replacement loop in five to seven business days.

Now, this is where my cynicism went into overdrive. Up to that point, I had not mentioned that I live in Canada. So I wasn’t too surprised when a couple of weeks went by with no sign of a package from Jawbone.

Until a little box showed up the other day, containing a complete set of four loops. It was later than promised, but with good reason. I had provided my home address, but my office postal code. That was my mistake. Then, someone in the Jawbone shipping department compounded my mistake by replacing my home town of Ottawa with Toronto. So a thoroughly buggered address, and yet it still made it to me.

So there are two customer-service heroes in this story. The first is Jawbone, which has salted an already superior customer experience. Very wll done, Ben, and the rest of the Jawbone Support Team. And the second is Canada Post, which persisted in its task and eventually found me. For the record, that second one doesn’t really surprise me; Canada Post is consistently exceptional at what we pay it to do, usually delivering letters here in Ottawa the morning after I post them.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on June 24, 2008

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Posted in: Product marketing, Public and media relations, Random thoughts — Leave a comment

The customer is your friend

By Leo Valiquette

Despite common misperception, Ottawa is home to entrepreneurs seasoned in the school of hard knocks who understand that the road to success is more often paved with customer interaction than it is by venture capital dollars or a preoccupation with product development behind closed doors.

Jay Litkey is one such entrepreneur. He took centre stage last week (or at least, the centre of the boardroom floor) at the last Startup Drop-in of the season at the offices of Labarge Weinstein.

Jay is co-founder and CEO of Embotics, a company he and the management team built from the ashes of Symbium, which met its end after a venture capital deal went sour a few minutes past the 11th hour.

Embotics has a relatively simple value proposition. As virtualization becomes more and more popular in the server farms of large organizations, it can be a challenge to efficiently manage it. Embotics’ V-Commander product helps organizations manage and monitor their virtual machines (VMs).

As Jay summed it up in an interview with the OBJ last fall:

“With the products of companies like Microsoft and VMWare, all you have to do is click a button and create a new server, and that leads to what is called ‘virtual machine sprawl,’” he said. “There’s exponential growth in the number of servers since you no longer have to buy a physical computer (to deploy a new server), and that’s a bad thing for enterprises when they can’t know who did what and what’s happening.”

Clear market, clear value proposition. The trick for Embotics has been keeping its cards close to its chest while the market matured enough for there to be substantial demand for its product. Before v1.0 of V-Commander became commercially available last fall, it was in beta with large enterprises in key verticals such as pharmaceutical, telecommunications, internet hosting, financial services and manufacturing sectors. With v2.0, the company is again taking that beta approach.

And as Jay emphasized this week, that kind of customer engagement throughout the product-development cycle is key. There is no other way to get the pulse of your market and understand whether or not your product addresses the right pain points and offers the features most valued by potential customers.

From the perspective of what we do here at inmedia, at some point that would likely involve a calculated public relations campaign targeted at those key trade media that reach these potential customers. And nothing gives the story more punch than testimonials from existing customers, but I digress.

Coming back to what Jay had to say, to drive a product through from idea to market adoption, he offered the following points:

1. Your first great idea is always full of holes. The sooner you can accept that and the more willing you are to seek out and absorb candid feedback and criticism, the quicker you’ll move ahead. So be humble.

2. Customer feedback is the only sure way to find out where you’re wrong, which means that …

3. Your focus out of the gate should be on customer interaction, rather than chasing VC dollars. Nothing gets the attention of investors faster than early traction with potential customers. (Embotics, by the way, has no VC investment.)

4. Adopt a philosophy that’s been evangelized by the titans in the Valley—fast failure. Failure is the path to wisdom and insight. Countless corporate icons have an impressive list of failures to their credit.

Perhaps you agree with Jay, perhaps you don’t. Feel free to comment one way or the other. What’s important is that there is dialogue in the local community on how to grow successful companies in Ottawa. What works, what doesn’t and what can we try next.

But I wholeheartedly agree with Jay — the primary focus out of the gate must always be on the end user, the customer. Product development for its own sake has no place in private enterprise. Engineers in the Valley get that and appreciate the value of early customer engagement. It’s the difference between being product or service focused, between saying “I have a product you should buy,” or “I have this solution to your problem. “ As long as we remain product-focused, the outlook for this region’s tech economy will be uncertain at best.

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Posted by: Leo Valiquette on June 23, 2008

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Posted in: Startups, Technology marketing — Leave a comment

Fighting the ground war

By Leo Valiquette

Nothing develops deeper familiarity with the lay of the land than on-the-ground reconnaissance, a truth that was impressed upon me over the weekend.

Last week I spent several days in Atlanta with one of our clients, Touch Bionics, maker of the world’s first fully articulating prosthetic hand, the i-LIMB. We were attending the annual conference of the Amputee Coalition of America.

Now, in the two months since I joined inmedia Public Relations, I’ve been familiarizing myself with, and working fairly extensively on, the Touch Bionics account. In fact, it’s the first client account with which I was involved. My second week with inmedia was spent on a road trip to the U.K. that included a stop at Touch Bionics’ corporate headquarters in Livingston, Scotland. I’ve worked on media lists for Touch Bionics, coordinated media opportunities, including a live segment taking place this morning on the CBS Early Show, interviewed i-LIMB users and written profiles from those interviews.

