2009 February

Archive for February, 2009

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The importance of what lies behind a headline

By Danny Sullivan

I just read John Rogers’ AP report on the PR phenomenon that surrounds “Octomom”, the California mother who successfully gave birth to eight babies last month. It seems the initial widespread news reporting of the “miracle” story has quickly given way to almost universal derision of the woman for her irresponsibilty in having more children and her attempts to gain financially from the story. Indeed, the mother’s publicist, who had represented her for free, was forced to end his work with her after receiving death threats. Unbelievable.

But this example shows how quickly the double-edged PR sword can turn on you. If the mother had opted for privacy following the birth, the breaking news stories would have come and gone, she would likely have had to lie low for a few weeks until the buzz died down, and might then have been left in relative peace to get on with changing all those nappies. Instead, it appears she opted to capitalize on the PR, and is now paying the price for doing so. Ultimately, the realities of her full story did not meet with the same reaction as the initial focus on the miracle of eight surviving babies.

I’m not sure it would have made any difference to Octomom’s situation, but there is a lesson to be taken from this. Focusing on a single key message, whether it be eight babies or a “world-first” technology, can be a tremendous way to generate headlines, but there always comes a point at which your story’s surface will be scratched and the deeper details will be revealed. Whether you’re planning a product launch, publishing the results of a study, or announcing a new business strategy, make sure that whole story stands up to scrutiny or the initial headlines will always be superceded by the truth.

Technorati Tags: Octomom, octuplets, messaging, marketing, public relations

Inside Sir Terry’s start-up engine

By Leo Valiquette

“Venture capital is dead. It’s gone.”

Sir Terry Matthews didn’t mince words Thursday morning as the keynote speaker at OCRI’s Technology Executive Breakfast. Not that he ever does. And while some might argue that statement about the status of Canada’s venture capital industry, or at least its level of activity in the nation’s capital, may be a bit premature, that’s not the point.

The point is, who cares?

Matthews and partner Michael Cowpland began the first incarnation of Mitel in 1972 with persistence, sweat and a $4,000 bank loan. That was enough to get their first product to market in nine months. This was followed by Mitel’s breakthrough product: a PBX phone system with a software switch. Mitel beat out about 40 larger competitors to win a watershed contract with AT&T, the first time, Matthews said, that the telecommunications giant contracted out. That deal, and a $250,000 grant through Canada’s IRAP program, took Mitel from zero to a 20-per-cent global market share in five years and made millionaires out of penny investors.

And while sheer persistence and hard work were part of the secret sauce for Mitel’s success, and for every success Matthews has had since then as the man behind the creation of more than 80 high-tech ventures, he cited an even more important ingredient: the core competency of partnerships.

Partnerships build technology clusters. Partnerships allow a company to capitalize on another’s strengths without having to carry the overhead of developing a particular area of expertise in house. Partnerships take advantage of another’s time and money invested in R&D to compliment your own.

Matthews holds Nortel’s utter aversion to partnerships to blame in no small degree for the company’s misfortunes.

And while there undoubtedly are challenges in the marketplace at present, Matthews insisted there is a resurgence at hand as ambitious and nimble entrepreneurs of the next generation make their mark. They just need a commitment of time and mentorship from those with experience and money to invest. Venture capital is irrelevant. Time is what’s important.

Matthews’ approach is to find the key contact in a post-secondary institution passionate about commercializing ideas into start-up companies to help him cherry pick the cream of the crop from among new grads. He wants to work with the handful who have the drive, ambition and adaptability critical to surviving and thriving in tough times. He puts these teams together, puts his resources behind them, and sets out to identify and develop a viable product and market niche. By engaging with the market, he will guide this team through the process of honing, refining and focusing the idea until there is a viable business ready to be formally launched.

In return for this intensive mentoring and a high-pressure work schedule that pays little attention to weekends and holidays, each team member is paid the lofty salary of $25,000. However, what they should be paid but are not is parlayed into ownership stakes in the new company.

Matthews believes there is no more effective way to quickly bring a product to market. And being first to market is the only way for North America and Europe to compete in a global economy that is now flat with few if any true trade barriers. With Asia pumping out engineering talent that works for a 10th of what ours does, trying to compete on cost is a death sentence.

So the next time you hear someone pining for the return of the good ol’ days of the telecom boom, or whining about the demise of the venture-capital industry, do as Matthews does and take a chapter from Darwin: it is not the strongest or the most intelligent that survive, but the ones most capable of adapting.

Technorati Tags: Terry Matthews, Mitel, Nortel, startup, IRAP, venture capital, OCRI, business development, commercialization

We’re now Twits!

