IT Data Centered

The “follow up call” (and having to deflect uninteresting pitches from overzealous PR folks) has always been a burden to busy reporters, but it’s also often been responsible for a significant percentage of stories that are successfully placed.

Unfortunately, good / highly relevant / perfectly crafted email pitches get caught by spam filters just as easily as careless spam.  Busy journalist inboxes get full – and even when you have something great to offer to a journalist with whom you have a solid relationship, sometimes the timing is such that you just don’t get a response to your email.  Picking up the phone is just something that successful PR people often do.

There are many occasions to pick up the phone as a PR person, but there is very little discussion (or training within PR firms) about HOW to use the phone effectively.

In media outreach, it’s implicit that when you call a journalist, you are defying their preference of being pitched by email (or some other social networking mechanism).   But oftentimes when you have something really good to offer and contact a journalist to follow up on a pitch, you learn that they never saw your pitch – and it is not a rare event to be thanked for having followed up via phone.  The idea that no journalists like to be called is less accurate than the idea that no journalists like to have their time wasted by unappealing subject matter, period.  Tech PR people feel that edge in the voice when the journalist picks up the phone, and it requires a certain kind of skill / diplomacy to get your foot in the door fast enough in the first moments of the conversation to intrigue, while at the same time not coming across as pushy.  But it’s the quality of what you have to offer that ultimately decides your fate typically (and the delivery) – and not the vehicle you use to deliver it.

In sales, many organizations find that email marketing, direct mail, advertising and other mechanisms may make the company FEEL “busy” and “productive” – but in fact the phone call is the #1 mechanism by which the vast majority of their sales opportunities are initiated and closed.  Often it’s fear of unpleasant response and rejection that precludes sales folks from making the volume of calls that they should.  And similarly, in PR, many media relations folks are so gunshy about that rejection that they do not make very many calls (and when they do, they are so fearful that they can’t choke out a short, coherent explanation about why what they have to offer is valuable).  A whole separate discussion is the fact that many of the folks that DO use the phone are so disrespectful / pushy in their approach that they are largely responsible for the “follow up call’s” bad rep.

But it’s amazing how many more results tech PR folks who use the phone regularly get.  Without exception, the best tech PR pros out there do NOT just send one way correspondences to journalists over the ether.  They have incredible salesmanship, are very savvy to what the journalists they pitch are actively writing about – and they are able to leverage a brief window of opportunity on the phone (and real time feedback from the reporters) to find an “in.”  The phone call typically results in at least some dialogue – but the rejected email / social media pitch is over the second it gets ignored.

These days many publications (especially the top tier tech blogs) not only do not publish individual author phone #’s – they don’t publish ANY phone number.

Not expecting any sympathy for the downward spiral of the “follow up call”, given the overall PR industry’s abuse of journalists’ time.  Obviously if every important author had a published phone number and honored all the calls they got, they’d never have time to get any work done.  But when you think back on how many relationships you made via phone, how many stories you placed that you would not have otherwise – it’s a little sad it’s been relegated to third class citizen as a communication mechanism.

Phones don’t hurt journalists.  PR people hurt journalists. ;)

My first job was bussing tables.  Other menial jobs through age 18 included cooking jobs, valet parking, construction, etc.  Altogether a pretty good dose of crummy jobs, most of which did not include tips or really any type of intellectual gratification.  I’m not bitter about it.  Important lessons, character building, blah blah blah.

But today I’m tired of EVERY place I go having a tip jar.  Somebody pours you a coffee into a cup … there is a tip jar.  They have tip jars even at the fast food restaurants here in San Francisco.  At a CAR RENTAL place one time I saw a tip jar.  Where does it end?

Where I’m going with this – back to the tech industry – is that I’m similarly tired of companies that I buy a product or service from reaching back to me to ask me for something after the purchase.

AT&T, after installing our business’ internet connection and phone lines at our new offices, calls up with a “customer service satisfaction” survey.  Would it ever occur to them that regardless of a business’ satisfaction with their service, a survey call during business hours is unwelcome?

Asking for feedback, kudos or references is the white collar tip jar that’s gone too far.  It’s after almost every B2B transaction these days.  If a contractor provides any sort of service to you and does an even mediocre job, it is almost guaranteed that they are going to ask to list you as a client on their site, or for a quote, or to give them feedback on how to do a better job.

ITDatabase uses Salesforce.com.  We also use a number of Atlassian products.  They sell completely different types of products.  Salesforce.com is publicly traded and persistently in the spotlight.  Atlassian is private and based in Australia.  So comparisons are truly apples to oranges in many respects.

