THE BLOG

08
Dec

Are minor hires worth announcing? Probably not.

Posted by / PR Tips

A company in the sector just put out a press release about its hiring of four people.

On one hand I am happy to read people are hiring again, as there is no shortage of people looking for work and that’s not going to change for a while. On the other hand, big whoop.

Press releases by software development companies that are well-established in the space are warranted when a big name is attracted and hired in. Someone who makes readers think, “Oh, well look at that …” It is warranted when a senior or thoroughly strategic position is filled.

It is not, however, warranted when the hires are support staff and back-office folks who do good work, but will provoke no more than a shrug from the industry or clients. Press releases like that, inadvertently, make people wonder if there is much really shaking around the place, if that’s the only thing they’ve got for making some hay.

If it ain’t news, it ain’t news, and some bot news portals picking it up verbatim doesn’t make it anymore so.

04
Dec

Sub-optimized PR: Don’t just tell them, show them

Posted by / PR Tips

I have a self-imposed rule that I don’t include the names of companies on this blog if I am slapping them around for being stupid or mindless in their approach.

Here’s a case of PR that is pretty well executed, albeit in a highly conventional way, but misses the opportunity at hand.

PlayNetwork is a Seattle-area company in the business of blending audio and video to create an overall experience in a retail environment – something that I believe is a huge growth part of this digital signage sector. Many chains have audio entertainment and messaging. Not that many, yet, have video. Very few have the two working seamlessly together. The guys who do that well, and reduce the overall offer down to one vendor, one bill, one throat to choke, are on to something good.

So we have Play announcing this week it’s people have deployed PlayNetwork’s Serenade Service to deliver music and messaging content in all of the Dickey’s Barbecue Pits around the US.

The original Dickey’s opened in Dallas in 1941, with a simple goal – “Serve barbecue so good people will crave it.” By harnessing the power of Serenade’s user-friendly and secure web-based interface, Dickey’s embeds that timeless mission into the music and promotional messages that play in all sites. These promotions, narrated by Roland Dickey himself, bring the heritage of Dickey’s to each individual location. Dickey’s also uses the Serenade tool to control their messaging on-hold content, extending its brand experience beyond the lease line to fans placing phone orders.

The release says the deal enables Dickey’s to serve up a uniquely Texan taste, smell, feel and sound.

To complement the popular Texas barbecue menu, PlayNetwork designed a music concept deeply rooted in Americana, mixed with a hefty dose of classic Southern rock, blues, and boogie-woogie, a Texas-style Western swing. There is no mistaking the Texas roots of Dickey’s Barbecue after listening to this home-grown collection of songs. The sounds reverberating through the restaurants are as distinctive as the taste and smell of Dickey’s Signature Beef Brisket – it’s down-home Texas barbecue.

Great. Sounds very cool.

And as a blogger who might even write about this – one of the objectives of PR – I scroll down the release looking for images, and ideally some video.

Nothing.

There is nothing inherently wrong in this release. The “global leader” thing makes me and other journalists/bloggers immediately yawn, but Play actually IS a global leader in this narrow part of the sector.

However, a company that is expressly in the business of teasing the eyes and ears of consumers really, really should at minimum have PR that offers images, and with the capabilities and cost of teeny camcorders and the ease of YouTube and other video channels, doing a basic video should be fundamental.

You’ve done some good, interesting work. Don’t just tell them, show them.

18
Nov

DS PR 101: No PDFs please

Posted by / PR Tips

I just got a press release as a PDF. For me, that’s OK, because while I write about the industry, I don’t spend a lot of time reporting on it and therefore extracting a lot of quotes from releases.

BUT, if I did, pulling the text out of PDF files is a pain in the butt, and depending on the way the PDF is formatted, possibly a giant pain in the butt. Couple that with images that look very nice in the PDF file, but now have to be grabbed via screen capture and then fiddled with in some image edit software.

By putting something out that looks polished and pretty, you have created a bunch of irritating extra work for editors. On a busy day, they might not bother dealing with your stuff because time is limited.

If you insist on sending a PDF, send it as an attachment and have all the text in simple, unadorned text form in the email message body, and send images and logos as attachments.

Make it easy and you will get better results.

18
Nov

DS PR 101: Contain your ego

Posted by / PR Tips

A press release this morning from a guy who was leaving his gig and going out on his own as … something … (it was far less than clear) … started with the guy proclaiming himself a luminary.

