commbasics

Public relations is one of the most misunderstood and poorly utilized resource in industry, especially technology start-ups. It is seen as a tactical function of marketing and, sometimes, a subset of advertising. It is often employed too late in a marketing program to be effective, generally blamed for the failure and rarely given credit for the success of those programs. This misuse and misunderstanding makes PR more a necessary evil than a valued part of the corporate effort. You're not sure what it does, you know are going to hate paying for it. But you know you have to do it, so lets do it as cheaply as possible and get it over with. As a result, few PR programs succeed, especially for start-ups. Most PR firms understand this situation and, for the most part, many have given up trying to convince entrepreneurs of how to do it right. They just try to do what the client asks, collect the money and move on to the next client. Personally, I'm one that isn't ready to gi...

I was reading a post in a technology bulletin board that was raving about how much business they get out of the site and how they get nothing out of news releases. The comment were pretty indicative of why start up companies, as a whole, can't seem to get their message out to the market and end up crashing and burning. I agree that most news releases aren't very valuable. I agree that word-of-mouth is a very valuable selling tool. The problem is that most companies view news releases as a sales tool and that's why most of them are crap. News releases are not supposed to be sales tools. They are supposed to be a way to give valuable information to the news media. The media, in turn, filter the content of the release to eliminate hype. Occasionally, a news release can be a leave-behind for a salesman, but that's a secondary use. Its more important to make sure it works for it's primary purpose. The web has compounded the problem because now, companies can bypa...

There has been no small amount of debate regarding the journalistic legitimacy of bloggers. Considering the kind of crap that stands as print and broadcast content, it's kind of funny that "traditional" journalists feel affronted by bloggers lack of perspective. But this issue of perspective and journalism is something every communicator should consider. Blog content lines up very nicely with what passed for journalism throughout history, especially Revolutionary America. Even Ben Franklin got into pissing contests with political rivals and competing newspapers under his own name and under psuedonymns like "Silence Dogood" and "Poor Richard." But that was the infancy of a free press in the United States and, eventually, some civility prevailed. Some, I said, not a lot. The American press has always been something of a Wild West shootout and our most revered journalists were generally curmudgeons. Consider, for example, Mark Twain, Ring Lardner, ...

Covey's Law of Diminishing Interest (what? you've never heard of it?) states that there is a direct relation between the timing of an announcement and the interest that the editorial community has for the announcement. The law separates editors into three classes: Long Lead, Short Lead, and Daily. Long lead includes magazines like Forbes, EDN and most national publications that come out once or twice a month. Short lead pubs are like Business Week, Electronic Engineering Times. These classes have different interest levels depending on the timing of the release. Their interest levels range from "High Interest" to "Annoyed." The daily press is especially affected by this law and has a corollary that any news involving Microsoft and Intel automatically double potential interest. Editorial interest is based on several factors, timeliness being foremost. In all cases, the best coverage you can get is when the publication date coincides with the date of the ann...

Technology, no matter how great or innovative, does not make a product successful. Marketing is the key. A mediocre product with good marketing will always beat a great technology with mediocre marketing. The Microsoft operating system is not the market leader because it is superior to UNIX or Linux, but because Microsoft is a superior marketing company. Intel beat down the Alpha chip not on the basis of superior technology but because of the $100 million "Intel Inside" marketing program (possibly the greatest example of market leadership ever). If good technology won the war, then everyone would have a Macintosh on their desktop. Every survey produced on the value of marketing (Advertising Council, Centre for Public Relations, Colombia University, to name a few) indicates that companies that spend 10 percent of their revenues on marketing lead their industries. Those same surveys show that successful technology companies spend a maximum of five percent of their revenues...

       In good times, companies spend a great deal of money on PR and advertising, most of it poorly thought out and saying nothing of value to the market.  In bad times, like those we have recently been through, advertising gets cut back and public relations carries the brunt of marketing messaging.         But with lower advertising revenues, publications go out of business making editorial pages scarce and making competition for PR stronger. It is crucial that companies change their conventional marketing wisdom in communicating to the customer.  So, let's start with some basics, like the purpose of advertising.        The conventional wisdom on the purpose of advertising is to increase sales.  That is wrong.  Increasing sales is the product of good advertising, not its purpose.  The purpose of advertising is much different.        Advertising is a relatively new thing in the history of the world. The first known paid advertisement was in a New England newspaper in 1704 (Make th...