I wrote previously about three things Atlassian could teach Salesforce.com about building web applications.  Now I just wanted to share a couple of words – as a customer of both companies – on why I will be attending Atlassian’s Starter Day event, but won’t be attending Salesforce’s DreamForce event.

When I visit the DreamForce web site (or see any email marketing from Salesforce.com about any of its events), it smacks of a vanity exercise to me.  The thrust of the events always seem to be Salesforce.com describing some crystal palace (”cloud computing” or otherwise) and Marc Beniof bloviating.  That formula has worked very well for them in getting publicity.  But why would I (or our employees) spend a full day out of the office to hear some long-winded advertorial from a vendor that we already pay?  At face value, little of the marketing language of Salesforce.com’s events speaks to me as a user of their product, OR to the specific challenges and opportunities that we face as a start-up.  Salesforce.com is a great company with great revenues (and I am just a pipsqueak small software startup founder, so what do I know?), but just sayin’ that I find the hubris in their marketing approach very off-putting in general.  They absolutely ran circles around Siebel in PR and marketing in their rise to the top – but now the posturing often seems disingenuous and pointless.  The product has changed very little in the three years I’ve been using it, and I’m often wondering why as a start-up we had to subscribe to the “enterprise” version to get the degree of functionality that we needed.

This morning I got an invite from Atlassian to a startup event they are hosting in San Francisco in June.

“We won’t be talking about Atlassian products at this event. Instead, we thought it would be cool to run an event that is about the business of startups.”

Quite a difference.  A company whose products are so kick-ass that they have every reason to throw a bunch of hubris around.  But instead they are coming from a humble and helpful position, and just giving away great, highly relevant content.

Look at this speaker / topic lineup:

• Nathan Stoll, Founder, Aardvark (Google) on User-Centered Design
• Avner Ronen, CEO and Founder, Boxee on Questioning Everything
• Mike Volpe, VP, Hubspot on Non-traditional Marketing
• Steve Ginsberg, VP, Pandora on Operations and Scaling
• Glenn Kelman, CEO, Redfin on Iterating the Idea
• Jochen Frey, CTO, ScoutLabs on 3 Things Every Dev Team should Know
• Mike Cannon-Brooks and Scott Farquhar, CEO and Founders, Atlassian, on the Art of the Bootstrap
• Just added: Mike Arrington, Founder, TechCrunch

Throw in the fact that they choose an expensive venue but are only charging Atlassian customers $10 to attend (it’s currently $799 for the “Early Bird Special” for Dreamforce).  The content is highly relevant to us as a start-up.  The gesture itself is generous (and they are clearly eating the costs of producing the event instead of trying to turn a quick buck).

One feels like I’m being invited to pay a lot of money to hear a lot of grandstanding and visionary rhetoric aimed at A-tier business press in attendence.  The other feels like a genuine invitation to an interesting and useful event by a company whose products evolve at a high rate and are very tied to the pulse of what we actually need.

0 – the number of followers that we currently have on Twitter (due to ‘auto follow’ bug follower shut-down)

30 - the avg. number of minutes per day I spent on Twitter when I first started checking it out ~four years ago (out of curiosity WRT the hysterical praise and promises of paradigm shifting I was from tech industry colleagues)

30 – the number of minutes per MONTH I now spend on Twitter (based on the availability of much more reliable, interesting, quality content from n- number of other preferred sources that I already don’t have time to check)

1 – on a scale of 1 to 10, with one being the least important – how I rate Twitter as a marketing channel for our company, compared to all other marketing channels that we use / have used

10-25% – the estimated percentage of time when on Twitter over the last two years that I’ve experienced the fail whale, a “temporarily unvailable” message, or some other type of user experience snafu

1,336 – number of mentions that Twitter got in a six month period in top tier business press (according to a report that we compiled)

534 – number of clips that IBM got in the same six month period in those same top tier business press publications

$0 – the amount of profits that Twitter has made to date

$5.3 billion – the amount of profits that IBM made last year

0 – my interest in reading anything else from social media pundits about Twitter (or social media in general, for that matter)

HARO, Profnet, Reporter Connection – there are numerous matchmaking services out there where reporters post queries and PR folks respond.  Often the queries are from relatively obscure authors and publications, and occasionally there are queries from more mainstream publications.  Many PR folks have success stories where the right query hit at the right time, for the right client, and a great result happened.  The services have their value, no question.