Don’t. Just don’t.

It’s meaningless to most people, but all the wrong people will jump all over it and make all the wrong hay with it.

27
Oct

Advice from editors: scale by association

Posted by / PR Tips

If there are 250 software platforms on the digital signage market, I am guessing at least a third of them have a McDonald’s logo somewhere in their presentation materials.

It is one of the world’s most recognizable icons and companies like to include it when referencing clients. I would imagine this is interesting for the retailers who see maybe a dozen software companies for show and tell sessions, and start wondering how all these guys could ALL be working with McDonald’s.

Well, they are … in a franchised location or group here and there. Whether the main office approved or even knows about the screens is another matter.

This also happens in press and marketing materials, and it is something that makes editors a little crazy. Barnaby Page of UK-based Screens.tv calls it “scale by association.”

“A few people are guilty of sending out releases that imply they are, for example, rolling out to a retailer’s whole estate when in reality it’s only a trial in a few branches. Don’t tell me SupaPharm has 865 stores. Tell me how many the screens are going into,” explained Page.

If it is a pilot, congratulations. It may lead to something. But be honest and indicate it is indeed a pilot. If it is a local franchisee going rogue on head office, and the press and marketing materials imply there is more to the deal than there really is, be prepared to get slapped around.

This happened to a rather larger technology provider this year, when a small job was trumpeted loudly as a rollout.

Lionel Tepper of Digital Signage Universe, in the wake of that one, went so far as to introduce a new editorial policy:

While we expect a certain amount of embellishment in a press release, we also expect that it will be accurate. It seems that some companies have been pushing the envelope on their facts in an effort to gain attention and market share. At a time when we are all looking to raise the profile of the industry, none of us can afford to have our credibility damaged. Credibility matters—yours and ours.

We recently carried a release on our site (which has now been removed) that marked a new low for distortions of fact. We understand that this release had a significant amount of “blow back” for the parties involved, and so Digital Signage Universe will now be vetting releases more carefully from this point forward.

Digital Signage Universe is slowing down the process to make sure that the information we receive is indeed accurate, and that credit is given where credit is due. We ask that other industry news sites to do the same. Posting company news is rarely mission-critical, and accuracy matters more than speed.

There is very little to gain from streeeeetching the truth, other than a brief little round of attention in the online trade sites. There is much more to lose when you start getting probed by customers who are serious about doing business with your company, and start figuring out your sales and marketing people are a little slippery with the facts.

20
Oct

Advice from editors: on carpet-bombing

Posted by / PR Tips

carpetbomb

There are countless blogs now on the digital signage and DOOH sector, but still just a handful of Web-based portals and news sites that cover the industry on a daily basis. The people who runs those commercial services make the calls daily on what either goes from their email Inboxes to their digital pages, or to the Trash folder.

You can work with these folks, or you can irritate the daylights out of them. Guess which approach is more effective in meeting your marketing needs.

I sent around a note today to the editors of these news sites to get their point of view on how things work, and got a lot of great responses. I will do a few posts about what they had to say, with this first one on the issue of what I call carpet-bombing.

This is the practice of sending press release after press release out to the same media outlets, with the notion that this shows the business has incredible momentum in the marketplace. There was a sports-oriented company doing this last year, and the new, undisputed champion is a software company that at least seems to put out a press release a day announcing a deal that sees its product installed in another small venue somewhere.

“We as editors get so many press releases per day as it is, it really doesn’t help to get carpet bombed with insignificant ones,” says Bill Yackey of Digital Signage Today. “If a company sends releases of little value to the industry too frequently, I may begin to ignore them, and that doesn’t help anyone.”

“Press releases are a valuable marketing tool, however, there’s a fine line between being informative and being abusive. We’ve reached a point where we’ve just stopped paying attention to companies that issue press releases too often, or make claims in their releases that are too over-the-top. There are several companies in this industry that have been too aggressive with their PR and we just won’t carry their news anymore,” adds Lionel Tepper, Managing Director, Digital Signage Universe.

On the other hand, several editors said they would rather get the releases than not at all, and indicated doing a mental filter on what matters and what doesn’t, or what is just yet more blabber, is easy enough for them.

Denis Gaumondie, who writes the French (and now English, as well) portal OOH-TV, suggests companies would be wise to show some restraint, and would probably get a better reception from editors like him. “I don’t care to know if a company signs another bar, or bowling alley, or whatever. It’s just irrelevant,” he says. “If I was them, and patient enough, I would aggregate four or five press releases like that and put one release together.”

