June was a mega busy month for our Midlands technology public relations agency. We worked on something a bit different this month.  We PR’d the launch of  Aldridge Prime, a new development of work and living space. A launch event for local businesses and residents attracted lots of attention and media coverage including one front cover and newspaper articles in all relevant local media.  I’ve never been in a court house, so that was fun as the development is going to refurbish and redevelop the old courts in Aldridge.

For our enterprise tech clients, we got two of our clients into this month’s Information Age magazine and the launch of the new test automation factory was picked up widely. We supported a launch of a new package to help systems integrators and enterprises put ERP onto mobile devices with articles in Techworld, CBR and Computerworlduk.

Reviews of computing kit that we have managed for our leading technology retail client, including laptops and all in one PCs have appeared in Trusted Reviews, What Laptop, CNET and PC Pro.

And as if that’s not enough, our hosted voip client has received a lot of attention due to the possibility of  an upcoming BT strike, which actually has just been called off!

We celebrated our fourth birthday earlier in the month, so here’s an very quick overview of what we think has been going on in the PR industry over the last four years.

The PR industry has evolved tremendously in the last four years; partly owing to the growing impact of the internet on our lives and partly due to the ever increasing competition within the PR industry and from other specialisms such as search marketers and social media agencies.

The sophistication of using the internet to communicate through mediums such as Twitter has shortened the communications chain – you can now communicate directly to a blogger or journalist instantly and be up to date on what they are up to in real time, no matter where you are based.

This has pushed nearly all PR firms to move to the digital arena (any that aren’t in some way offering digital activity surely won’t be around for long) and manage their clients’ campaigns using a mixture of traditional and digital PR.

With improved communications and technology, also comes the ability to work more flexibly, so virtual PR agencies are popping up to threaten their traditional counterparts.  Virtual agencies are able to pull in expert consultants with specific experience so creating bespoke teams.

Since we are now operating in the digital world, getting the best talent in the field has become easier, with geographical distance and boundaries no more a constraint. This has given the virtual PR firms one more advantage. They have been able to minimise overheads and thus provide their clients with affordable high quality PR. No wonder, start-ups and small businesses are also able to benefit from these services. In last four years, the PR industry has grown by leaps and bounds; which means any cost cutting will give a PR firm significant cost advantage over its competitors.

Another interesting fact is the blurring line between PR and SEO (Search Engine Marketing). With more and more businesses adopting online brand promotional strategies, PR has assumed a new role that of “online PR”. The PR agencies have started helping their clients make their online presence felt. They now make use of integrated PR efforts in the form of online news sites, independent blog posts, online reviews, SEO news releases with optimised content and links and social media optimisation campaigns on Twitter, LinkedIn etc. In their endeavour to attract quality traffic to their clients’ websites, PR agencies have also widened the scope of their services to include website design and content creation for SEO and to make the sites both user and search engine friendly.

Of course the recession and this move to all things digital has also led to the demise of print publications, with shrinking readerships and ad revenue, only the strongest are surviving and ploughing budget into their digital offerings to keep their readers loyal.

The PR industry has come a long way in last four years.  Let’s see what the next four years bring.

We asked Nadine, who looks after our admin, to write about what she’s been up to this month.

“This month has been a very busy one for our PR agency with the addition of several new clients.  But with it has brought the opportunity to learn new skills, including things I never thought possible without years dedicated to IT Courses!

This month I have set up a Facebook page and researched how to maximise the effect of social networking in business to communicate with potential consumers; how to schedule Tweets and look at the efficacy of the links we have posted up; and amazingly I have learnt CODING!! Something I never expected to include in my personal skill set.

New jobs also require old skills too and I have started monitoring the online coverage generated by Vitis PR for our new clients; began researching lists of relevant media personnel to contact on behalf of our clients; proofread press releases; uploaded press releases to websites and managed the process to pick up products from journalists that have reviewed our clients’ products.

It’s always exciting to have new clients on board, learning about their business and sometimes finding new services you wondered how you ever lived without them!”

We work for a great small business VoIP company called Cloud Net. They provide plug and play internet telephones and switchboard.

We like the idea so much that we have switched our business phone system to theirs.

It’s already saving us money and is really easy to control online.

What’s more, there was no complicated installation or waiting in for installation engineers and they gave us free handsets thrown in.

We’ve taken more than one handset and our calls get automatically routed to whoever is free, our voicemails go to emails and they have a free conference line included. We just plugged the handsets into our router and then started making calls.

Another uber busy month has kept us away from the blog.

February started with a trip down to Farnborough to represent our embedded electronics consultancy client at the Southern Manfucturing and Electronics Show.  We met with 8 journalists during the day and picked up some great show preview coverage in Elektor, Design Products and Electronics among others.  We’ve been working with the Longbridge based team on PR activity to raise awareness of the company and also re-design their website and improve their SEO to drive more customers to them via the internet.  It was therefore great news to hear that they have won their biggest contract to date as a result of a Google Search.

Rather than work on our own blog, we’ve also been providing enterprise tech industry news analysis for one of our clients to include in their regular blogging activity.