By Francis Moran

When we launched this blog about 18 months ago, I blamed congenital social media addict Alec Saunders for persuading me that I and my colleagues here at inmedia PR had enough to say that we should be blogging. Nothing we’ve seen in the time since would persuade me he was wrong; our blog has hugely increased our online presence, vastly boosted the ratings for our corporate web site, and both brought us interesting business opportunities and helped validate our expertise on others.

Now we take the next step. Twitter.

And, as I wrote in my very first Tweet, if Saunders is to blame for making me a blogger, then Scott Lake has to take responsibility for making me a Twit. Scott has been pushing me to join the twitterati for a while now, and last week, I did. You can follow me at @francismoran. The tipping point for me was this blog post from the folks at Velocity about how they use many different social media tools, including Twitter, to gain the greatest possible leverage for good pieces of content they generate for their clients.

Now, much as I like to claim to be an early adopter, I’m not terribly early to this particular party. In fact, I’m not even the first person at inmedia to start a Twitter account. That honour belongs to my colleague Linda Forrest (@lforrestinmedia), who wrote her first update in May last year and has been a bit more active while on maternity leave. (We all know that first-time Mums with months-old babies have oodles of time on their hands, right Linda?)

Scott has promised to drop by and give me a crash course in how to make the most of this interesting social media tool. For my part, I think I’ll use it for all the quick comments that seem to occur to me in the course of a week, things insufficiently detailed or profound to warrant a full blog post. We’ll also add a tool to this blog that automatically issues a tweet when we write a new post. I’ll tweet about other posts I read in my hundreds-deep RSS feed, participate in some of the conversations that are going in the twittersphere and, like Velocity, draw the broader web’s attention to some of our clients’ successful content generation.

As with our blog, we’ll keep you posted on how this goes. As a newbie, though, I’d be keen to hear from readers who have had good or bad experiences with Twitter, and how you use it.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, media relations, social media, Alec Saunders, Scott Lake

How stale is your contact list?

By Leo Valiquette

There is no question that we PR types are often taken to task for blitzing the world with news of little relevance or importance or, at least, for failing to ensure that the news is relevant and important to the hapless targets in range of our scatter guns.

In an ongoing series of posts chronicling his study of the pitches that flood his inbox, research analyst Josh Bernoff has been examining why three quarters of the PR email he receives is irrelevant. He makes the point of saying, “I really like working with PR people, I just don’t like all of their tactics.” After working for 14 years as an analyst and being barraged by tens of thousands of emails during that time, he believes his exercise in navel-gazing is well justified.

Among the points he makes is that far too much of the email he receives is related to research areas he covered years before, but is not relevant to what he is doing now. Obviously, too little research is done to ensure information in a contact database is up to date.

The simple fact is, things change. Publications fold and people move on to new jobs or assume new responsibilities. When it comes to those media contact and editorial calendar databases to which many of us subscribe, their accuracy and timeliness is often dependent on media outlets voluntarily responding to requests to update their information. I can say from previous experience as a business journal editor bombarded by irrelevant pitches that such requests often go unanswered.

In the end, the most effective way to verify if a particular journalist or editor is an appropriate target for the news you have to pitch is to visit their publication’s website.

Case in point. We recently re-engaged with a client after a two-year hiatus to put out some news for them. It had been a long time since we created their target media list and we emphasized the value of budgeting into the project the time and cost necessary to go through the list one name at a time to verify and update the information.

They saw our point, and thankfully so. Forty to 50 per cent of the contacts we had were no longer accurate for reasons that included staff turnover, defunct publications, and changes to the email addresses and phone numbers of those contacts who were still appropriate targets for this particular client’s news. If we hadn’t undertaken this process, up to half our outreach on this client’s behalf would have been a misfire.

Not all media outlets are forthcoming on their “Contact Us” or “About Us” pages with individual staff bios, beats covered and contact information, but most are. It can be tedious to visit dozens of websites to dig up and verify this kind of information, but without a doubt, it is the only assured way to get your client’s story where it needs to go.

Technorati Tags: pitching, media relations, contact databases

Two inmedia clients among OCRI awards finalists

By Francis Moran

Two inmedia clients, PIKA Technologies Inc. and Vocantas Inc., are finalists in two different categories of the 2009 OCRI Awards. Interestingly, both work with advanced voice technologies.

PIKA, a developer of media-processing hardware and software, made the cut in the Product of the Year category while Vocantas, which develops advanced interactive voice-response systems, is a finalist for Technology Commercialization Partnership.

We’ll be cheering on these favoured finalists and all the outstanding Ottawa companies that will be waiting for the envelope at the OCRI Awards Gala April 8.

Technorati Tags: OCRI Awards, PIKA, Vocantas

Media train, but don’t overdo it!