But what I really don’t get is – who would respond to an anonymous / “cloaked” query (that is, one where the author and / or source name are obscured)?  Under what circumstance would that ever make sense?  I don’t care if the subject matter is dead-on with what a company’s product or service does.  I can’t think of a single condition where just offering up any information or your precious time makes sense if you don’t even know who you are talking to?

Is anyone so desperate for publicity that they would just haphazardly approach any anonymous stranger?

Can anyone enlighten me on when that would ever make sense?

Anyone who enters PR firm agency life quickly hears peers prodding clients for reference-able customers.  They prod for “customer traction” press releases, and case studies that they can ship to target journalists.  There is this idea – seldom challenged – that a blueprint of how one customer uses your product will attract publicity, which will attract other customers and so on.

I’d argue that the product / service is what attracts customers, far more than superficial arm-waving.

Every day the “customer win” press releases that I see (especially from the other research co’s that we compete with) have some of the most breathless commentary about the incredible chasm their solution helped their customer cross.  Like so much hot air, these things often lack any real authenticity or substance, and the throwaway customer quote is so clearly contrived by the vendor that it’s rendered useless.  There are moments where we see things in PR that make us sort of embarrassed for the profession.  Today I saw one competitor list out “companies that rely on our solution” (as if the research solution were that customer’s sole lifeline to prosperity).

I’m just saying, every customer that we have won so far took their own free trial, did their own due diligence, and decided that it helped them conduct their business.  And I’m sure as hell not going to bother any of them to testify on our behalf about our supposed awesomeness (if they feel so inclined they can do it on their own terms, in their own forums).  #1, I don’t think it’s their responsibility (they already paid us, so they shouldn’t have to do anything else but use our product… if anything, they should complain that we are taking so long to get the other cool new stuff we’re working on released).  #2, I’d rather spend the time (required to get their quote and put out some lame customer win announcement) trying to make our product better.  We think our product is good at some stuff, but we have much higher expectations for where we are taking it, and we certainly aren’t interested in posing on some platform like we just won a bodybuilding contest.

The more I engage our target customers, the more I’m noticing that some of the highest revenue companies in the tech industry do not stoop to produce embarrassing rhetoric about how awesome they are.  No breathless fodder about how revolutionary their product is or how visionary their spokespersons are.  For many, they don’t even list a single customer on their web site.

Their customers they earn by the merits of their product.  And their competitors literally have no clues to seeing where they are getting the most traction.

Could that be a clue for the rest of us, that breathless arm-waving and self-promotion is now passe in tech marketing and PR?

A tech PR principal I recently spoke with offered an interesting observation.  That is, if you were a noob to tech PR (fresh college grad or otherwise) and were sniffing around popular PR influencer blogs and books to try to get a beat on how to advance your career, you might infer (by witnessing their behavior) that this is the recipe to becoming successful as a PR pro:

• Frequent ostentatious displays of one’s connections (referencing relationships with highly popular biz press journalists, identifying a leading analyst as a “close personal friend” – that kind of stuff)
• Contriving a sort of “edgy” personality or persona and frequently mentioning unusual personal life activities to further brand oneself as unique
• Forwarding / retweeting content more than actually READING it (i.e., misinterpreting that it is more important to appear knowledgeable than to actually BE knowledgeable)
• Frequently referring to one’s social networking prowess
• Frequently claiming to have been “first” to spot an emerging trend, etc.
• Being dismissive out of hand of anything “tactical” (requiring grunt work) in favor of anything “strategic”

I’m going to exclude the trite ones like the bait and switch (senior staff promised in pitch, then junior staff does all the work … subterfuge on really long reports … etc.).  But if I were sitting in the client seat, these are 8 things that I would be leery of.  If the collective list amounts to the high percentage of how your tech PR firm is spending your dime, time to start busting some heads, because there are too many people good at the profession to put up with this b.s.

