Much of our PR agency experience is with medium and larger sized technology companies. However, we often come across smaller companies that would benefit from PR. Being a small company, we fully understand that the PR needs of small businesses are not so different from those of larger firms: typically they want more potential customers to hear about their products and services.

The people we meet from those companies often have to manage marketing alongside other responsibilities – it’s not their main day job. In most cases, their experience of PR has been discouraging: they may have tried emailing the editors of their trade journals with a press release or perhaps tried putting a press release or two out across a free wire service. The results from this are often disappointing and, as anyone who as called up a busy editor will tell you, getting your press releases published is no easy feat. At that point in the conversation we might talk about the benefits of engaging a professional PR agency where turning those press releases into hits on your website or articles in a trade journal is part of the day job.

However, the reality for many small businesses is that the cost of engaging a PR agency would be prohibitive and we’ve been thinking about ways to help small businesses carry out effective PR without breaking the bank. As a starter it may be worth reading some of the articles we’ve written on PR, they cover topics such as entering awards and online PR. We’ve also recently started offering tailored one-day PR training courses that cover topics like: the right way to approach journalists; managing social media and search engine optimisation (SEO). These courses are aimed at people for whom marketing isn’t necessarily their main job i.e. exactly the kind of people we so often meet.

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!”

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.

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

While large firms employ both PR agencies and SEO (search engine optimisation) consultancies, a lot of SMEs can’t stretch to employing both.

I am a director at Vitis PR and we’ve been looking at how we could improve our search engine visibility without having to hire an SEO consultancy.  It would be interesting to hear how other companies have done the same.

A little about where we are with SEO at the moment – we rank on page one on Google for our key search terms – PR agency, PR company, technology PR agency, technology PR and Midlands PR agency.   We rank highly for other related terms too.

We are not an SEO consultancy.  In fact, Vitis PR is a small PR consultancy whose core offerings are public relations services for technology companies, which include media and analyst relations, social media relations, event support, copywriting and strategic PR counsel.   We have however taken the basic principals of PR and merged them with what we understand of SEO (not very scientific, but it works).  Here are some of the things we have done.

SEO consultancies are definitely reaping the benefits of companies wanting to rank highly on Google and I don’t blame them.  I have however talked to a few when first investigating how we could improve our rankings.  They did bamboozle me with phrases and terminology that I just didn’t understand and it is hard for me to buy what I don’t understand, so I didn’t go any further, but decided to investigate SEO myself.

Firstly, I went on an SEO training day run by Susan Hallam and got her to do a one hour website review.  Then Nadine and I worked through the information on lots of SEO help websites and put in place the basics, eg optimising our website pages – ensuring that our key words were mentioned naturally was one activity on our list and also sorting out our title tags.  Our site was in okay shape as we’d had National B2B Centre help us out with it when it first went up, but it definitely wasn’t optimised.  I guess the key here is that as a PR consultant, I write for a living and SEO is in a great part about managing and disseminating information, like public relations, so there is definitely cross over.  We have worked with software companies that describe English as their second language and are much happier with C++, so this isn’t necessarily as easy for everyone.  We then started to add more content to the website and what better way than adding press releases and articles.

Press releases are a staple PR tool, which we write on our own behalf and for our clients on quite literally a daily basis.  Our aim used to be securing media interest so that they publish our stories, so providing third party credibility and sometimes if we are lucky – backlinks.  We have to admit though, that some of our own press releases about our agency are not really earth shattering news, BUT our clients, partners and prospects would still like to hear our news.  So we are no longer only focused on securing media coverage only.  We tier news, by sorting out the best news from news that isn’t going to get into a key publication……. and distribute the news through appropriate news distribution services or social media.  This helps us get onto Google News.  We ensure that our key search terms include back links and we send out news consistently.  It’s working.

Building back links is a process which can be time consuming and some SEO agencies will have people in place who do this all day.  We added ourselves to relevant online locations which gave us backlinks and then the hard work began.  We have worked on gaining links naturally and gradually.  It is actually time intensive, so we have given ourselves a reasonable target and stuck  to it.  Something that is really working for us is following the news agenda and commenting on news articles, blogs and social media.  This is actually a PR technique we use when tracking what the media are saying, so it’s not really new to us.  I think that SEO agencies may not target sites that won’t give their clients backlinks.  On the other hand, we’re not put off by blog owners not linking back to us, especially if they have a lot of readers.  It helps us to establish credibility (which is what we are about).

We also aim to put out well written content on a regular basis.  I know a company that uses an SEO consultancy that is, in my opinion, pumping out poorly written content which reads like brochure-ware just to gain a link.  As PR consultants, we are taught that reputation is key. I guess if it gains a link, does it matter?  I would say it does.  Who wants poor English and a badly articulated argument associated with them?

Our PR activities tie in very closely to our SEO activity.  Another company I know of is using both SEO and PR agencies.  The SEO agency is asking the PR agency to stall on sending out the news on a wire for two days after it goes on the website.  As I said, I am not an SEO expert, so don’t understand this, but the whole point of news is to make it public to everyone at the same time especially since the internet is immediate.  For high profile online news websites, a story that has been available on the public domain for a couple of days may be old news, especially if you have invested in gaining a media profile and asking journalists to follow what you’re up to.  That example needs the two agencies to work together rather than against each other.

