Laura Kempke

Schwartz Twitter Campaign Yields 70% Increase in Referral Traffic

This week's issue of PRWeek describes a holiday Twitter campaign that Schwartz designed and executed for Australian client RetailMeNot.com.

RetailMeNot is an online discount and coupon site. They're a current Schwartz client, but this article focuses on a push made around the 2009 holiday shopping season to reach RetailMeNot's target demographic of women between the ages of 18 and 39 with messages about new merchants, discounts and other offers to help drive website traffic.

Check out PRWeek for a description of Twitter tactics. The result was a 70 percent increase in referral traffic to RetailMeNot.com and continued strong traffic after the conclusion of this particular campaign. Pretty nice for a campaign that lasted just over a month.

Posted by Laura Kempke on March 2, 2010 at 3:27 PM
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Traditional and Social Media Intersect, Reinforce Each Other: PRWeek Interview with Bryan Scanlon

Traditional and social media relations are connected and shouldn't be viewed as "either/or," Schwartz Communications President Bryan Scanlon says in a new video interview with PRWeek.

He describes how the agency, which serves established and entrepreneurial businesses in industries that include healthcare, technology, cleantech and professional services, performed over the past year and notes that our diversification across industries, lack of reliance of a handful of big clients for revenue, and ability to span social and traditional media at a time when many agencies push one over the other were sources of strength in 2009.

Bryan also answers questions about agency and client PR workloads in 2010 and notes that the recession has forced both ends of the PR team to focus on the highest value activities--those that help bring sales leads, drive website visits and close sales.

Check out the full interview at PRWeek.

Posted by Laura Kempke on February 23, 2010 at 5:50 PM
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Fortune 500 Fail SEO. Opportunity for Market Challengers?

A report today from Conductor, a company that provides SEO technology and services, concludes that "the Fortune 500 fail natural search." Specifically, the report looks at big companies' visibility in natural search results for terms that those companies have elected to purchase for ad campaigns.

The idea is that if an advertiser is paying a lot (and they probably are--the report says that the Fortune 500 pay $3.4 million a day on nearly 100,000 keywords), the word may be important enough to also be supported with a natural search campaign.

Sears, a company that I personally like, received a poor grade. That caught my eye and I asked myself what a business such as Sears, which sells thousands of unrelated things, could do to make its products appear on the first page of natural search results.

I suppose the real answer is that optimizing on all of the most competitive (i.e., expensive) search terms is entirely impractical and so they have to pick their battles carefully by focusing on the company's biggest money-makers, which may not be the same thing as the most competitive keywords.

What does any of this mean for companies that are taking on the industry behemoths?

The most obvious conclusion is that market challengers should be optimistic that they can outmaneuver or at least pull alongside big competitors when it comes to organic search. The simple fact that their product lines tend to be more focused should make it easier for them to build momentum in a way that a company with more offerings may find difficult.

Since great placement in organic search rankings may realistically be within medium and smaller companies' reach, it would stand to reason that they'd want to be attentive to good SEO practices. (Search Marketing Sage; Search Engine Guide, which focuses on search marketing for small businesses; and Search Engine Watch's "search marketing topics" section are good resources for thoughtful SEO advice.)

Most of the companies that Schwartz works with--they tend to be innovators in markets like technology, healthcare, cleantech, materials and professional services--fully appreciate that website design matters. Many have overhauled their websites with things like better navigation, URLs and page titles in mind.

That's good, but they shouldn't lose sight of Google's advice (Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide; Version 1.1; November 13, 2008) that "[c]reating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here," (i.e., more than website mechanics).

So, good website content matters, but so also do things like inbound links from reputable websites to the innovator's website. Securing these links, not via cheesy requests, but through on-message media and blog coverage that points back to the company's website, is part of PR's job these days. As is being aware of the company's keywords and using them intelligently in content like news releases, which can have nice SEO value when syndicated.

Freshness of content and consistency over time also impact SEO. Smaller companies sometimes think they can turn PR on and off. This works in a limited set of cases, but is normally ineffective for an array of reasons.

