MarketingSherpa has an article (link valid until May 28, 2004) on how to pitch a number of marketing blogs. They have interviews with:
The bottom line, most will accept pitches if they’re relevant and not spam. Just like PR Opinions…. in the unlikely case you wanted to know..
If you’ve ever been through an Initial Public Offering (IPO) with your client or employer, you’ll be very aware that the run-up to the offering is subject to strict regulations.
These regulations are aimed at preventing any company from hyping their stock prior to the flotation. It is called the “Quiet Period” and most public companies have a similar quiet period between the end of their financial quarter and the announcement of their quarterly earnings.
This is public company PR 101. It’s not a big secret.
The rule for PR people in this period is that the company shouldn’t release any “material” information or indulge in marketing activities that could be miscontrued as hyping the company. In effect, normal business practice is fine, but no big splashes.
These requirements (along with other legal regulations) sometimes can feel highly restrictive, but they are well established and they are there for a reason.
So to make sure you’ve all been paying attention here’s a little test.
Question:
In your professional opinion, when a company is in its “quiet period” prior to its IPO, would a prominent, favorable profile in the New York Times (free subscription required) constitute:
If you chose answer “1” go to the back of the class and start reading this post over again. If you answered “2” come to the top of the class.
Salesforce.com is a phenomenal success story.
In a difficult economic environment they have created a profitable business, a large number of customers (including Cape Clear Software), successfully pioneered a new way of providing applications as an online service and created a prominent corporate profile.
Before the company announced their IPO they did a fantastic job of extending their company into the business pages and with the exception of Google became the darling of the technology upstarts.
A lot of their success is built around CEO Marc Benioff, who is likeable, quotable and irreverant. The media love him.
But what were they thinking lining up a New York Times piece in the quiet period? How could a company so au fait with effective PR make such a faux pas?
I don’t know.
The episode has forced the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to request that Salesforce postpone their IPO (that would have valued the company in excess of $868 million ) for contravention of the quiet period.
Reading the New York Times profile you get the feeling that Benioff is difficult to manage from a PR perspective, but that isn’t an excuse. The SEC don’t provide these guidelines for the fun of it and they aren’t some well kept secret.
I’m sure Salesforce will have a successful future IPO, but this is one of the PR stunts they may wish to forget.
“Most companies are extra cautious during the quiet period,” said David Menlow, the president of the IPO Financial Network.
Mr. Benioff, by contrast, recently permitted a reporter to spend a day following him around, a visit that included hours of one-on-one time, much to the chagrin of the high-priced lawyers the company has hired to help him negotiate the tricky byways of going public.
“There’s quiet, and then there’s Marc’s version of quiet,” said John Dillon, Salesforce’s chief executive from mid-1999 through late 2001. “He loves the media attention and courts it like no one else in Silicon Valley.”
In part, Mr. Benioff said, he has no choice. He sells the kind of product that only a sales executive could love: a simple, efficient way of tracking a company’s customers and prospective clients.
Footnote:
Jeremy Pepper also covers the Salesforce.com saga
More from Silicon Valley News, San Francisco Chronicle, Information Week and DestinationCRM.
Serial author Al Ries has a new book out “The Origin of Brands” which is the follow up to “The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR”.
Kevin Dugan has an interesting interview with Ries about his new book and of course PR’s role in the building of a brand.
“PR people have to learn to do two things: (1) Think more strategically and (2) Vigorously stress the need for the PR function to run the launch of all new brands… Sometimes, PR people do not try to take charge of the launch of new brands because they don’t want to take the responsibility if the brand happens to fail.”
Footnote
More PR Opinions posts on “The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR”:
It’s Fall, let’s examine an old chestnut (October 21, 2003)
Original post on the book (October, 30 2002)
You�re probably reading this post sitting at your desk. You probably spend an disproportionate amount of your waking hours sitting right there.
I�m always interested in how other people work. I’m always trying to find techniques and procedures that will increase my efficiency and of course trawling the web in the vain hope of finding software that might give me a couple of extra minutes each day.
I�m also very interested in new models for structuring an organization. After all, most of us work in a traditional structure that hasn�t changed in fifty years.
This week I came across two interesting examples of different work environments. Both of them question how we think about the structure of organizations and as a result the treatment of employees.
First up, CIO Insight magazine has an interview with Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco, whose unique approach to organizational management is well publicized and covered in his books. Ricardo believes in a radically different work environment where amongst other things employees decide their own hours, suggest their own salaries and the organization seems to be held together through a combination of professional pride, peer pressure and innovative hiring policies.
