As CMO at GigaSpaces , I kind of live in two worlds: software developers/architects and marketing. I mostly write here about the former world, but this post is about the latter.
Todd Defren recently wrote about his firm, Shift Communications, and their relationship as a PR agency with their customers -- and specifically with one customer around Blogger Relations. It so happens that we are one of Todd's customers and let me say outright that we love them and they are doing an awesome job for us.
Anyway, his post brought to mind a few thoughts about PR I've been meaning to post for a while. These are some random thoughts about PR, not a cohesive thesis.
Point #1: Blogging/Social Media increases the need for a PR Agency
For those of you who are not familiar with modern world of marketing/PR, for the past two-three years there is a lot of talk on the blogosphere about the death of traditional PR because of blogging and social media in general. People just won't shut up about it. (Google search: "death of pr").
From my experience, social media increases the need for working with a PR agency, it does not diminish it. This is simply because of the fact that the analyst/reporter (in the broad sense of the words) universe is now much more fragmented and large, and it is not cost-efficient to try to tackle it all in-house.
Don't get me wrong, there is no substitution in the blogoshpere to your company executives, product folks, etc. getting personally and directly involved in the conversation. That can never be outsourced to an agency - and we certainly do a lot of that at GigaSpaces. But there is a lot of work around it, such as tracking who's writing what, making initial pitches and so on, which a PR agency can greatly help with (especially if they are as savvy about it as Shift is).
Point #2: Strive to make your PR agency as much a part of the team as possible
The reality for small and mid-sized companies such as GigaSpaces is that many of the marketing functions are outsourced. We have a PR agency, SEO consultants, tech writers, marcom writers, graphic designers, web designers, etc. This is something I don't do enough, but made it a point to myself to try and integrate all of these "external" contributors into the team. It means weekly calls, regular email updates, etc. It means sharing with them the bigger picture and the going-ons of the company in other areas.
Point #3: Select the right agency, right for you that is
Duh!
I interviewed a lot of agencies before I decided to go with Shift. I had a very specific set of criteria, and Shift were perfect for me:
- Not too big, not too small. A very small firm (up to 10-15 people) doesn't have the bandwidth to handle peaks in activity. In a very large firm (probably over 100 people, you don't get enough attention ). Shift is about 80 people, which was perfect for us. In addition, they set it up so that there are 5-6 different people involved in the GigaSpaces account and they are all kept in the loop on everything. So they can fairly quickly and seamlessly take over from each other when necessary.
- Not afraid of deep technical subject matter. I wanted a firm that wasn't afraid of dealing with technical material and had experience in marketing to developers. Shift fit both.
- Savvy about Social Media. This was an easy one. I found Shift having been a reader of Todd's blog for a while. He is one of the leading thinkers on Social Media and a pioneer of the Social Media Press Release.
- Right attitude. From reading Todd's blog, I knew these were people I could work with. Posts like this made it clear: What Would David Do? And I knew that if Todd has the right attitude, most likely anybody who works for him does too.
- Right Location. I needed a firm that has presence on both coasts. Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
The results speak for themselves. This graph shows the number of press mentions GigaSpaces received in May-June (the two months since we've been working with Shift) versus our competitors and other companies in the space who we track (I removed names and numbers).
We received more press mentions than all of the other seven companies combined.
And that was growth from a negligible amount in April. Pretty impressive.
Now, granted this is also because we had quite a few things going on during this period (new product version release, Microsoft partnership, customer win announcements, etc.), but still pretty impressive.
