IT Data Centered

When I see this on a tech publication …

… usually what follows is a really poor search experience.  I don’t know if Google Custom Search is tough to implement (we work with Lucene), or if web developers at the tech publications who use it are improperly implementing it – but it’s like hiring NASA to do your kid’s math homework and then the kid somehow bringing home a D.  It just doesn’t make any sense.

So many tech trades have Google Custom Search slapped onto their sites.  If you type in an exact tech phrase that you know the publication covers, I think the minimum expectation for a reader these days is to be able to sort by relevance, sort by date, or sort by author.  Few of the publications that have Google Custom Search implemented offer these basic conveniences.  Most just spit back articles by relevance – and often times, the most relevant matches aren’t even articles (but are promos for events they hosted in 2003, or other odd results).

I’m not interested to call out the offending publications.  But it’s really weird that any company whose main asset is content would make it so impossible for users to hone in on precisely what they are looking for.  Trying to find exactly which author at a specific publication most frequently writes about cloud computing or network attached storage or SOA?  If you hit the home page and see that Google Custom Search, typically the results are such a garbled mess that you can pretty much forget about it.

Another thing that’s really odd about this bizarre lack of respect for proper search configuration by so many of these tech trades is that many of them have actually digressed over the past 10 years.  Some of the very worst search experiences are on some of the most reputable trade publications (by the very largest publishers).  And some of these really poor search experience publications once had search that worked very fluidly / intuitively.  What happened?

How is social media any different than message boards, emails, IM, the phone, talking to someone on the street, carrier pigeons or smoke signals?

There are all kinds of ways that people can communicate with each other, and all kinds of ways that businesses can communicate with other businesses and consumers.  I don’t think that a scarcity of ways to communicate with people is a problem, I think that too many ways to communicate with people is a problem.  I don’t think that scarcity of ways to listen to customers is a problem, I think that scarcity of time to listen to customers is a problem (why else are so many corporate call centers automated and outsourced)?

I think short attention spans are a problem.  And too many people that like to hear themselves talk and too few people that actually have something interesting to say is a problem.  I don’t think that a n-new ways of facilitating communication between [people:people ... companies:people ... companies:companies] is really transforming to the same degree that I read about from so many social media blow-hards who are selling books and themselves on speaking circuits.  I think a lot of the folks out there fanning the flames the hardest on social media have a personal and / or commercial axe to grind.  There’s a whole lot of fluffy social language being tossed around by folks, and there are a lot of tech PR firms me-too’ing the exact same social media value propositions in their services.

Most times I search on tech topics of interest (virtualization, cloud computing) on social networks, the vast majority of social “conversations” are marketing people from tech vendors pointing back to marketing materials on their web sites.  I rarely see actual enterprise IT buyers on social networks expressing their purchase eval questions (that’s what I would find really interesting – not some product marketing person pointing to a webinar / white paper / whatever).  If a tech company that sells expensive hardware / software to a C- level technical audience is spending more than a small percentage of their overall sales efforts trolling on Twitter or Facebook for quality leads, I would be very concerned as a stockholder.

I don’t think that today’s social media fervor measures up to the true degree of transformation that is happening. I have read a lot of blogs and books by social media proponents.  I have watched a lot of videos, and I have seen some speeches in person.  There is a whole lot of fluff, and there are very few truly transformative discussions.  I don’t know if that’s more of a statement about social media or about marketing in general, but I feel like I’ve suspended my disbelief for more time than could be reasonably expected, and I’ve spoken with a lot of other tech marketing and PR folks who feel the same way (though they won’t be pulling the “social media services” from their site anytime soon).

I agree that any tech PR firm should be an expert in all the channels to deliver a message (and in some cases, a specific social channel might be the very best channel for delivery of a message to a specific audience).  But I think where the true talent lies is still in being able to understand a technology, an audience and a story well enough to tell it in an interesting way.  The few people who are really good at that – they are the very best PR people, regardless of whether they are blowing on the social media horn as heavily as everyone else out there.

It’s pretty amazing how many research tools (social media monitoring in particular) attempt to charm users with meaningless graphical overlays.

When I say meaningless, I’m referring to:

Share of Voice Metrics Based on Porous Datasets
Share of voice is an empty gesture if the underlying dataset is missing a substantial volume of the relevant authors and sources that cover a given topic.  If a search for “virtualization” turns up a result set that’s missing scores of relevant blogs and publications, whatever pretty share of voice chart that ensues is useless.