“Nor did he stop with flextime. He did away with dedicated receptionists, org charts, even the central office�it now resembles an airlines’ VIP lounge, with people working in different areas each day. He encouraged employees to suggest what they should be paid, to evaluate their bosses, to learn each other’s jobs, and to tolerate dissent�even when divisive. He set up a profit-sharing system and insisted that the company’s financials be published internally, so that everyone could see how the company was doing.”
I found the second example in the recently published book: Bang!: Getting your message heard in a noisy world. It’s written by Advertising Agency executives Linda Kaplan Thaler, Robin Koval and Delia Marshall. While it does primarily center around advertising, there are some interesting angles for any marketer.
In the book, they cover the issue of how you can build a workplace that promotes creative thinking. One of their suggestions particularly resonated with me. The issue of how you manage career advancement in a marketing agency.
I’ve covered this issue before in relation to the fact that the traditional PR agency promotion model doesn’t help staff to specialize in the areas where they can add the most value.
Instead everyone looks to get away from office administration, then they try and get away from media relations and then they hope to start managing staff, budgets and clients. The result is that the media relations is often left to the newbies which annoys journalists and doesn’t guarantee the best results for the client.
The authors’ answer to this problem is to can promotions. Instead of creating a deep, traditional structure (think Account Administrator, Account Executive, Account Manager, Account Director etc.) they have nominal practice areas (in PR terms think “Media Relations”, “Client Management” etc.) and they incentivize the people to focus on the areas they are best suited to. So people good with the media become well paid media specialists while people with skills in client management focus on that area. In one step you can remove the issue of good media relations staff wasting time managing people and budgets when it’s not their strength. Instead leave that task to people who are good at it.
The result is a flatter organization with skilled operatives doing what they’re best at.
That’s an interesting alternative to traditional thinking of PR agency structure…
Blog Relations concerns using blogs to communicate with an audience. There’s two elements to that lofty objective. Firstly how you can reach out to bloggers who are of interest to your audience and secondly how your organization can communicate using your own blogs.
Corporate blogging, has to date, been primarily taking place in the technology industry, however the growing number of weblogs means that other industries will undoubtedly follow suit. It’s common sense for the employer and the employee to have some agreed guidelines to ensure that everyone is clear on what’s acceptable, in the same way that companies have formal e-mail and web usage policies.
(Aside: I am always surprised at the number of organizations who don’t have formal e-mail and web usage policies, if you don’t already have one you should consider it.)
The objective of these blog guidelines isn’t to stifle creativity or create a Big Brother environment, but rather to help staff and employers make use of blogging without any negative repercussions.
With Microsoft now boasting over 400 staff bloggers, it’s no surprise to hear that Sun Microsystems is planning to enter the world of corporate blogging. Tim Bray at Sun has published some common sense guidelines for Sun employees interested in kicking off a blog.
There are also a host of other guidelines and essays on the Web regarding Corporate blogging and if your colleagues are beginning to blog, it’s useful to try and agree some groundrules.
Here are some examples:
Here’s some additional reading:
Footnote:
Thanks to Constantin Basturea for the link to Tim Bray’s guidelines.
Richard Bailey points to a recent article in PR Week (UK) on the state of PR Education and it’s relevance to the profession.
“There may be plenty of PR stalwarts who privately snigger at the idea of their craft being an academic pursuit, but consultancies and in-house PR teams are increasingly becoming dominated by graduates – of both PR and other courses.”
Colin McKay (who clearly has too much time on his hands 🙂 has conducted a very funny interview with Dan Aykroyd on the growth of blogging!
Q: Corporate communicators are increasingly interested in how blogging can help them reach out to their stakeholder groups. Still, they have problems securing buy-in from senior management, and hold nagging concerns about shifting from a comfortable communication system based in hierarchy and control to an evolving system that depends upon transparency and responsiveness by all participants. Do you think these �growing pains� will continue?
A: You know, it just occurred to me, we haven’t had a completely successful test of this equipment. No sense worrying about it now.
Jim Horton points out the continuing mis-match between PR professionals in different areas of practice.
“PR has gone back to the future. It started with payola at the beginning of the 20th century when publicity agencies paid newspapers to run columns on the wonders of the telephone. Payola was a part of the media through the scandals of the Nixon era when newspapers and other media started an overdue cleanup.”
Steve Rubel has an interview with Esther Schindler, author of the fantastic “Care and Feeding of the Press“.