Our consumer electronic product review work took me down to the new PC World and Currys combined store in Fulham to co-host consumer tech journalists while they checked out the latest range of touch screens from the likes of Acer, Sony, HP and Dell.

We also started working for Cloud Net, a business phone systems company based in Walsall.  They provide a full featured phone switchboard for the fraction of the price of hardware switchboards, and users get free handsets which saves even more money.  Their associate programme launch, appointment of new sales and marketing director and exhibition at the Business Growth Show certainly kept us busy.

It’s already March and hopefully, we’ll have a little more time to blog this month!

Got this today from Realwire, sounds like it would be worth signing up to:

An Inconvenient PR Truth - a campaign to reduce PR spam

Near the end of last year we carried out surveys with recipients of press releases which focused on the extent to which the releases they receive from the PR Industry as a whole are relevant to them.

The results were quite startling with 78 per cent of press releases received by the participants being irrelevant to them. In addition more than half of them had taken action to block a sender of releases due to irrelevance.

When asked about RealWire’s performance we compared favourably. Guided by recipient’s feedback we have already taken action to improve our service to them further.

However we felt that this issue was of industry wide importance so we decided to start a campaign that aims to tackle PR Spam. By coincidence this has turned out to be a topic on a number of key people’s lips at the start of this year.

The campaign is launching today and to learn more visit the campaign website at www.inconvenientprtruth.com

- Watch a powerful video argument to reduce online PR pollution, based on the results of our research;

- Review a proposed charter to protect journalists, bloggers and publishers from irrelevant PR spam

We have already started work on some developments to improve our own relevance, but the campaign isn’t about us as on our own we are neither the problem or the solution. It is about trying to convince the PR industry to grasp this nettle once and for all.

If you are interested in showing your support for the campaign you can sign up on our Activists page or contact us to find out more.

We’ve been working with a video company to produce some video content for news websites and get media and analysts’ questions answered in video format.  It’s great for the interviewer as their news story comes to life, and great for our clients as they get content they can spread virally which is more interesting than a standard update.

Here are links to a couple of the videos we pitched in, secured questions for, organised filming and supplied to Sales Pro in the UK and SMB Group in the US.

Yuuguu interview for SalesPro.co.uk

Yuuguu interview with SMB Group

Gosh end of the year already!  2009 has certainly been one of the most interesting and challenging years for our tech PR agency.

With client marketing budgets under pressure at the beginning of the year as the recession really began to bite, coupled with the growing interest and use of social media, we started to update the services that we provide to clients, so that we could ensure the best use of budget.

Our presence as a technology PR agency on search engines is certainly improving and that understanding is helping us to gain more clients and help our clients with basic SEO activity and helps us to guide our clients through the social media landscape.

Media coverage, both on and offline,  of course plays an important part in raising awareness of our clients’ products and services, so here’s a tiny weeny sample of the coverage we have generated for our clients this year:

1. Application platform company - Financial Times
2. Online security company – Financial Times, page 3 piece on online anonymity

3. Online security company – Sky TV

4. Web conferencing company – Daily Telegraph

5. Web conferencing company – BBC Click

6. Open source company – Computer Weekly

7. Management consultancy – Computing

8. Mobile marketing company – Data Strategy

9. Open source company – ZDNet

10. Regional IT project – Birmingham Post

Loving all things Social media, I attended a Social media workshop run by the National Business to Business Centre, an organisation which helps West Midlands SMEs benefit from e-business.  The workshop was very interesting in terms of new tools introduced, the importance of analysis, determining which tool is best for a company and what is critical to us…..that if a company doesn’t have time to manage a social media campaign, it really isn’t worth setting up say a Twitter page or Facebook group.

Some SMEs on the workshop complained that indeed they just didn’t have the time to manage a social media campaign and this is really where a PR agency can help.  For instance, we run social media activity for our clients including Twitter and Linkedin campaigns.  We also provide ideas and conduct research for blog posts, which can help our clients cut the time needed to post interesting, original and relevant comment.

Finally, I learnt that is okay not to have a social media campaign and as one of the presenters said, if you know who your targets are and how to contact them, pick up the phone, don’t spend time Tweeting hoping that they will call you off the back of that.  If you have a client base that you can’t reach via direct sales due to size, not knowing exactly who they are or location, then social media should be part of a comprehensive marketing communications plan.

It’s been such a busy two weeks that we haven’t been able to catch our breathe to CELEBRATE the fact that we won a Silver PR campaign award for our work with the ICT Cluster.  We won the award from the CIPR, which is the Chartered Institute for PR for the uninitiated.

It was a proud moment as this is the first campaign that we have entered for an award and to be in the finals was amazing but to get Silver really was the icing on the cake, especially as the competition was very tough.

The judges especially congratulated us for the use of social media to reach SMEs within the West Midlands region.  For the ICT Cluster we manage the Twitter feed and the Linkedin pages, provide and upload content to their website, produce the newsletter and also implement traditional and online PR.

We’re definitely proud of our achievement.