By Danny Sullivan

Last week was a particularly uncomfortable one for four ex-banking bigwigs here in the UK. They faced a public grilling from British MPs about their roles in the events that led to two of the country’s biggest banks needing to be rescued with taxpayers’ money.

The extensive media training that each received was widely reported on, and was even raised during the session itself. “Are you expressing sympathy because your PR advisers have told you to do so?” queried one MP.

Thank goodness not many PR folk will ever have to prepare their organisations to face such a high-profile public dressing-down, but media training is still an important element that serves its purpose well, no matter the profile of your company.

Unless you are partly responsible for the near-collapse of a major bank, you probably don’t need to go through the kind of rigourous training that the four chaps in London doubtless endured in the lead up to the grilling. In general, media training should not lead to the detriment of personality.

The golden rule of speaking to the media centres on the fact that they can only print or broadcast what you tell them, so stay on message. Yes, certain subjects and situations require more focus on key messages than others, and the bigger you are, the more careful you need to be. For the majority of tech companies, however, building a successful ongoing rapport with their target media is just as important as ensuring your top three messages make it into print.

Stifling an engaging and entertaining orator to try and exert control over the resulting coverage will serve only to irritate the media or, at the very least, make for an unmemorable interview. Far better for the interviewer to encounter an executive who is happy to explore additional areas of discussion in a more casual manner. This may mean that you lose some of the focus of the message, but you’ll have left behind a much happier reporter, and hopefully one who’ll want to come back and talk again some time.

Technorati Tags: Media training, Crisis communications, Media relations

Straight from the dragon’s mouth

By Leo Valiquette

“Even if there’s blood on the street there’s always somebody making money. You just have to make sure you’re on the right side of it.”

The son of poor Croatian immigrants, he sold his first company for $100 million in 2000. His second company, launched in 2003, is now the largest privately held IT solutions provider and integrator in Canada. When not residing in one of his posh homes, he holds court in CBC’s Dragon’s Den.

Robert Herjavec is a living example of what hard work and vision can achieve. He took the stage to close out this week’s 2009 Ottawa Business Summit and treated his audience to his insights on what it takes to achieve business and personal success.

I scribbled furiously the entire time he spoke and have distilled his pearls of wisdom to the following:

1. There is no stereotypical external factor for success. Fame and fortune is not reserved for the beautiful people in the world, nor can a successful person be judged by appearances. One of his neighbours has a company with 12,000 staff, an original Monet on his wall and a 15-year-old car in the driveway. And, bad people do succeed. “There are people who beat their dog and run a great business.”

2. However, he has never met a successful person who didn’t have a purpose, and that purpose must be more than the accumulation of wealth. If all one pursues is money, they will hit a wall. Herjavec’s goal was to build the best company in its industry. The money followed.

3. Achieving that success requires vision. When he started his second company, the problem was too much available money and not enough vision about what it should be. Money keeps you in the game. It doesn’t make a good company.

(Geez, have we learned that lesson in Ottawa after the VC excesses of the tech boom?)

4. And on that note, with particular relevance to Ottawa: If you build a better mousetrap, the world will not beat a path to your door. There is no such thing as a good idea. It’s all about execution. Sales and marketing. And while he would hire the fellow who can sell ice to Eskimos, Herjavec would much rather have the fellow with the foresight to sell water in the desert beside a broken-down bus.

5. “Discipline is the art of doing what is necessary even when you don’t want to.” Inaction is easy. Citing his own recent experience running a marathon for the first time and the amputee with a prosthetic leg who passed him, Herjavec put it plain: “Winners find a way, losers find an excuse.” Which invariably means, ”For you to win, somebody has to lose.”

6. The importance of leadership, which he defined as the ability to get people to do something they wouldn’t otherwise be able to achieve–lift them from their comfort zone.

7. It’s all about sales. “Nothing matters until you sell something.” Which also speaks to the value of branding and marketing to drive those sales. But after sales comes service – sales may sell the first night in a hotel room, but service will keep the guest coming back.

8. Business is a sprint. “You’ve got to go now.” It’s better to take action than sit around planning the next five days. Once you secure an opportunity, then it becomes a marathon.

9. Feed the whales, not the minnows. Especially in a tough economy, devote your time and effort to those prospects, those core customers, who will support your business in tough times. He didn’t cite the 80-20 rule, but it obviously applies. For example, Herjavec’s business positions itself around high value, high touch service. When faced with a customer who likes to shop around and bargain hunt just to keep his suppliers on their toes, his preference is to dump them in favour of more loyal customers who appreciate the value of what they are getting for their money.

10. And when it comes to suppliers for your business, it’s a love/hate relationship. At the end of the day, your business is your business and they’re looking out for their business, not yours.

