No, YOU aren’t stupid. I was referring to other tech PR folks.
You know, the ones that spend 5 hours per day following journalists on Twitter, but don’t spend 5 hours in a whole month actually reading articles about their company or client’s tech category. YOU know that the only way to keep a pulse on the trends / competitor activities / transitions in individual journalists’ interests is to actually read their content! YOU aren’t intellectually lazy or otherwise disinterested in technology. YOU got into tech PR / marketing because YOU – *gasp* – like technology, and you want to be as smart as you can about the tech subject matter related to your daily efforts.
YOU aren’t still doing tech PR research like it’s 1999. Nope. I’m referring to the tech PR folks that think a bio written six months ago by a third party – based on a five minute conversation with an annoyed journalist (yes, by and large, tech authors HATE getting those calls) – will somehow give them the necessary intel to effectively pitch / forge a relationship with that journalist.
YOU don’t make sweeping assumptions about trends in tech media coverage based on reading just a few articles, or just taking someone else’s word for it. YOU like to get your hands dirty with proof, zero in on all the tech journalists covering that topic, and make YOUR decisions with scientific reasoning. YOU aren’t just looking for shortcuts – you’re looking for truth.
YOU don’t become so insulated in your own company’s efforts that you forget to frequently look at what’s going on in the tech world around you. YOU know that tech moves fast, that new companies pop up every day, that new tech trends and news patterns pop up every day – and that the only way to really detect these changes is to have a strong appetite for identifying / reading related tech content (publications AND blogs).
YOU aren’t naïve enough to think that any ‘monitoring’ tool that indiscriminately crawls content and has zero built in intelligence about the tech industry automagically delivers comprehensive measures of “what’s going on” in the tech universe. YOU would never entrust your tech media research to an automated monitoring tool unless you were 100% confident in the comprehensiveness of the tech authors / sources under its hood.
Sorry – I wasn’t talking about YOU when I said tech PR and Marketing is all about the content, stupid. Because YOU obviously already knew that despite all the platitudes thrown out about the obvious importance of “relationships” – from the point of view of the people you want to have “relationships” with, it’s the tech content (and your ability to discover it, read it and grok it) that makes you good at tech marketing and PR.