My take: You can easily wear out your welcome with an editor. Even those editors who indicate they will deal with the carpet-bombing campaign of a company would also, probably, confirm any releases from that company stop getting read beyond the headline.

Editors are interested in news and in educating their industry. If a company is in the business of selling software, it is hopefully NOT news that the company actually did some business and got a small client here and there to sign on. The news is when a software company does a big deal, like an entire chain of stores. Or the company does something that hasn’t been done before, or very much — like converting a whole restaurant from backlits to digital menu boards.

My advice is to be judicious about your PR. Send things out when you really have something worth telling the world.

When a company engages in carpet-bombing, and the daily deals all look tiny and irrelevant, that company can start to look a little desperate for attention.

NEXT: “Scale by association.”

16
Oct

DS PR 101: Don’t go overboard with the information

Posted by / PR Tips

I was reading what I thought was a quite well-executed news release from a company, but started laughing about half-way through when the marketing person who probably put it together appeared to run out of things to write, so started using what the ops guy fed him or her.

These digital signs are designated as ART1, ART2, LUXE and ICON, respectively.  In addition, the four <vendor> units are connected to an AMX distribution system which allows <client> to selectively distribute the artwork to all the televisions in the lounge/bar areas via strategically located touchpanels.

Image display in BMP, JPEG and PNG formats enables the network to handle the variety of formats supplied by contributing artists. <Vendor> models can also play MPEG-2 and -4 High-Definition videos at up to 1080p resolution, via component or HDMI outputs. High-definition still-image modes provide versatility and reliability, making <vendor> the ideal solution to show artists’ works at their best.

It goes on like that for several paragraphs.

It’s OK to just say what you did and include an image or even video link. Going into deep detail about what names were designated for the players and what media formats are supported is way more than you need for PR work. The target readership has no cause to care. The only people who need to know that stuff work in the operations department. Celebrate and highlight the good stuff and the shut the release down.

14
Oct

Differentiate or perish

Posted by / PR Tips

It is really interesting to spend many years in this industry, pitching sets of pots and pans and trying to win over prospective customers … and then stepping back from the contest and realizing what’s going on.

Damn near everyone is using the same sales pitch.

I am talking suppliers. And I am talking operators.

When you manage to escape from the bubble that is your company, or the larger bubble that is your general technology or media proposition, you start to realize the sales and marketing pitch – those bullet points that people use to excite prospects – is pretty much the same one the next guys are using. And the next guys. And the next guys.

Everyone is the industry leader. What they do is the next generation. They’re the best in class. The audience is premium. Their medium is highly targeted.

My work now gives me the blissful perspective of looking from the outside in at the industry, functioning as a smarty-pants consultant and communications specialist. I get asked now to help companies pull together their marketing copy and strategy, and enable them to stand out from the many other companies that offer variations on essentially the same products, services or audience.

The problem is … most companies are so busy getting everything else done — to organize, launch and run a technology or media company — that the actual time spent developing a compelling set of marketing messages is minimal. It’s one of those, “Oh crap, we need a sell sheet and some stuff for the Website!” situations, that usually involves someone who shouldn’t be doing marketing pulling together a few points during spare moments.

I have done a couple of competitive analyses for technology companies lately, and what really struck me was how similar the value propositions are between technology companies. Go through 15 company sites and you will find most of them highlighting the things that everybody else is highlighting, like flexibility and scalability and support for most media formats.

Ad network operators are not as bad, but the same issues apply.

Volkswagen markets itself on statements like “The art of rocket science.” It does not plaster signs on its windows reading, “Tires on our cars are filled with air!”

So why, when I go to many Websites for vendors, do I read excited bullet points about Day-part scheduling!!!

Well, woohoo! Peddling features and benefits that just about all your prospective customers already assume you have is not the path to glory.

There are clear indications much of what gets written and trumpeted is a variation on what a competitor has on its site. Chances are, that copy was ‘inspired’ by another competitor’s copy. And so on. Companies need to spend more time thinking about how they set themselves apart from the mob, and far less worrying about how their competitors market themselves.

What is it that you guys do, or have, that makes you different? Are you particularly strong in a vertical market? Does your technology have some whiz-bang component that’s rare or unique? Is there something you are doing that others can’t touch?