It’s been a hands-on learning experience, but hardly exhaustive. In fact, spending a few days at the conference in Atlanta, where I could speak with other prosthetic manufacturers, distributors, amputees and clinicians and see the i-LIMB in use, provided insight and context to match, even exceed, everything I had learned in the preceding two months. It’s an invaluable experience that has dramatically increased my understanding of the Touch Bionics story, the competitive market landscape and the amputee community.

Most importantly, and this was my primary reason for going down there, it’s allowed me to cultivate face-to-face connections with new media channels beyond the obvious ones. It’s intelligence that could only have been garnered on the ground.

There are a lot of PR shops out there that lure their prospective clients with lines like, “Well, we already have all these contacts,” or, “We have all these existing relationships” with the key trade or industry press in which the client’s story needs to be told.

Considering that in any given scenario the key media could number in the dozens and be scattered across a country or eight, it’s hard to see that as anything but a line of bull. What’s important in a PR agency is its ability to seek out and cultivate the media channels that best serve the client’s interests beyond the warm and fuzzy comfort of whatever relationships already exist. It’s our specialty at inmedia and it can only be accomplished through research and no small amount of cold calling. And as I learned last week in Atlanta, it can’t always be done from behind a phone and a desk.

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Posted by: Leo Valiquette on June 23, 2008

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A healthy dose of sarcasm, but a point nonetheless

By Linda Forrest

One of this morning’s newsletters directed me to a fellow blogger’s post on all of the silly reasons you don’t need PR. The post was written with the blogger’s tongue firmly in cheek and had me chuckling, but I’m sorry to report that, silly as they may seem in this context, we hear these points all too frequently as arguments against the business case for engaging with a PR company like ours.

Posted by: Linda Forrest on June 20, 2008

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The ‘hurry up and wait’ game

By Linda Forrest

Prior to the release of an announcement, there is a lot of work to be done. Not only must we develop the content, but often times we must run the potential content past a series of third-party gatekeepers. This is where things can slow down and timelines can get pushed out.

The good news is, you’ve gotten this far and your partners or customers have agreed to talk on your behalf or participate to some degree in your media activities. This third-party validation opens up a range of PR activities, from customer win announcements to case studies and speaking opportunities. When it comes to distributing a release though, a document that will live in your company’s newsroom for considerable time and be found by any Googler searching for a company name, those parties involved want to ensure that materials are on message and accurate.

To that end, understandably, often times our clients’ partners and customers will want approval on the information and/or quotes being attributed to them prior to dissemination. Sometimes, this can mean that materials need to run the internal approvals gauntlet at third-party organizations.

Depending on the size of the organization, or how high up the chain of command your information needs to be vetted, this can take considerable time. Typically, though not always, the larger the organization, the longer you’re going to have to wait for sign off. There’s a good chance that the materials will have to float up through a sophisticated communications department to a c-level executive, and come back down through the ranks back to your hands. These departments are busy with announcements and initiatives of their own and so sometimes your news will have a lesser priority in the sign-off pile.

Still, getting the facts straight and the endorsement, implied or explicit, of a third-party partner or customer will go a long way for your public relations campaign. The best advice comes from the Boy Scouts – be prepared. Begin the conversation early and be prepared to hold your announcement or pitch until all of the stakeholders are on the same page. Most of the time, it’s worth the wait.

For those of you in the midst of playing the waiting game, in the meantime, ensure that all of your other ducks are in a row, so to speak – the media list is prepared and updated, the balance of the media kit is ready to go, and once you’ve got the approved materials, all that you need to do is hit send.

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Posted by: Linda Forrest on June 18, 2008

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Sales: From afterthought to forethought

By Eliot Burdett

guest blogger2 Sales: From afterthought to forethought

Eliot Burdett, co-managing partner of Peak Sales Recruiting, shares his thoughts on last week’s launch of a new initiative in Ottawa to help build stronger sales-based companies.

The Sales Leadership Initiative hosted its first event last Friday morning, with bestselling author Jeffrey Gitomer speaking about the importance of sales culture and what it means to build dominating sales organizations.

More than 200 execs and sales leaders packed the event, which was sponsored by Peak Sales Recruiting, RIM, Bell, Telus, Corel, the Ottawa Business Journal, CFRA and Sherwin Kaldeway. The OBJ also reported on the event.

The Sales Leadership Initiative (SLI) is a not-for-profit, community-based organization that launched earlier in the year to help Ottawa technology businesses grow larger and faster. The organization will increase and develop the pool of sales talent and leaders and raise the profile of Ottawa as a center of sales excellence.

As SLI co-founder Brent Thomson put it at the opening of the event, “we are very strong at creating technology in Ottawa, but we have struggled to build companies that can outsell their competitors worldwide. For many of our companies, sales is an afterthought, when it should be the only thought. We are here to help make that happen.”

Peak supported this event because we believe that local companies need powerful sales functions in order for the city’s economy to thrive. We have clusters for technology, marketing, finance and even operations, but until now, there has not been an initiative focused on making sales paramount. The irony of this is that with the current limited availability of investment capital, there can be no marketing, engineering or operations unless there are strong sales. In effect, sales have become the fuel for the engine of innovation (if it wasn’t always). This is a critical issue for Ottawa.

Without sales (and revenue), the part of this town that is not funded by an external source – government or VC – will wither or die and that is hard for us to watch. The executives who formed the Sales Leadership Initiative have an immense amount of sales experience and want to leverage their success to help the community be stronger…and the Sales Leadership Initiative seems a perfect venue.

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Posted by: Eliot Burdett on June 17, 2008

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Posted in: Marketing strategy — 1 Comment