“The consensus is that blogging is not journalism; it’s something different. Lots of bloggers write about the world as they see it — which can sometimes be more accurate than a jaded journalist, but just as easily can be a naive view from a “reporter” who has his own agenda, a lack of context, or incorrect assumptions. Not to mention fact checking and bad grammar.”
Mark Borkowski has posted a story regarding the “new world of journalism”.
“I hope the companies which want to buy pure PR will see through the charlatans and global corporate suits for what they are: lackeys of the likes of WPP and Omnicom, networked and trussed to generate profits for their master. “
PR Blogger, Hans Kullin has done some research on which PR blogs are the most “influential” based on their Technorati references.
It seems from this research that Steve Rubel has the most influential PR blog.
In related news, Cameron Marlow’s Overstated blog has some really interesting analysis of the frequency that blogs and weblogs are covered in the print media. According to research from LexisNexis there have been 4051 articles since February 18, 1998.
Footnote:
Thanks to Robb Hecht for the head up on Hans’ PR blog findings.
Thanks to Trevor Cook for the link to Cameron’s research.
Google’s rise is well documented and the secret of their success isn’t really a secret. It’s simple: They are good at what they do and they keep trying to make it better.
Google shouldn’t actually exist. According to the experts the search engine market was saturated with Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves and then Google appeared and suddenly there was a new kid on the block and that kid was easier, faster and more productive.
As you’re probably aware they’ve launched their new Google blog to coincide with the re-design of blogger.
Now once you’ve built the profile Google has, you must tread very carefully because everyone is watching. When you go public it gets even harder.
As you probably know, blogs can provide a human face to your organization and Google once again is doing a fine job.
It turns out that one of the early posts to the blog was (shock and horror) edited. Of course, given it is Google’s blog, this editing was quickly noted by the Internet mind police and outrage followed in predictable fashion.
So Google posted a mea culpa on the blog which I think deals with the “issue” nicely. It’s also a nice illustration of building an honest conversation.
“Blogs are living things. Ours was just born and is still adjusting to the loud noises and the bright lights. It’s gonna be awhile before we get our driver’s license, so you decide if you want to sit in the passenger seat while we figure out which one’s the gear shift and which is the turn signal. One way or another, it should be an interesting ride.”
Thank god no one reads this blog, because I edit my posts all the time. I edit the typos (yes I know I don’t get them all), I sometimes change my opinions and I’ve even been known to change a post just because I can. So there.
Footnote:
I’ve edited this post a couple of times already….
The Inquirer has an story on reviewing hardware and the contribution of PR.
“Whilst some company PR reps are equally happy to have bad editorial (so long as it is constructive) there are others that will tend to get a little stressed – after all, PR reps consider it their job to get good reviews of a product, a job made much harder if the product they’re given by their company is rubbish.”
I enjoy the RLM PR newsletter every month, there’s a whole mixed bag of content and they are an opionated bunch at RLM…. which is a good thing!
In this month’s newsletter, Erin Mitchell has a soapbox piece looking at the ROI from PR.
The article argues for a more common sense approach to measuring PR. This is somthing I agree with, we need to tie PR back to a company’s business objectives and look at how well PR contributes to those objectives. Of course that opens the debate on how we measure how PR is contributing. Erin writes:
“To me, measuring ROI of PR programs has always been really simple: The purpose of a well-executed PR program (with few exceptions) is to drive sales. �Sales,� in this context, comes in different forms�prescriptions written, product purchased by consumers, legislation passed�you get the idea: it is supposed to contribute to the company�s tangible bottom line.”
Now there’s a lot of merit to that idea, but I’m not sure it’s always as easy as that. If the company is selling directly from the web, then analysis of sales patterns to coverage might indicate performance, but where companies are selling through a direct sales force or indirectly through channel partners it becomes a more complex equation. And there are other factors that might impact that analysis. For example what if the company in question is weak at converting sales or has poor channel management. How do we compensate for those factors? If there’s loads of well qualified leads but no sales, has PR (and marketing) failed? Probably not. Surely what we have to do is look at what point PR hands over the opportunity to a different department, because it is hard to be measured on something that you have no control on.
One other area of discussion is Erin’s comment that “Some of us folks who toil in PR have forgotten the core purpose of what we do: deliver complete stories to the right media.”
Of course PR extends far beyond media relations. Some practitioners never talk to the media, they’re focused on internal communications, community relations, analyst relations etc. PR’s diversity is what makes it great, it’s also what makes it hard.
Murphy's Law 