Sentiment Analysis
This is the one that I find particularly objectionable.  There are some extreme challenges in natural language processing that have yet to be conquered to make the margins of error even remotely acceptable for sentiment analysis in terms of raw text / tech news analysis.  Even processing a large set of unstructured data and determining what the theme is can be extremely difficult, with how many words in the English language have different meanings in different contexts.  The idea that you can slap some semantic foo on top of a huge volume of clips and determine which of them are positive or negative in tone is outrageous, and every single representation of sentiment analysis that I’ve seen applied to a substantive dataset of tech articles (and determining whether a specific vendor or product was mentioned in a positive or favorable light) has fallen short when drilled down.

Who buys that crap?  I’m guessing the same type of companies that leave real research work to interns … who consider a keen insight of the landscape too “low level” and “not strategic.”  IMHO (and in the opinion of the folks that sign up for ITDatabase), the killer app for interpreting news is still the human brain, which turns out to be incredibly efficient when it’s fed truly comprehensive datasets on whatever category of tech news it needs to disseminate.

Can either Share of Voice or Sentiment Analysis be pulled off effectively?  I’m sure.  I just have yet to see a solution that provides either share of voice or sentiment analysis that both #1- has a comprehensive / accurate dataset and #2- if there is semantic foo / taxonomies under the hood, the results aren’t extremely skewed by false positives.

When it comes to talking a big game, I don’t think that Salesforce.com has many rivals.  The company that proclaimed the death of software and credits itself with pioneering cloud computing (among other things) does a better job of describing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow than pretty much any other tech vendor out there, IMHO.  It is an outstanding sales organization.

When ITDatabase chose a CRM solution, Salesforce.com was more of a reflex than a carefully analyzed purchase.  I was intrigued by the workflow API and what was possible with other types of integration scenarios, and just by virtue of having used Salesforce.com previously there was that familiarity factor.  And even though the licensing is moderately expensive for the enterprise version (~$1k/seat/annual subscription), it just didn’t feel like a great use of time to kick the tires on a bunch of CRM solutions out there.  I suspect a lot of folks that sign up with Salesforce.com follow a similar mental path to the one I followed.

You know what they say about throwing stones.  And ITDatabase is absolutely guilty of all of the same criticisms that I’m about to make of Salesforce.com (and more).  And SF.com has accomplished some extraordinary revenues and made a lot of investors rich.  But the company has been around for 10+ years, and repeatedly barfs out this pie in the sky vision of a world without computing boundaries.  Call me sanctimonious, but I think when you claim to have pioneered cloud computing and to have killed software, your product better be damn impressive and high performing, and neither is the case based on my two years using Salesforce.com.

ITDatabase recently took on a new technical lead who has pushed us into a bunch of new Atlassian products.  We were already using JIRA, but now we’re using Confluence, Bamboo, and other Atlassian products that were part of a really cool promo that they are running.  I saw that Atlassian was up for a Crunchie recently.  I’m told they were a runner up in their category – congrats to them.  In any case, I find it absolutely amazing that Atlassian – with the creativity and nearly perfect execution that goes into so many of its products – gets so relatively little discussion in the U.S. tech pubs and blogs.

As a longtime Salesforce.com user and a somewhat new Atlassian user, I want to point out three ways that I think that Atlassian (severely underrated) outshines Salesforce.com (severely overrated) in product execution:

“Just Enough”
For every Atlassian product I’m currently using, I would estimate that I use more than 75% of the features.  For Salesforce.com, I use about 10% of the features.  Sure – the very large enterprise users have a much more expansive set of use cases that would lead them into more of the features.  But it was Salesforce.com’s idea to force me into the enterprise edition (by withholding access to the few extra features that did reside there that I was interested in).

Meaningful Integration Between Functions
I love the way the discreet pieces of the puzzle work together with Atlassian.  They have this “Agile Planning Board” drill-down, for example, that lets you see the issues you created in JIRA in an entirely new format (in the context of product releases you’re working on, for example).  In Salesforce.com, the dashboards functionality is really limited, often generates error messages for improper configuration, and is just not very fun to use.  Any SF.com drones I suspect would point out that other people have no problems with the dashboards – but I have asked other folks who find them pretty miserable to use.  My greater point is that for a company that so emphasizes integration in its cloud hallucinations, the integration just within Salesforce.com between the different views and functionality (in their Enterprise Edition) is not very fluid or dynamic.

Speed Matters
This is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison at this point, because we are hosting our own installs of Atlassian – but Salesforce.com is miserably slow.  Every other web application that I use is zippy by comparison, and it’s just unacceptable that a company that big, with that many resources can’t figure out how to reduce these load times between page refreshes, or pull more xml / ajaxy stuff in to not require certain pages to refresh at all.  My experience w/ Sf.com has also been that the email client part isn’t a lot of fun. Very little has changed with the look and feel / performance of the email client in the last two years (which is pretty weak considering Sf.com’s vast revenues / virtually unlimited development resources). I would already far prefer sending emails from Outlook (and using the sf.com connector) than sending from w/ in Sf.com. The Sf.com email has a fixed window size. Once you’ve opened an email window and started drafting something, you can’t do a search for a contact or do anything else (you’re basically tied to either finishing / sending that email, or shutting out of it and going off to do something else). The email functionality of sf.com is in the dark ages … missing simple user conveniences that even a rough once-over by someone with a user hat on would detect.

