Getting great publicity in the tech industry isn't as simple as following the right breadcrumbs. Based on feedback from some tech PR folks who I deal with at companies of varying sizes--publicly traded, VC-funded start-ups, and bootstrapped DIYers--here are five free tech industry PR resources that I would recommend. (If any tech PR folks out there have additional free resources they'd recommend, please comment.)
IT Memos
It can be incredibly painful to keep track of the thousands of tech events and speaking submission due dates each year. (Some--like RSA, Interop, CES, etc.--have lead times up to seven months in advance).
Keeping tabs on all the tech awards (like Webware 100, the Webbies, the Crunchies, etc.) and submission deadlines is no picnic either. And it's also dreadful to manually track "editorial calendars" (where tech publications often tip their hands on upcoming stories they are writing).
ITMemos is a free new e-mail alert from the team at IT Database that simply nudges subscribers about important upcoming opportunities in these areas. If you're not subscribed to this free alert, hundreds of tech PR people are finding out about/acting on these opportunities before you are, so GL.
(Disclosure: I am an advisor to IT Database.)
Help a Reporter Out
Many tech PR folks are familiar with the journalist/source-matching service called Profnet that used to charge an annual subscription fee leading a guy named Peter Shankman to do the end-around and start giving away the same service for free, while increasing the number of opportunities.
Sign up for the HARO newsletter and receive three daily digest e-mails that list out opportunities where reporters are searching for sources/comments for stories they are writing.
While "Tech" is just one section in the e-mail, and often you will open it without finding a relevant opportunity--it's totally worth it to subscribe for the times where you do come across a journalists' story that matches your company's tech category.
... Read moreHow many tech PR pros actually regularly read the content produced by the journalists they're pitching? Based on all the inappropriate e-mails I get, I'm guessing not many. And based on other journalists' feedback, the tools that PR pros use to identify targets aren't very intelligent either.
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine decided to tackle this challenge of making tech PR pros smarter about how they identify and track appropriate tech authors for publicity purposes. It turns out it's a data problem--not stupidity or laziness (OK, maybe a *little* laziness)--that explains why PR people are so often completely off the mark when targeting and communicating with authors.
ITDatabase is launching Monday and tackling a very specific opportunity--get all tech news indexed in one place, and make it much easier for tech industry pros to analyze/aggregate trends about what's being said across all tech news. The company is starting with tech PR pros as the initial target customers, but believes the product offers a lot of research value to product managers and sales roles as well.
"There are thousands of tech authors covering tens of thousands of vendors and themes," said Travis Van, founder of ITDatabase. "Multiply them all together and you get a huge unstructured data mess, which largely accounts for why tech PR folks are often hitting the wrong journalists with the wrong content."
Like the vast majority of online start-ups, ITDatabase is built on an open-source stack:
- Wicket--a Java-based Web app framework
- Hibernate--Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) framework & JPA (Java Persistence API) provider
- Hibernate Search--provides ORM integration with Lucene
- Lucene--search engine
- MySQL
- Tomcat (behind Apache)
Van admits there's an enormous universe of data and that ITDatabase is still finding new/missing tech industry authors every day. "That's just the nature of an information product--we're always going to be finding new tech industry authors and sources," he said.
I think we often give too much credit to Google alerts and portals, expecting them to bring us all of the information. Services like ITDatabase can offer a wealth of actionable data to make you more efficient.
Disclosure: I am an informal adviser to ITDatabase.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom
It's no secret that most companies are not great at PR, or that many people consider PR to be a money pit with questionable returns. But odds are some very simple tweaks can make your efforts much more successful.
Over on The Page Wonders blog, Ray George gives some advice on 3 Things You Can Still Do Better in the world of traditional PR. In addition to better leveraging tactics like contributed articles you have to start thinking beyond the immediate press hits and realize that the conversation shouldn't end.
Here's a bigger idea to chew on - people sell PR short by thinking of media opportunities as a 1:1 ratio. That is, client briefs reporter - reporter writes story - it goes live - it is listed under client news section. Instead, focus on using media opportunities and successes and discussion to breed other media opportunities and successes and discussion.
The big idea here is to ensure that your brand maintains momentum and that media opportunities go from 1:1 to one to many.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom
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