commbasics

There is a sea change in process in how success in technology is defined, especially in the arenas of electronics, semiconductors and software. The number of customers, sales statistics, and technology leadership are all still important but not as all defining as they once were. Options for IPOs, mergers and acquisitions are disappearing behind the massive potential of the private equity LBO. The ultimate success for a company is now to gain the attention of private equity and the industry consolidation that comes with it. That's not the easiest thing to do. Most of the startup companies (and there are more than 5,000 of them in the United States alone) lack sufficient research coverage for a VC or a private equity group to do the due diligence necessary to make a decision. That means many companies with great technology and potential will go to a competitor in a fire sale or disappear from the market altogether. The key to attaining modern success for small tech companies and star...

Marketing is generally defined as a process that identifies, anticipates and supplies consumer requirements efficiently and effectively. Marketing communications, publicity and advertising exist on one side of the marketing effort, pushing information to the customer. The media and analysis communities are on the other side of marketing providing information to create the messages that are pushed to the customer. Public relations exists along side of marketing and serves the marketing effort, but it is not a subset of marketing because it is not directly involved in the sale of products and services. Instead, the activity of public relations is the engineering of opinion in the marketplace. It is, in essence, the conversation of the market, where the various publics – the media, the consumer, and industry – participate in defining and building the economy. A public relations practitioner is one who acts as an advocate for all the various parts of the marketing community – the media...

Trade shows began as a means to provide a means of providing financial support of technical conferences and get direct access to decision making customers. These conferences and shows also attracted a large number of press and analysts making them a cost-effective means for building press relationships getting one-on-one meetings with influential members of the press, replacing the more costly press tour. This press relations practice, howeverm has become highly inefficient for three primary reasons: •Lack of finances: The press corps has been decimated by the cutback in advertising in the technology industries (advertising has rebounded in consumer but not in high technology, especially semiconductor and design automation). The fact is that there are fewer editors and reporters to cover the events. Financially, the publishers of trade magazines are finding it increasingly difficult to justify the expense of sending journalists to cover these events, especially since… •Lack of new...

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...