I think that PR agencies tend to be good at spotting stories, so the content we create is more likely to be re-used by third parties, which helps them to spread the good word about us online.

We measure like crazy – what works, which sites help us to rank highly.  We compare progress every month and have become laser focused on which keywords we want to rank highly for.  We don’t have too many fancy tools in place but have the basics and access many useful free tools.

I don’t know how long it would take for an SEO company to achieve page one rankings, but we noticed fairly quickly, within 3 weeks that we moved from nowhere (not on the top 15 pages) to seventh page, then after a few more weeks, we went to page 4, then 3 and it actually took around 2 months to get onto page 1.  Our main priority is servicing our clients, so we couldn’t dedicate all our time to driving our rankings, but I guess if we did, it would have been much faster.  Indeed for a PR client, who we also provided web copy for, we started ranking for their key terms within 2 days as we issued press releases which were used by key trade publications.

I think by continuing what we’ve been doing we have maintained our position till today and hopefully will stay on page 1 for our top keywords.  Of course, we will continue to keep abreast of what is going on in the SEO world, but know now that PR is a great driver for search engine rankings and it’s still going to be the key part of our SEO strategy.

It would be interesting to hear what others are doing in relation to using PR to drive their SEO.

It’s been another interesting month for our tech PR agency.

I wanted to share just a few pieces of media coverage we have generated for our clients in October, so you get an idea of what we can achieve. It’s hard to put the list in order as the stories mean different things to different clients and we can’t put everything here, so here are some of the ones we are most proud of:

1. Yuuguu review on BBC’s flagship consumer technology programme - BBC Click

2. credativ on Windows 7 and open source – Computer Weekly

3. Magic Software migrating 60 banking applications easily and effectively for international Bank Leumi – Banking Technology

4. ByteSnap Design releasing a new Windows CE user interface design tool – Windowsfordevices

5. Rapide Communication revealing new research on 75% of customer feedback being unread – Retail Bulletin

6. fg microtec partnering to provide their fixed mobile convergence client to Siemens – Enterprise VOIP Planet

The Rapide research story should be appearing in a tier one marketing magazine in November, so it’s getting exposure in front of the right people for the company.

We represented ByteSnap at the Embedded Systems Show in Farnborough in early October and their story on their new User Interface Tool has been run by some very good quality electronics publications and some with direct links back to ByteSnap’s website.  Google Analytics proves useful to understand which direct links from a publication’s website bring the most traffic.

As the month comes to a close, we are prepping for the biggest event in the Midlands ICT calendar – the ICT Cluster Conference and Awards – it’s all hands to the pump as we prepare press releases for shortlisted companies, organise publicity to encourage delegates to attend, arrange advertorials and get media interest for the event.

Anyway, November is again looking pretty busy, but as always we are up for a challenge!

A well thought out targeted PR campaign will bring business benefits, with leads, more positive awareness, support for sales teams and more.

But often companies employing PR agencies come away with a bad taste in their mouths. A prospect who subsequently became a client asked me recently: “so what if you don’t manage to achieve what you put in the proposal?” I told him that if we didn’t think we could do it, we would walk away, but PR is a two way street.

PR agencies and clients both need to give and take. Some important things for clients to consider to ensure that a project or retainer agreement work successfully are:

1.  Be very clear what you want to get out of the relationship – is it to be known in a specific vertical, dominate a technology space, launch a new product or service.  Whatever your objective is be very clear about it.

2. Be sure YOU can deliver your end of the bargain. You may have just signed up the biggest client ever but if they are unwilling to support the claim, then taking on an agency to promote this is obviously the wrong thing to do. Get your clients agreement up front.

3. Don’t be an also ran. Be different – have a unique value proposition or key messages and back them up with third party references, be they clients, partners or a academics or analysts. Prove that what you have is compelling.

4. Stick to timescales and give your agency the time they deserve. Unexpected things happen all the time and projects will overrun – that’s okay.   But if a piece of work overruns because you’re too busy to talk to  your agency, then there is a danger that the PR effort won’t deliver what you expected and frankly your not using the PR investment correctly.  Make time for your agency.

5.  Don’t expect miracles.  Agencies are creative and should be able to spot a story angle, but sometimes what you think is earth shattering, just isn’t going to cut it in newsland. We call those stories tier 2 stories – good for SEO, your website, social media and your maybe customers and partners but don’t bother your trade publications or nationals with tales of version 3.8.5 which offers one bug fix.

6. Communicate and listen to your agency.  They need to know what is going on in your company. Don’t surprise them by asking for a press release on a new strstegic direction for issue the next day. A good PR company agency should be treated like your internal team are (or even better;-).

7. And don’t make them keep having to chase you.  If you said you would do something by a certain date then do it or tell them another date. A lot of agency fee can be spent on chasing clients rather than meeting journalists or doing client work.

7. Understand that PR is a long term investment. You may get a spike in traffic on your website or more calls following a PR initiative, but once you have converted any strong leads what happens then?  Keep the momentum going.

8.  Make the right level of financial commitment. If you want to be in The Times, you will most likely need to create a story to support your business goals.  Depending on what your company is offering, a story may need a report or research to back it up, especially for the business pages. Research isn’t cheap but it can be reused for other marketing activity.  Also, be very clear that one day of PR agency time per month may not get you the really big goals you want to achieve.

These are just a few thoughts and I will try to add to them later, but pls feel free to add your own.