Reflecting on the conclusions of today's report and considering what we know about the importance of good content in supporting SEO, as a PR person, my conclusion is that market innovators and challengers--those who haven't yet made the Fortune 500--are well served by communications strategies that are created with SEO/lead generation in mind and that are pursued steadily over time rather than in fits and starts.

Posted by Laura Kempke on February 17, 2010 at 5:58 PM
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Technology PR: 12 Terminal Media Relations Mistakes

Most technology innovators are eager for positive, on-message media coverage to build their brands, drive sales leads or support other business goals. But unless you're already a tech industry behemoth, getting consistent, repeated media coverage across a variety of publications and channels takes some creativity, a fair amount of knowledge of what makes a good story and a ton of persistence.

When a technology company has before it an opportunity to work with a journalist, blogger or other influential individual, they're going to want to make that interaction as perfect as possible. Right?

You'd think so, but technology companies torpedo their chances of securing media coverage by doing, or by failing to do, some pretty elemental things. These mistakes have nothing to do with faulty communications strategy or going to the wrong journalist with the wrong story. They're more basic and they're pervasive in some companies' PR programs. Maybe the belief that the problems are small makes some people underappreciate their impact, but they kill coverage all the time.

The good news, then, is that they're fully within the tech company's control and doing this stuff right can make a huge difference in PR results. If the PR team detects these problems as they're occurring, they're remiss if they don't point them out, but ultimately only the tech company can fully correct these media relations errors.

1. Fail to provide a spokesperson. Your PR person has possibly just walked through walls to get a journalist to agree to talk with your company's expert. That reporter wants to hear from one of your smart people and if your industry is driven by breaking news, he needs to hear from that person minutes from now. In some cases, we may have the luxury of a couple of hours or days to provide an expert source. In either case, any small to mid-sized tech firm should be able to get an informed spokesperson on the phone quickly.

2. Neglect to prepare for the conversation. Your PR team will give you information about the blogger or journalist before your interview and tell you what she's been covering lately. You want to look at this information before, not during, the conversation. And there's no substitute for spending a little time reading the reporter's recent articles yourself. You'll feel more confident during the interview and be in a good position to give the journalist information that she'll find useful.

3. Miss scheduled briefings. Everyone's busy. Everyone also has a mobile device that allows them to contact their PR team before missing a briefing. Journalists are as stretched as anyone and we have to respect their time. Along those lines, we need to plan ahead to conduct the interview from an area with a decent cell connection and low background noise. Anything else will guarantee that the reporter will get off the phone with us at the earliest possible moment.

4. Respond on your own timetable. Media relations success is largely about being in the right place at the right time. A big part of that is understanding that reporters work on deadlines that are anything but leisurely; we have to conform to deadlines or forfeit coverage. It's hard for everyone involved, but if options are "I'm in the story" and "my competitor is in the story," priorities become a little clearer.

5. Decline to provide photos or graphics. Technology media are increasingly interested in telling stories that have a visual component. Your PR team should work with you to anticipate these needs, but when requests come for something we don't have on hand, know that providing it can mean the difference between coverage and exclusion from the story. Particularly when all that's required is a photo of the new executive, there's no reason for not being able to quickly provide one. Grab your camera and get it done.

6. Refuse to discuss pricing. Everyone who works in the B2B technology industry understands that there's no set price for anything and that stuff tends to be pretty expensive. And you didn't invent volume discounts--journalists understand the concept. So we need to have an answer to the elemental question, "how much does this cost?" Some journalists can't or won't cover our story without being able to say "pricing starts at ...."

7. Talk about confidential material and then ask the reporter not to use it. The #1 rule of media relations is "don't say anything you don't want to see in print." It's unfair to journalists to give them information that you later ask them not to use. They generally don't want to see you get into trouble, but you, in turn, should understand that it's a problem for them to not use material that they consider interesting. Don't put them or yourself into this painful position--if your PR team has asked you not to talk about how that big customer is using your product and about to toss the big vendor out on his ear, don't do it. 

