Stupid PR Tricks

“I saw your article on the [ …] and wanted to clarify some confusion in the article around pricing,” began an exchange with one PR person last week about something that I wrote in my first week as Business Channels editor at ReadWriteWeb. For those of you that missed that memo, I have taken on a new job there running four different enterprise IT-related sites for them. To paraphrase Garrison Keillor, tech PR is the place where the pitches all seem strong, the products all claim to be good looking and the reps are all still below average.

So it seems my real job is that of PR educator or trainer, or at least getting folks to give me correct information. My article, one of 20 that I posted last week on the site (not that I am trying to brag, but still), had the wrong pricing info for the product. Okay, simple enough, I thought. “Please give me a couple of examples of what typical enterprise pricing would be, thanks,” I replied. Moments later came the reply: “Enterprise pricing varies from one enterprise to the next because it’s based on the number of subscribers. There is no ‘typical’ pricing for enterprises.”

Okay, how about if I sign up a 25 person company for this service, what would that cost? Seems like a straightforward question, right? Nope. “We don’t break out pricing publicly that way.” In the end I really never got an answer, and had to replace specific but incorrect information with vague but accurate statements. Was my reader served by this? Not one bit.

Oh, now I remember why I went out and worked for myself: I hate this kind of PR dumbing-down. Sigh.

So for those of you that plan on pitching me story ideas, here is a guide to help.

First off, before you send anything, read my clips! Figure out what I write about. Then take a deep breath and send your pitch to my RWW email address. If you can’t find it inside of one click from our home page, then stop right now and figure out something else to do with your career. This is not quantum mechanics.

The one exception to this is if I wrote about category of web widgets and your client has a really great one that I should have covered. Save us both a lot of time and add a comment to the article, making it clear that you represent the client. Maybe I will return to the topic in a few months and pick up some news on your client. Maybe not. But I am not inclined to write another widget article anytime soon.

Second, if you don’t have a story with something Web-based for enterprise IT workers, you can save both of us a lot of time. That is what I cover. A new printer? If it does have some interesting Web interface, it is a stretch but maybe. A new database engine for Web apps? Most certainly. There will be some other stories that I will write about, but probably not because you pitch me but because I think our readers will find them interesting.

Third, I love demos. Or better yet, access to a working version of a product that I can try out. (Please, no 30 day timebombs, because I guarantee you that on the 29th day is when I end up actually beginning my tests.) I want to see the actual product or service that my reader is going to be using in the same kind of context.

This means no slide decks, no long 30 minute conference calls where your CEO has to go over in detail how each round of capital was raised and how many of his or her cronies came from formerly fabulous places to round out the dream team. Honestly, I couldn’t care less. If you must use slides, send me a deck with three of them that I can review beforehand.

And yes, please put some kind of pricing in there. Readers are shoppers and shoppers need to know what something costs before they can honestly consider what they should do.

Finally, be responsive and get back to me soon. Real soon. This is the Interwebs, people. Our deadlines are measured in minutes sometimes, and if I have to hold a story overnight, it may never see the dawn’s early light, or even be posted. Sometimes I get two of the same email pitches, spaced a few days apart: yes, my email is actually working and the servers dutifully deliver the messages right to my little computer pretty much all day long. There is no need to follow up with a duplicate message checking to see if systems are AOK. Or worse yet, a phone call to confirm that the email was delivered. If you are so worried about it, learn to use encrypted email with delivery and read receipts.

Some of this may be old school to some of you, and you know who you are – I am happy to say that not everyone is below average. But based on my not-so-random sampling of my first week at RWW, I am not so sure.

Markmonitor: Spring 2011 Brandjacking Index on Online Hotel Bookings

The online hotel bookings business is a lucrative one for fraud, but it is fraud of a very insidious nature: The major hotel brands are losing billions of dollars a year, and much of this business is being snapped up by their own legitimate online travel agents who get to the customer first through a variety of ploys. It is surprising how these agents can game the paid search results and squat on a variety of domain names that misrepresent themselves, with almost 360 million visits being diverted from the hotels’ own sites.

You can download the report (after registering) here that I did for Markmonitor.

Network World: Check Point’s new security blades cut both ways

If you’re in the market for endpoint protection, Check Point’s new R80 Unified Endpoint Security Management product shows promise. The R80 represents the first integration of the Pointsec encryption product line, which Check Point acquired in 2007, and the notion of software blades. The R80 features six separately licensed blades that cover a wide range of endpoint security features. You can read my entire review along with a short slide show of what I liked and didn’t, over on Network World here.

Personal announcement

I have been doing these Web Informant essays since September 1995 on a more or less weekly basis. It has been the single most effective thing that I have done to further my career, keep in touch with you, my loyal readers, and otherwise act as a sounding board for whatever it is that I am working on.

Today, I start a new job, as business channels editor for ReadWriteWeb. It is a challenging position: I supervise four of their enterprise IT sites and several full-time and part-time writers. My bosses are scattered between New Zealand, Pittsburgh, and Portland, Oregon. It has been years since I last had a “real” job, running multiple pubs.

Nevertheless, I am excited about the opportunity, and looking forward to working with a growing company that has a tremendous reputation. This means that I won’t be doing any freelance writing for my usual outlets (Ziff, IDG, TechTarget, and QuinnStreet), although I still will take some consulting (including doing video reviews), speaking, and custom publishing work.

So what should you do if you want to keep up with my work? For the time being, nothing: sit back and see what makes sense for your particular Strom consumption. I will repost something to this list and on my strominator.com Web site after it hits RWW’s sites. If you want to subscribe to the RWW email newsletter or feeds, you can find that information on their main Web page or go to their Feedburner feed here:
feed://feeds.feedburner.com/readwriteweb

(My first post is about what enterprise IT workers can learn from the new Oregon Facebook data center and the massive Sony PlayStation Network outage.)