#1- Earnest Cheerleading About Social Media Opportunities (but no evidence of buyers)
Over the course of two years, almost every tech PR firm galvanized a social media practice.  There was money to be made based on the dream that social media held vast riches for every tech company that jumped in with their marketing desires (provided they had the right sherpa).  Well guess what, a lot of tech vendors that have endeavored into social media get disproportionately less out of it than they put into it (compared with their other marketing efforts).  If your tech PR firm is continually beating the drum about the importance of social media without showing you specific evidence that your BUYERS are on those channels, they are spinning your wheels.  [this is not to say that there are no tech PR firms that are leveraging social media with incredible results for their clients - but IMHO this applies to a smaller percentage than the former]

#2- Spending a Lot of Time Chasing Everyman Opportunities

Editorial calendar items, queries on journalist / PR matchmaking services – there are a number of run-of-the-mill opportunities that come over the transom for tech PR people.  If your tech PR firm is busily patting itself on the back for pursuing these low hanging fruit opportunities, they are not very sophisticated.  And if they are spending large volumes of time pursuing everyman opportunities, they aren’t digging enough into the relationships that are uniquely available to your company / technology.

#3- Frequently Setting You Up with People Trying To Sell YOU
There are many tech analyst firms out there – but there are few that actually move products (especially with enterprise tech).  If your tech PR firm is constantly setting you up with obscure analyst firms that have little influence and are spending the second half of the call hard selling you on sponsored white papers and webinars – that is a terrible use of your time.  Same applies to pay for play speaking opps and awards (few are worth it).  Your tech PR firm’s job is deliver mostly needles and occasional haystack (impossible to hit home runs all the time) – not the other way around.

#4- Not Understanding that It’s Different Strokes for Different Folks
Opportunities that drive customers are different than opportunities that reach developer audiences which are different than opportunities that reach channel / partner ecosystem targets.  Tech PR isn’t just about snatching and grabbing anything that moves and hoping for the best (well – that actually was PR in large part in the late 90s / early 00s).  Tech PR firms today (the good ones) know your business.  They know your pipeline, understand your different audiences, and truly (not just lip service) understand how PR can / should support your discreet objectives.

#5- Learning Who To Contact On Your Dime
The price to entry to a new tech account should be already knowing who all the most important authors / bloggers are that cover the tech category.  I can’t imagine hiring a tech PR firm without first being 100% confident that they are armed with this info.  But I hear it all the time – tech PR firms that have been working with clients for a number of months and STILL don’t know precisely who writes about that client’s tech category(ies).

#6- Complacency About Learning Your Technology
Few people love to read white papers / documentation.  But a lot of tech PR people are unapologetic about their lack of intellectual curiosity about their client’s product.  In fact, I’ve met a lot of in-house marketing and PR people who view technical aptitude / understanding of the product as somehow being beneath them.  It’s disgusting.  What an ignorant mentality.  The fact is in this business, the more you put into understanding subject matter, the more dangerous you are as a PR person.  Some of the very biggest stories in the tech industry are triggered by nuance – and it’s the people that really know their shit that are able to grasp those opportune moments on behalf of their clients.  If your tech PR firm isn’t hungry for more info about the intricacies of your product, asking to speak with product and sales engineers, you’ve got a real problem.

#7- Turning You Into a Publisher, But Not Bringing You Traffic
Your tech PR firm wants you (or one or more of your company’s star employees) to author by-lines or write blog posts?  There’s a big opportunity cost to doing so.  It takes hours to write something good (as opposed to this drivel I crank out here), and most people who don’t write really underestimate that.  Yes, there are some companies who have gotten a lot of mileage out of company founders / employees writing provocative content.  But if your tech PR firm is turning you into a publisher, they sure as hell better hold up their end of the bargain by driving people to read it.  Even the most brilliant piece – if it just disappears into the ether, it’s not worth your time to produce it.  People didn’t read Jonathan Schwartz’s Sun Microsystems blog because he or the content was interesting – they read it because Sun put a lot of PR / marketing resource towards driving people to it.  If you’ve got something compelling to say and your tech PR firm can fulfill the readership side, go for it.  But if you are repeatedly being tapped to write, and it’s not moving the needle in any measurable way, what’s the benefit?

#8- Not Moving the Needle on Your Site Traffic
In a recent survey that we conducted, 34% of tech PR responders said that they did NOT use analytics to measure how publicity drove traffic to their clients’ sites.  WTF!!!???  It’s 2010.  Your company’s web site is arguably the most important marketing / sales asset that you have.  The formula isn’t rocket science – you do A/B testing on landing pages, and one of the biggest roles of publicity is to drive POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS to that landing page.  If this schema sounds foreign to whatever dog and pony show your tech PR firm is describing when you speak with them each week, things are seriously broken.

For the last five years, the m.o. of larger tech vendors in particular has been to launch a new product or service a few weeks out ahead of a tech event, and then to use the event to showcase the product and conduct follow-up interviews on-site.

