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.