Context Public Relations

The new iPhone 4 has finally hit the UK and after queues at phone shops up and down the country (we are British afterall), customers have discovered that the latest version of their beloved iPhone has a bit of a glitch. Users are finding that if they cover the bottom left hand corner of the phone while on a call, they often lose signal as this covers the new location of the phone’s antenna. So, what have Apple got to say about this? Well, the direct quote from Steve jobs is: “Just avoid holding it in that way”. Not, perhaps, what many disgruntled customers were hoping to hear.

Apple did elaborate on this slightly, but while the advice was ultimately the same, the official statement from their PR department managed to provide customers with a solution. No, not an instruction on a better holding technique, rather that the problems of lost signal could be avoided by investing in a rubber case for the phone…strangely enough this was the first time Apple had issued such a phone case. They cost £25 each.

You have to hand it to Apple though. While the issues of signal loss have dominated many of the headlines since the launch, underneath this Apple has a brilliant product, which has also been recognised. Now along with strong demand for the iPhone 4, Apple is also seeing a sudden surge in sales of their new £25 rubber phone cases. So that’s extra revenue and even more exposure for the latest launch…not quite the disastrous launch many reviewers may lead you to believe. 

Tags: Public Relations, Technology by Debbie
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“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” ….. Winston Churchill.

Next time you get a new prospect ask them if they searched for you on Google. Googling is now one of the most common ways people will check out your business. It provides instant access to both your own PR as well as comments from current and past clients and if the feedback is poor the prospect is unlikely to contact you.

Many tech PR clients are now asking our advice on managing their online reputations so here are a few tips to get you started:

• Get your house in order - if there is a problem get it sorted before you try and say there is no problem
• If a comment is totally untrue approach the webmaster or publisher nicely - if someone is calling your service a scam and it is not the webmaster should happily take the comment down
• Accept the criticism and don’t rant a response online - responses in CAPITALS are often seen as very negative. Think about what you are writing as it will be there permanently
• Actively engage with your critics - answer their concerns and once it is sorted ask them to post about the resolution. Turning a negative into a positive shows that you will resolve problems as they occur and gives a great deal of confidence to your customers

Finally make sure you continually feed good news to media sources. The more your own story appears the more likely any negative posts will never be seen.
If you’re looking for more advice on managing your online reputation give us a call.

Tags: Public Relations, Technology by Rob
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Twitter:  like it or loathe it, can you afford to ignore it?  A lot of businesses are simply wondering how they can use Twitter to their advantage, either to spread a positive message, or to counter negative feeling.

Here’s an excellent article from the Wall Street Journal on how several massive corporations – including Ford Motor Co., Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Southwest Airlines – are using Twitter as part of their overall PR strategy. 

It includes some strong case studies on how these companies have listened to the buzz on Twitter to gauge consumer feeling, and have used their Twitter profiles to respond directly to issues, averting PR problems almost before they happen. 

It’s well worth a read.  If you’d like to know more about how Twitter can become part of your comms strategy, contact us.

Tags: Marketing Mix, Public Relations, Technology by Craig
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Recently, I was at the giant Infosecurity exhibition for the 9th year in succession.  As is often the case with industry trade shows, they’re always changing (new vendors, new logos, new stand designs), yet always the same (you get to meet your friends, peers and rivals from the industry again).

What made this show different for me was, my clients at the show had already made big news announcements earlier in the year.  They didn’t have any news events that they were saving for the show itself.  And as nothing irritates the press like an interview with no news value, I made no appointments to meet with journalists.

Instead, I spent time in the press office, just chatting and catching up with my contacts, without the usual pressures of organising a round of interviews.  And this informal approach was far more productive in terms of updating the press on what my clients were doing, and in terms of refreshing relationships.

That’s not to say that interviews at shows are a waste of time.  Far from it.  But if a press interview is to be successful, there’s GOT to be some hard news behind it, otherwise it’s wasting the journalist’s time.  And shows are no exception to this rule.

So if you don’t have any real news at a trade show, don’t worry.  By all means, meet the journalists.  But do it on their terms — don’t tug at their sleeves and interrupt if they are busy, but do stop and chat if they have a few minutes.  That’s where the real relationship-building work is done.

Tags: Public Relations, Technology by Craig
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I recently took a group of IT journalists to Disneyland Paris for a client event (insert your own joke about Mickey Mouse press trips here). As often happens after a couple of drinks, the conversation turned to what’s good and what’s bad in the relationship between PRs and journalists.

One thing that was strongly and universally disliked, was PRs using Facebook or LinkedIn to distribute press stories. The point was made to me quite forcefully that these applications are for social purposes, for keeping up with people you want to keep up with – and not a medium for press releases.

What made me think about this again was yesterday’s report from Nielsen Online, the analytics firm that tracks time spent online at various websites. The report says that in 2008, social networking sites saw more time spent by users than personal email. Nielsen found that Facebook in particular saw greater growth among older people than it did among the young.

The important words in the report are ‘social’ and ‘personal’, which also means that most people see use of social networking applications as separate from their work identity.

By all means, have a blog, or update your profile on Web 2.0 apps so that your connections can see the changes when they choose. But using these apps to send press releases is a sure-fire way of getting onto a journalist’s blacklist.

Tags: Public Relations, Technology by Craig
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It’s funny how our expectations have changed over the years.  It was only just over a decade ago that you’d send out a press release by fax or post, and you’d start to see the results in the magazines 4 or 6 weeks later at the earliest.

Nowadays, you send the news by email, and you find yourself wondering what’s gone wrong if you don’t see online hits for it within a couple of hours.  Such are our expectations of a fast turn-round.  But not all stories will hit quickly — and nor should they.

Twice in the past week I’ve been checking Google news every few hours, hoping to see the story I’d just sent out pop up.  After a day, I’d given up hope.  But sure enough, a couple of days after sending the stories, they started to get hits, and continued to do so.

I asked a journalist contact on www.vnunet.com about this.  He said that some stories have an obvious finite life-span (like this one:  http://www.itpro.co.uk/603807/six-laptops-stolen-from-south-london-hospital), and get used quickly.  Others — for example, customer stories, that are less time sensitive – are often held for a day or two, so that they can be given a little more consideration and work.

So don’t be downhearted if you don’t get a bumper crop of news links immediately on issuing a press release.  Not everything these days moves at lightning speed. 

Tags: Public Relations, Technology by Craig
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One of our clients, Check Point (http://www.checkpoint.com) has just won a product category in the 2008 Techworld awards (http://www.Techworld.com), which has given us a warm glow this morning.

Especially as the client has sent the news out to all its field sales staff, partners and resellers — it shows how much they value winning.

Sometimes it may not seem worth the effort of entering industry awards in general:  there’s the time and effort, not to mention the ever-present suspicions of prize fixing.

But one thing’s for sure:  you don’t win if you don’t enter.  As Woody Allen once observed — and it’s very true in PR — success is 75% turning up.   [Read more →]

Tags: Public Relations, Technology by Craig
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There’s been quite a bit of debate in recent months about the use of social networking apps (mostly Facebook) for PR purposes. Specifically, should PR companies send press material direct to a journalist’s Facebook account? It seems like a good idea.  Since we abandoned paper press releases, journalists’ email inboxes have been deluged. [Read more →]

Tags: Technology by Craig
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