Will I move off of Salesforce.com anytime soon?  Probably not, because the switching cost is that it’s a major pain in the butt to do so.  Would Salesforce.com care if they lost our two seats?  Of course not – they’re doing great financially (especially if you ask them).  But is it not reasonable for a customer to ask that one of the biggest blowhard companies in the tech industry drink its own Kool Aid and practice what it preaches?

It’s that time of year.

The CES press list is flying around.  Exhibiting vendors have it, and are sharing it with their PR firms.  As I write this, many tech PR folks are in an Excel doc, investigating these attending “media” and highlighting the ones they intend to contact.  Journalists are already starting to get emails with different permutations of “hoping to meet you and CES,” “new product launching at CES,” and “please visit [company name] booth at CES” subject lines.   And PR folks that don’t have the list are firing off emails to the CES management asking for permission to view it (and likely being refused).

But what’s funny about all of this is how many of the folks on the CES list (from what I’m hearing) are not really “press.”  It’s not surprising, because it’s been happening routinely with events since anyone can remember.

Is someone who is employed by a tech vendor, and writes one blog post every three months a member of the “press”?  Because I hear that applies to a number of contacts on the CES press list.

There is apparently little vetting done (by CES or any event) to make sure that folks on a press list are indeed press.  I can’t tell you how many times I bump into someone at an event at the Moscone and see them with a press badge (and they happily snicker when I comment on it).  Duping an event for a press badge is a way to circumvent attendance fees and otherwise get access.

And events for the most part let this whole charade continue because it’s to their benefit to have a massive press list (that they can dangle to entice sponsorships, exhibition, and the whole host of items they are trying to sell to give folks access to a captive audience).

But it’s annoying as hell when you are the point person at an exhibiting company – and you are having to manually parse a list of “press” that has an incredibly low rate of legit press (i.e., “opportunities”).

I wonder if it is also annoying to legit members of the press to show up at an event and have to wait in a quarter mile line for press registration.

You would think this whole rigamarole would have dissolved by 2010.  It would actually be hilarious if it weren’t for all the wasted time.

One of the tech PR hazards that’s getting increasingly difficult to navigate is the discovery / avoidance of tech authors with a severe conflict of interest.

You could argue that any tech author (blogger or full-timer at a publication) has some degree of bias / conflict of interest, sure.  We all do, based on our personal experiences.

But I’m referring to really blatant conflicts of interest.  A contributing author who is also an employee (or founder) of a company – who writes for a very prominent source, and takes every opportunity to drop subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) endorsements of their product or product category.

Sometimes that type of person is easy to detect.  Other times (if they are even remotely clever), they are not.

What’s even worse (than the advertorials that they personally write, without giving fair disclosure) is the degree of influence that person has on the editorial agenda of the publication (i.e., the more invisible ways that they pull the puppet strings and influence other authors’ coverage in favor of their personal interests).  In order to get that contributing author gig, they obviously have the ear / trust of other editors at the publication / blog.  And some searching on that publication will sure enough find that a disproportionate volume of coverage about the given tech category is (no surprise) mentioning that individual’s company.

Nowadays – certainly more than 10 years ago – you have more and more “authors” that are vendors.  You see companies with inferior products (relative to their competitors) that mysteriously get 10x the coverage on certain publications (while the other companies that pitch the publication get ignored).

One related issue (that’s really nothing new at all) is how “relationships” tend to stilt tech journalists’ coverage.  Tech authors that have existing relationships with vendors (and develop friendships with representatives / spokespersons of those vendors, or find their commentary particularly colorful) tend to cover them a heck of a lot more than vendors that come in cold.

It seems sort of perverse that the coverage in tech is driven as much by relationships as it is by the merits of the technology. But it’s counterproductive to agonize about notions of fairness and fixing this.  Not to mention – do you turn down unfair publicity advantages based on personal relationships?  I once had a boss who was fond of saying “it wouldn’t be interesting if there weren’t a conflict.”

IMHO, it’s more important than ever to have your eyes wide open about who you are speaking with.

If they’ve written a disproportionate # of times about one of your competitors, you should know that and dig deeper into the content before pitching them.  If they are employed by a vendor, you should know that before pitching them.