If you are a PR person or work for a vendor in this space and want to pitch me on a story idea, product or service review, please send me an email and I will take a closer look. Can’t promise anything of course.

If you are in the NYC area, I will be attending the 2Way Summit conference held June 13-14 at Columbia University, and you are welcome to book some time to meet up there.

SearchCloudComputing: Preparing for a hybrid cloud move

The notion of hybrid cloud computing is gaining traction. While the concept isn’t all that new, vendors are constantly adding to the ways IT managers can effectively migrate and manage these mixed environments. And new providers spring up frequently, which makes evaluating them all that much harder. Assuming you’re ready to hop into the cloud, what are the right steps to take with a hybrid offering?

You can read my article on Techtarget’s site here that goes into details about the steps you need to take.

Welcome to the new backchannel

It’s not unusual to see IT audiences these days typing away on their laptops and smartphones while a speaker is making a presentation. But lately, I have seen the logged-on proportion with non-technical audiences start to swell.

Welcome to the new backchannel. No, these laptop-toting folks aren’t just bored and doing their emails (well, maybe some of them are). For the most part, they are actively listening to the speaker and reacting and sharing their comments with their peers, including other audience members and colleagues who aren’t attending the event. This presents new challenges and opportunities for speakers to engage their audiences

This is called a “backchannel” because your audience is conversing on Twitter and Facebook and using other social media tools during a speech. There are even some conferences, such as South by Southwest, held in Austin, Texas, each spring where the Twitter feed is projected on screens at the front of the hall for everyone to view.

And it isn’t just happening at conferences, either. A recent article in the NY Times talks about how the backchannel is working in the classroom, as teachers actively encourage laptop-toting students to “converse” with each other during class, finding that more students will open up on the keyboard than aloud.

The backchannel is catching on, and many conference organizers are creating a common hashtags on Twitter to promote their events and particular sessions and to help participants – or even folks that couldn’t attend the event – to track what is going on at the conference. A hashtag, for those of you not yet in the know, means adding a “#” character to your Tweet with a short label, to make it easier to search. Some speakers bring along a wingman or work with the conference organizer to help them track the stream of responses and field questions from their audiences.

But not all audiences – or professional speakers – are Twitter-friendly. Some presentations aren’t designed to be interactive and those speakers don’t take any questions from their audiences. Some industries, such as banking, have been slower to adopt social media tools. Also, Twittering with large audiences gets cumbersome. And some conference venues have been slow to provide free Wifi for participants, or provide such a low level of connectivity that quickly gets overwhelmed when more than a few attendees connect.

Many speakers have created extensive social media plans that involve reaching out to prospects prior to an event, publicizing an event and post-event follow-up, all using various social media. For example, I list my upcoming trips on Tripit.com before the event, which will let others in my network know my travel dates. At the end of my speeches, I put up the link to Slideshare.net/davidstrom, which has a copy of my slides that anyone can download.

So how to get started in using the social media backchannel? A great book to get started is Cliff Atkinson’s The Backchannel, which has lots of examples, recommended tools, audience and speaker guidelines, and more. There are sample chapters and resources online.

For example, Atkinson talks about having the following simple code of conduct for audiences to use when they Tweet during your presentations:

•  Tweet unto others as you would have them Tweet unto you.
•  Be accurate.
•  Say something good before you say something bad
• Stay aware of your Twitterstream reputation.

Second, start thinking about how you can include social media as part of your natural business operations to market yourself, extend your brand, and initiate conversations with potential audiences and clients. Finally, watch what your audiences are doing with Twitter and Facebook to understand their level of engagement and where you can complement their interest.

N.B. This post is adapted from an article that I wrote for Speaker Magazine which can be found here.

MSPtv: Cloud ROI: Pie in the Sky?

As with every emerging technology, once the hype gives way to reality, attention turns to ROI. And that is exactly what is happening with cloud computing. Is ROI as hard to prove with the cloud as it had been with most legacy technologies or do new financial models make ROI projections more straightforward? Either way, solution providers must become adept at it because their customers will want to understand cost benefits before embracing the cloud.

You can register and view this recorded webinar, where I talk about these issues with reseller Jason Smith of Binary IT solutions, here.

Datamation: Virtualization Software Trends: Hybrid Clouds Mature, Virtual Firewalls Lag

In my last update on virtualization for Datamation last winter, I looked at developments toward the end of 2010 concerning virtual desktops and improvements to virtual infrastructure. The past six months have seen increasing sophistication in both areas, with new products from the major virtualization vendors and some interesting twists, which I’ve noted in my story for them this week here. I review where Microsoft, Xen and VMware have been with recent new products and acquisitions and identify a few trends.

SearchCloudComputing: Shopping around for cloud services

We’ve all heard that cloud computing can be cheaper than paying for your own server. But the dirty little secret is that, because almost everything is priced à la carte, comparison shopping can be akin to prying a final number from your local car dealer.

I found this out recently when I got a monthly bill from Amazon Web Services for $37. My past bills had been only a few pennies a month for some test virtual machines I had placed on their servers; how could I run up $37 worth of services? The culprit ended up being the virtual private network  I had forgotten to turn off when my tests were complete. Oops.

And therein lies the challenge for any IT manager on the hunt for cloud savings: to read the fine print and understand what is billable and when the meter starts — or in my case, stops — running. You can get more in my story that ran on SearchCloudComputing this week here. 

Channel Happy Hour podcast

This week I join Mike Vizard and Brett Martin to talk about the recent events and how they relate to resellers. You can go to the podcast’s Web page and subscribe in iTunes.