Less sophisticated tech vendors often make the rookie mistake of launching AT an event and relying 100% on the event’s press list to try to create some sort of groundswell of interest at the actual event.  In their irrational exuberance, they fail to realize that by doing so they are competing against many factors 100% out of their control:

• Other larger vendors that have briefings / press conferences / demos scheduled with the most important attending press during the event
• The lack of quality of the press list itself
• Journalists on the press list that just flat out decide not to attend, or otherwise get pulled into a more important assignment
• The general anxiety / oddities that occur at events (otherwise responsible journalists have a knack for being flaky / not showing for briefings – and carefully coordinated sequences of interviews are tough to maintain)

When you launch out ahead of an event, you get many advantages:

• Many folks that write about your technology are likely not even in attendance at that event (launching ahead allows you to pursue the full spectrum)
• You have perfect control / efficiency of the process (as opposed to being totally stressed out / waiting by your booth with a twitchy spokesperson for a journalist who is 15 minutes late)
• It’s easier to sit back and measure the publicity as it rolls in and take advantage of other opportunities that pop up (as opposed to being pulled in 10 different directions at the event)
• Announcing before gives you the ability to use the event to try to get the attention of additional journalists (and if you did a good job with the launch a week or so prior to, all those additional results are just gravy – and you’re not stressed out by needing them)

A lot of new tech vendors that haven’t been through the events madness before get seduced by this idea that they are going to emerge in front of hundreds of captivated journalists / buyers at the event.  That just doesn’t happen to 99.99% of vendors.  Your odds are much better rolling the dice a week or so prior to.

Which raises the question – when IS the event itself the best place to make the product / company launch announcement?

At ITDatabase, we consider editorial calendars to be a sort of checkbox feature for folks evaluating our service.  That is, few people who ultimately buy our product did so because of editorial calendars – but it’s a creature comfort that they want to just know they have.

Every tech PR firm has at least one junior level person internally who is tasked to be on the hunt for edcals that are of potential interest to their clients.  Most of the tech vendors I speak with (handling PR in-house) don’t even care an iota about editorial calendars.

There are a few publications that dutifully maintain editorial calendars and actually honor all of the items on there and really leverage it to streamline communications with tech PR folks.  Network World’s weekly editorial highlights really come to mind as the sterling example.  There is sufficient descriptive text for each item where a tech PR person can clearly decipher the relevance to what they may have to offer the publication.  There is a specific contact person (and their email listed) and 99.99% of the time it is the correct contact.  Informationweek’s is similarly good.

But for every Network World there are 50 publications (no point in naming any specific ones) whose editorial calendars are useless.  No contact is listed (or worse, the wrong contact).  Or you might take the time to write a perfectly tailored pitch that demonstrates you understand the publication’s previous coverage on that topic and have something valuable – only to find out that they no longer plan to write it.  In most cases we find that the editorial calendars are ONLY used as instruments for the publication to organize its sales efforts and to prove to ad targets that their tech category of interest is sufficiently on the agenda to warrant taking out an ad.

The thing that we find the most annoying is when a publication’s editorial calendar is extremely vague on individual items.  June Issue:  Virtualization.  Well – what the hell does that mean?  Desktop virtualization?  Storage virtualization?  Server virtualiation?  Virtualization has been around for a long time now and there are many different potential angles.  So you pick up the phone and call about it, and the managing editor #1 isn’t aware of the story; #2 seems annoyed that you called; #3 doesn’t know who is going to be assigned to the story; and, sometimes #4 doesn’t know what virtualization even is!

Look – the time that tech PR people spend chasing down editorial calendars needs to be levelled out to the actual importance level of editorial calendars, which is somewhere near zero.  Have a great virtualization product or story to tell?  There are hundreds of authors / bloggers that cover it all the time.  THAT is where you should be spending your time.  Instead of chasing down some extremely vague editorial calendar item – spend that time pursuing the exact person at that publication who writes about virtualization.

The question is (for tech PR firms in particular) – why spend ANY time on editorial calendars when we all know how relatively fruitless and unimportant they are.  If I were hiring a tech PR firm today, I would instruct them to spend 100% of their time engaging folks actively writing about my tech topics of interest and 0% of their time on editorial calendars (well, maybe with the exception of the quality ones like Network World and Informationweek).

Sure, you might miss the occasional obvious opportunity, but who cares – you are going to win the war by focusing where all the action is.

Agree / disagree?  I would love to hear any tech PR person try to defend the importance of editorial calendars in the grand scheme of things.