If you’re pitching authors simply based on reading their bios / scanning their headlines, you’re taking some careless risks, these days more than ever.

Most of my posts are blatant advertorials for ITDatabase.  Typically they start off with some sort of backhanded compliment for an existing research product (or free option) and then unapologetically jump into shameless promotion of our product.

Today I applaud RSS, but it is not backhanded.  It’s totally sincere.

My only criticism of RSS is really more a criticism of myself – and my inability to keep up with the volume of content that is being dumped into my RSS reader.

I finally caved and bought a MacBook Pro.  Immediately I started diligently subscribing to RSS feeds (w/ in Mac’s mail client) for all of the publications / blogs / podcasts that I’m interested in.  I had the best intentions of reading them all every day – or at the very least, scanning the headlines.  I swore that this time I’d really read them all.

But here I am, a month later, and I’ve got unread feeds stacked up by the hundreds.  300+ in my TechCrunch folder.  168 in ReadWriteWeb.  108 in WSJ.com’s Technology feed.  I spot some unlistened to tech podcasts and wonder what planet I was on when I thought I’d have enough time to just be casually listening to podcasts (sometime between watching our 13 month old son and running a start-up … riiiight).

The worst thing is that I’m a repeat offender.  This is the sixth or seventh time now that I’ve gone through the process of subscribing to a ton of RSS feeds, then never really stayed on top of the most imoprtant part of reading them.  When RSS first came out, I did it.  When I first heard about News Gator, I did it.  When Outlook 2007 had support of RSS, I did it.  Each of these times (and others) I spent many hours going out and pulling in RSS feeds for many different tech-related sources.  Each time I had this incredible enthusiasm for the idea of staying on top of all my tech news in such an organized manner.  Each time, a few weeks passed where I struggled to keep up.  Each time, RSS ultimately crushed me.

Every morning on my way to work, I practically trip over the Wall Street Journal / Financial Times combo that we’re subscribed to at our house.  I pick it up off the steps about 50% of the time.  In these cases, I’d estimate that I go on to read it (after my walk to work) about 25% of the time.  The rest of the time, I get immediately caught up in email and work and at some point in the mid afternoon after lunch, I spot the papers – still wrapped in plastic and rubber band – and I feel pretty guilty about it.

Every day, I read and produce a ton of email.  Every day, I find myself on tech news sites, and typically get wrapped up in at least one important announcement / story / development.

There’s no question that I enjoy reading tech news.  But as I sit here and listen to the CNET Buzz Out Loud podcast that arrived earlier via RSS (the first one I’ve listened to in two weeks, despite really enjoying the previous one I listed to), and think to myself I should listen to this thing every time it arrives, I know it’s just the latest in a long line of broken promises to myself about how much tech news I’m going to read.

Today ITDatabase rolled out a new editorial calendar tracking feature for tech marketing / PR pros.

The UI is very simple / minimalist (we strive for speed / ease of discovery with the product in general).  We give the user the full list of edit cals (which they can of course just browse, reverse-chron by deadline date or by publish date of the respective items).  And we allow the user to either search by keyword or by source.  Clicking on a specific edcal opportunity will display the respective contact person(s) at the publication.

As we said in today’s HARO ad – the “editorial calendar” as a tech PR entity certainly does not hold the degree of importance that it once did.  But you don’t want to miss relevant publicity opportunities in publications you care about.

Whether you’re in-house or at an agency – It’s a major pain to have to manually keep a list of opportunities in excel (I remember working at a PR firm that managed edcals in the company “Intranet” – which would take about 30 seconds to load every time you did a page refresh … wheee!).  If you’re doing this manually, the pain is three-fold:  (1) building a comprehensive list of all of the publications that have editorial calendars in the tech industry (2) remembering to visit them frequently to look for updates, and (3) remembering to contact the publications far enough in advance of the deadline.

Hopefully we’ve eliminated some of that pain in the editorial calendar process for our users.

Note:  our timing in releasing this is a bit unfortunate, approaching Q4.  Editorial calendars can tend to be a little stale at the end of the year, considering that it was nine months ago that these editorial teams huddled around and drew these up.  Generally editorial calendar opportunities are richest at the beginning of the calendar year.  We’ll be working hard over the next few months to make sure that the 2010 tech editorial calendars that we index for you are as comprehensive as possible.

Here’s a new version of ITDatabase’s online product demo:  http://tr.im/xAdU

A few things discussed (not in the previous version):

• Editorial Calendars
• Ability to “narrow” search to include / exclude blogs
• Ability to “widen” searches by source to also include its assets (for example, when searching for The Wall Street Journal, widening your search to include its assets would also search against All Things Digital and other WSJ blog assets)

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.