A recent product launch we managed for Pliant Technology underscored the increasingly interrelated link between traditional public relations and social media marketing.

Last week, Pliant announced availability of its Lightning Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs), a new class of solid state storage devices for data centers and other high-performance computing environments. The dramatic performance, reliability and energy efficiency gains Pliant’s EFDs offered over anything currently available made for a timely and powerful news story.

After developing an arsenal of compelling performance, reliability and green IT messages, we orchestrated an extensive traditional media outreach campaign. This included setting up 50+ briefings with analysts and press covering SSD, enterprise storage, OEM, HPC, data center, and green markets and news.

On the social media front, we briefed a wide range of bloggers and other “non-traditional” media outlets to expand online visibility of the Pliant announcement, including HotHardware, Cleantech, Matter Network, and HPCwire.com.

The launch was an overwhelming success, generating 500+ articles, press release postings and mentions in a range of online/print media outlets, blogs, analysts reports, and social media outlets, including Twitter, Digg and Facebook.

Mentions on Twitter, in particular, were quite impressive, with more than 200 individual Tweets and re-Tweets appearing at launch and in the days following.
The launch was also successful from an SEO/online visibility perspective. Visits to the Pliant web site were up a whopping 794 percent over the previous week, with 85 percent of these coming from new visitors.

As they say, the numbers don’t lie. But personally, I’d have to say that of the coolest success metric of the launch came in the form of anecdotal feedback:  several editors took the time to offer their congratulations on the success of the launch.

George