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

In Sunday Business, Phyllis Korkki’s “The Count” column entitled, “Online Outlets for Creating and Socializing,” highlighted the findings of a Forrester Research report on the explosion of social media, concluding that, “…social media are a phenomenon that is now nearly impossible to ignore.” Pretty much in line with what we’ve been saying here at WaltCast.

But then I read Virginia Heffernan’s “The Medium” column in the New York Times Magazine entitled, “Facebook Exodus; why some members are moving on,” in which she wrote about the growing “disillusionment with Facebook.” She talked to people who have a range of reasons for leaving Facebook including: the ending last year of Scrabulous (copyright issues), because it undermines the notion of online friendship, its lack of privacy, a general lack of coolness, and just plain boredom.

Unlike Forrester’s quantitative approach, Heffernan’s insights are solely anecdotal. Yet, both make some pretty good points. The Forrester data shows that social networks like Facebook are enjoying 46 percent year-over-year growth, and that nearly half of all online adults belong to one of the big social networks.  Heffernan’s lead, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” points out the generally inevitable flip side of market domination, and goes on to make a pretty convincing case.

So who’s right? Will Facebook grow by half again next year, or will it be the next Netscape in a rapidly evolving social media landscape? You be the judge.  Since you will, in fact, be part of the decision.

Thoughts? Let me know.

Bob

The continuing decline of traditional print and broadcast media outlets, coupled with the rise of social networking and an increasingly digitally-connected public, are requiring fundamental changes to the way client communications programs are conceived and executed.

And nowhere is this more evident than in the world of technology PR.

Budget-, competition- and eco-minded organizations spanning virtually every technology sector are putting increasing pressure on their PR partners to adapt to this new era, and essentially, do more with less. This means generating more brand visibility, continually devising new and more creative program strategies, and driving more online traffic, in less time, with fewer resources, and often with only limited “news.”

At the end of the day, PR is still about helping a company manage how it interacts with, and is viewed by, it’s public. However as the rules of the game change, so does the tech PR practice as it seeks to keep up with new and unprecedented client and market demands.

Here are 4 fundamental ways in which the tech PR practice is evolving to meet these changing times:

1. Social-centeredness – PR pros are increasingly called upon to help tech clients devise strategies to identify and reach the growing numbers of media, influencers, partners, investors, and customer via a wide range of social networking tools and outlets. And, as no two client social media programs are alike, PR pros must quickly become experienced in a variety of social networks, tools and norms.

   This new social networking focus, by necessity, requires that the PR practitioner truly walk-the-walk. It’s virtually impossible to counsel a client on the nuances of Twitter unless one has used it him- or herself. As a result, many PR pros are blogging, Tweeting and engaging in Facebook, YouTube, Ning and a host of other social networking outlets on their own and on behalf of their agencies to hone their skills.

2. Google trumps ‘ink’ – While a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal may still be the Holy Grail for many tech clients, public relations is increasingly focused on helping a company establish and maintain strong brand visibility and a positive corporate reputation in the social media sphere, and by optimizing programs to help drive organic search visibility. This requires an entirely new set of technology and communications skills that traditional PR pros must learn — and learn fast. As a result, to be successful moving forward, tech PR pros will need to be trained in multiple disciplines, which brings me to the next point…
3. Cross-functional expertise – Traditionally, communications, media and/or journalism was the primary training of the PR pro. Today, with much effort centered on driving client visibility on the Web and via digital media, they must also have a basic knowledge about how to maximize SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for all PR campaigns. This includes identifying the ideal keywords and proper ‘keyword density’ when developing outbound PR materials to attract the most qualified search traffic to clients’ Web sites. Thankfully, there a number of helpful tools available for this purpose, including the Google Keyword Tool and PRNewsire’s SEO tips document and Keyword Density tool.

   Also, given the growing popularity of client blogs as part of an overall PR strategy, it helps to have a basic understanding of HTML programming. While most blogging engines are pretty easy to use and provide plug-ins to enable most of the core functionality, an understanding of basic HTML provides much more power and flexibility — particularly from an SEO perspective.

4. Putting the “public” back in PR – With the growing importance of social media communications, PR today is increasingly about helping clients use new tools to establish authentic, transparent relationships with customers and business partners, in addition to press and analysts. For the PR pro, this requires actively tracking client- and issue-centric discussions, monitoring conversations, and managing relationship-building and content-development strategies. Sometimes, it also means helping clients break through old, well-entrenched corporate cultural norms and biases as a means to build meaningful social media programs.

This is not to say that all traditional PR tactics will cease to have value. For example, there will still be a need for media/analyst relations activities, and press and/or social media releases for the foreseeable future.

However, tech PR is and will always be a strategic discipline. It’s about analyzing clients’ corporate and technology assets, target markets, competitive issues, and customer needs, and then devising customized strategies to reach their key audiences via the right combination of messaging and delivery vehicles.

And, these changing times, new technologies and the increasing pressures require that PR pros apply the same type of strategic process to continue finding new, creative, efficient, and effective ways to help clients achieve tomorrow’s communications and marketing goals.

Interested to hear your feedback.

Geo2