11. Learn to focus, which he defined as the ability to make the most of the 24 hours in a day and ”distinguish the truly important from the urgent that happens every day.”

12. Your business is not your family, it’s just business. Avoid emotional attachments.

13. Make it fun and be resilient. Nobody likes a negative person. What’s important is not what you say, but how you make people feel. There may be really bad days when you just want to walk away, but that just proves you care. What’s vital is having the resilience to believe that tomorrow will be a better day.

14. It’s not who you know, but how brutally honest you are with yourself. “The worst lies you tell in business are the ones you tell yourself.”

15. And lastly, business is like a game of Whac-A-Mole. Keep swinging until you hit something.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneurship, management, Robert Herjavec, Dragon’s Den, Ottawa Business Summit

Having skin in the game

By Leo Valiquette

“What we’ve done is turn our people into raving capitalists.”

Not the label one might think to apply to the employees of Canadian airline WestJet, but that was how Duncan Bureau, WestJet’s vice president of sales, characterized the company’s singular focus on customer service while delivering the opening keynote at the 2009 Ottawa Business Summit this week.

The summit was a joint effort between the Ottawa Business Journal, The Canadian Association of Family Enterprise and the City of Ottawa to provide business owners and executives with education, information and inspiration.

In a cut-throat, commoditized business that’s seen dozens of players fold in the past couple of decades, WestJet has in 13 years grown from an upstart, with three planes serving only a handful of destinations in Western Canada, to a fleet of 76 planes, 55 destinations, $806 million in cash and one of the highest earnings before tax margins among North American carriers.

Key to WestJet’s success has been its focus on cost efficiencies and finding ways to keep its fleet flying and generating revenue, such as partnering with Transat to fly its short-haul routes when Transat’s own narrow-body aircraft fleet for that purpose grew tired.

But perhaps the greatest difference has been made by a corporate culture that makes employees owners with a vested interest in the organization’s success. At present, about 87 per cent of WestJet’s employees are shareholders in the company. The value of profit-share payments to employees to date is approaching $150 million, more money, Duncan pointed out, than many airlines have made in that same period.

While this model may not be for everyone, in an industry where service is the strongest differentiator, the WestJet example includes a number of common sense lessons to achieve top-notch employee engagement and performance.

1. As Duncan emphasized, travellers are considered guests, and this emphasis on serving the needs of guests has resulted in 90 per cent of travellers who use the airline recommending it to others.

2. Build a culture of opportunity rather than entitlement, in which employees feel confident in taking the initiative to ensure an optimal customer experience. Employees are empowered to act and think like owners. At WestJet, “great customer service comes from the heart, not from a manual.” There is no weighty policy book. Nor do executives get the kinds of perks that create a divide with the rank and file, such as reserved parking.

3. Hire for attitude and train for ability. Except for pilots, of course. As Duncan said, he can’t make someone smile and demonstrate enthusiasm for their job.

4. Celebrate success and recognize excellence frequently and loudly.

5. On the flipside of that, don’t hesitate to sack the “duds” who don’t fit in or are not performing and threaten to poison the organization.

6. Communication. Communication. Communication. Maintain an active dialogue (which means the listening is happening on both ends) with employees.

7. And lastly, imbed in your culture the lessons learned in Kindergarten — share, play fair, don’t hit people, put things back where you found them, don’t take things that don’t belong to you, say sorry when you hurt someone, look both ways before you leap, and keep the balance between work, life and play.

Tomorrow I’ll offer the Dragon’s perspective from the afternoon keynote by Robert Herjavec, one of the five dragons on the CBC television series, Dragon’s Den.

Technorati Tags: Ottawa Business Journal, Canadian Association of Family Enterprise, City of Ottawa, WestJet, Duncan Bureau, management, employee engagement, retention

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Becca : That is an awesome post. You have really layed out your points in great detail. And also a great reminder for everyone.

Alexandra Reid : Thanks Brier! Glad you found it helpful :)

Brier Dodge : Great post Alex! I was at the social media breakfast and I think you did a great job summarizing Joi's points and information.

Colleen Wolak : Does anyone know of any good tools, free or paid, for gathering reviews on Yelp, Google, Yahoo, etc? We have 24 locations, so it's definitely time-consuming ...

Easymarketing : Entrepreneurship has become a way of life for those who creatively and innovatively make good use of informative research and ideas that are offered in the i...

David J. French : Good observations. Good example. Once you switch from lean to rich living, it is hard to go back. Ask any student.

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Archive for February, 2009

The importance of what lies behind a headline

Inside Sir Terry’s start-up engine

How stale is your contact list?

Two inmedia clients among OCRI awards finalists

Media train, but don’t overdo it!

Straight from the dragon’s mouth

Having skin in the game

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