There are companies I won’t name who market themselves on technology offers that aren’t even unique, but they’ve nonetheless made that gadgetry their own. They’re the guys who do (insert not terribly unique thing here) and they let people know. Compare that to what most companies go out with, which is essentially: “We’re one of countless industry leaders and we offer the same dynamic, flexible and cost-effective stuff for digital signage networks that you’ll find on the next 14 sites you browse and sell sheets you read!!!”

Try this exercise: Print off your main Web pages and sell sheets and grab some Hi-Liter pens. Underline in yellow those phrases and features you’ll admit are common across many companies, and in another colour highlight those features that are unique or more compelling than common. If there’s a lot of yellow, you need to get to work.

There are many, many reasons why a company might prosper or fail, but a really strong predictor for failure is a company that can’t put into words how it is different and why that matters. The same disciplined work that goes into product development, budgets and staffing needs to also go into how your company goes to market and sets itself apart.

If you can’t differentiate, you perish.

05
Oct

Quotes from the boss should be useful, not just blabber

Posted by / PR Tips

It is probably rare in companies of any real size that the quotes in a press release, that involve the president or CEO, have actually been uttered by that person.

It is probably almost as rare that the release gets distributed with the quoted person actually having seen what he or she has supposedly said. So these quotes are often innocuous and irrelevant, and therefore not going to get anyone in trouble.

The problem is that these sorts of quotes are just about useless and can actually, in their useless glory,  cast the boss in a bad light. Consider quotes you see all the time that read something like this:

“We’re really excited to be working with Acme DooDads on this project,” says  Brand X CEO Bob Jones.

That sort of thing is suggesting to me that Bob has only the most fleeting awareness of the project, particularly since the  most insightful thing he can come up with is that he’s getting goosebumps.

When you are cooking up a quote from your boss, first of all make it sound like a quote. But more to the point, make it relevant, and something that advances the story. For example: “We know Acme DooDads weighed a lot of options before selecting Brand X,” says Bob Jones, the CEO of Brand X,  “and we’ll be working closely with Acme to ensure we’re helping them hit the business goals we all identified.”

That’s actually making a statement that Brand X came out ahead of a lot of competing companies, and the Brand X is less a vendor and more a partner.

Innocuous nothing quotes, on the other hand, are big red Stop signs that tell a reader, “OK, we’re done with the interesting stuff and we’re into the Blah Blah Blah. Time to move on.”

02
Oct

Think, write it out, then think again, then think again, and only then click on Publish

Posted by / PR Tips

I just sent a note off to an unnamed company.

They are unnamed because I like their product and their general approach, and as noted in the past, this blog was not created as some weird writing hall of shame.

Someone, in this case, has been given the keys to the corporate blog, and instead of driving the blog by the cool kids and showing off, the kid with the keys is going up on the sidewalk trying to run the cool kids over.

Not a great idea.

Without going into detail, the company’s blogger is making seriously odd assertions and slapping around the industry as a whole by suggesting pretty much everybody – except his company – has it all wrong.

Well, there’s a slight chance he’s right. But only slight.

His saving grace may be that few people actually read company blogs, because most of those kinds of blogs in this industry have precious little to say other than, “We’re swell!” and “We just released some more stuff that makes us even sweller!!!” These blogs have a role, but are not reliably updated and therefore have no substantive audience.

There are some very notable exceptions to that rule, of course.

A company blog can be a useful mechanism to help existing clients and enlighten potential customers, but’s it’s rare when one bubbles up that’s actually good and not just an exercise in Tarzan chest beating. In this case, the blogger is banging stuff out without, I gather, really thinking through what happens after he posts the piece.

This is a small industry still. Stuff gets around quickly. Twitter can get all kinds of people suddenly reading a post the writer might have thought few would see. The low road is rarely the right road. And your company will be spotted on it. An industry friend note about these guys: “Maybe they should accomplish something before they declare victory.”

As someone writing for your company blog, consider these steps:

Think about what you want to write. Then write it out. Read it again. Think about how the audience will react and what that means. Then think it through some more.

Then, if you are comfy that the benefits outweigh the negatives, hit the Publish button.

If you have any sense your post may stir up some shit you didn’t want stirred, save it as a draft and sleep on it. Even if your blog readership is minuscule, search engines pick up just about everything. So unless you really want to “own” your statements, and are ready to defend them inside and outside your company walls. think carefully about where your opinions might be read, and what goes down as a result.

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