Travis Van came to the Bay Area in the late 90's, armed only with a journalismdegree and the desire for an honest wage. Instead he discovered that entrylevel reporting wages were poorly aligned with his material demands, so hejoined the seedy underworld of tech PR, where he's been lurking...
The Tech PR Gems blog ran an interesting post earlier this week that discusses the practice of PR folks commenting on their own clients' stories. As the author notes, it's a fuzzy area that makes a lot of folks nervous: "In talking about engaging bloggers in PR, we...
Monday, 10/8 Online Marketing Blog -- "Why Search Marketing is So Hard" Pronet Advertising -- "StumbleUpon: The Antithesis of Google?" Tuesday, 10/9 Marketing Pilgrim -- "Are Newspapers Squandering Yahoo Ad Opportunities? InfoFlow -- "Marketers: There are Seven Separate Intelligences"...
Does your company ever dilute its credibility with these types of very common lame-o announcements? Lame Partnership Initiatives -- When Google and IBM announce [even relatively mundane] joint initiatives (like today's announcement that they're partnering to "promote new software development methods" in research and academia), tier-1 business...
In a perfect world, product reviewers would buy the new products they're reviewing ... and test them completely independent of any interaction with or coercion by the respective vendors. But most publications don't have the budget to independently acquire the products they review, and therefore rely on the vendors...
Too often, new products are created without adequate feedback and buy-in from prospective customers. That's the gist of the popular book "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" -- which advocates / roadmaps a much richer interaction between vendors and customers during the entire product development cycle. ...
You hear a lot of PR folks claim to have 'relationships' with certain journalists. I remember when I was at PR firms how often colleagues would drop names during new business pitches. "Walt Mossberg WSJ, Steve Lohr NYT -- yeah, we have GREAT relationships with them." As if to say...
Yesterday's rant covered some of the common characteristics of underperforming PR firms (from the frustrated client's point of view). As kstarrpr from Larkin Communications commented, sometimes PR firms do indeed "[e]xpect the internal manger [on the client side] to do the heavy lifting with the agency's duties...
Your company went through an agency review process and found the PR firm that felt like the right match (their track record was solid, their referrals checked out, the publicity results they promised sounded ideal). You've already invested a great deal of your VP or director of marketing time...
A couple of weeks ago, Forbes wrote that VMware had become the world's fifth highest-valued software company (behind only Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Adobe). Pretty incredible for a technology category ("virtualization") whose basic concept / definition ("abstracting the OS and software from the underlying hardware") ... is far beyond the...
I once had a client who was relatively ho-hum about all the trade press we were getting (i.e., great visibility with the audience actually likely to buy his product) ... yet would take great delight in any mere mention in business press articles (sending out celebratory emails to his friends...
Proving customer traction is something that most vendors really struggle with. As one reader noted, "so many start-ups [in particular] have drunk their own Kool-Aid and will not accept anything less than the type of PR results they have enjoyed around a launch or something else of magnitude." But the...
After a competing vendor once blatantly stole a bunch of his company's positioning / messaging language ... a CEO I knew shipped them a box of t-shirts (with his company's logo on it), noting "you stole our message, you might as well wear our t-shirt while you're at it." ...
PRWeek ran a story about the just-launched Google News feature that "allows newsmakers to comment on articles" listed on Google News and then puts those comments at the top of the comments list."Some have commended the technology for revolutionizing media - notably the role of journalists, sources, and PR pros....
I've found publicity to be much easier to generate for early stage companies. There's always lots to talk about -- how novel the new product or service is, how it will disrupt the existing landscape, et al. And not only is there more to talk about, but the...
Today a relatively new wire distribution service (24-7pressrelease.com) announced that it was named #1 in a list of the "top five press release companies" (ironically, 24-7pressrelease.com used PRNewswire for the distribution of their press release announcing this accomplishment).10 years ago, press release distribution was basically a two horse race between...
With all the sleaze that's shrouding Barry's homerun legacy, it's truly apropos that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome is officially kowtowing.Excerpt from AP Story that ran recently:City Hall will be lit up with orange lights and keeping track of Barry Bonds' home runs starting Friday as the Giants slugger gets...
There are scores of self-serving, PR agency-written blogs out there today about the emergence of (*gag*) "PR 2.0" - pontificating on the power of blogging, tagging, podcasting, social networking and wikis for generating buzz and credibility. Very few give any sort of valuable context about when it actually makes...
During the late '90s Dot Com boom, David Holtzman ran the most critical network in the world - the domain name system. As Chief Technology Officer for Network Solutions (acquired by VeriSign for $21-billion in '00) and the manager of the Internet's master root server, or the "dot," Holtzman oversaw...
Many vendors use the timing of an industry event as the gaiting factor for the launch of their new product. Without question, the ability to get a product in front of a concentrated audience of the target customer is extremely valuable.But for most vendors, does it really make sense...
In a previous marketing job, I was shocked when a publicly-traded company started to deposition against us a brand spanking new software startup in their product messaging ... and mention us by name in publicity opportunities.As an established player in your industry, you never have anything to gain by swatting...