8. Decline to discuss competitors. Maybe we truly don't have any, but most tech companies do. We don't need to offer up information about competitors, but if asked, we do need a coherent answer. Your PR team will work with you to think through how to answer this question, but flat-out refusing to address it makes it hard for the reporter to cover you because he needs to be able to place your company, particularly if it's small, into some larger context. Really, we should view questions about competitors as opportunities to talk about who we're challenging.

9. Ask to review the article prior to publication. Some journalists will allow you to take a peek at quotes, but most will not. And protests about having been misquoted in the past aren't that convincing, so the key here is to work with your PR team before the interview to think critically about the messages you want to convey and then take care not to go off on a tangent. Normally if we prepare for conversations and stay focused, we will come out of interviews feeling comfortable, not worried about what we said and how it might have been interpreted.

10. Speak in PowerPoint. Reporters and bloggers don't want a canned presentation--they want information that's tailored for them. Your PR people should tell you that using a PPT for media briefings is generally discouraged. Nothing says "I've had this conversation with all your competitors" like reliance on canned information.

11. Be boring, ramble, speak in monotone or otherwise fail to sell. Your PR team will help you understand what the journalist wants to learn about, how much time she has and what messages you need to deliver. It's then on the spokesperson to seal the deal by offering informed and timely conversation. Spokespeople from most companies should adopt the mindset, because it's nearly always true, that they need the journalist more than the journalist needs them and that the interview is not going to be an intellectual give and take. The spokesperson's job is to inform or educate the journalist and to convince her that this subject is worth her time. Make it interesting or expect to hear from your PR team that the reporter will "keep the information on file."

12. Assume the relationship is personal. Journalists value connections to people at tech companies if and only if those connections yield useful information. Perhaps they included us in an article or two, and that's great, but the challenge is to keep coming back with fresh info. If we cease to provide that, we should expect to be left off the short list of companies to include in stories going forward.

Your PR team, whether they're inside your company or with an agency, should be working to keep you on the straight and narrow in all these areas. You can help your technology company eke out every last bit of media coverage if you understand that these little mistakes can have a significant impact on your coverage.

Posted by Laura Kempke on February 10, 2010 at 10:02 PM
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Should the Company Blog Be Part of the Company Website?

Technology companies that don't blog but know they should often ask where, exactly, they should blog. Should it be a part of the corporate website or kept separate on a platform like TypePad or Blogger? 

Here are the basic factors that I take into account when I get this query:

- Most blogs, and hopefully all of those run by companies, have clear themes. If the general topics that the blog explores are in line with the messages that the business is trying to disseminate, it makes a lot of sense to have the blog on the company website and not hosted somewhere else. Readers will be able to easily jump from your blog to other resources that live on your website and vice versa.

- Plus, if you know you've got great stuff to say and think others might even want to link to your blog, having those inbound links pointing to your website and not to a site like TypePad should, over time, help elevate your site in the eyes of search engines. That's not likely to be the case immediately, but if you go with a blogging platform now--maybe you think it'll be more convenient--and figure you'll move your posts over to your company's website later, don't expect hard-earned links to follow you.

On the other hand, there are perfectly good reasons for separating the company website and blog:

- If your blog will focus on a brand that you're marketing to a different audience than the group of people who typically visit your website, you may do well to have the blog separate from the website and just link to one from the other. In this case, you may benefit (from branding and SEO standpoints) from being able to choose a different domain name and from being able to promote two distinct information resources. This arrangement makes sense if a company is trying to raise awareness of a medical condition, for example, but not promote its own products. It may also be the best course if an open source project has a large and active community apart from the project's corporate sponsor.

- Perhaps people from outside of your company regularly contribute to your blog and need to make clear that they're not too closely affiliated with the business. A situation such as this, where the blog may be viewed as a community resource--albeit one funded and largely driven by one vendor--may also be a good candidate for being hosted separately from the corporate site.

- If the blog isn't a company resource per se, but is really the CEO's or CTO's latest thoughts on a range of topics, it's likely best to host the blog elsewhere and just link to it from the company website.

In sum, I think the blog is best housed in the corporate website for the convenience of readers and to support SEO and branding unless the company intends the blog for a slice of its normal audience, has a specific need to separate brands or wants to underscore that an exec's musings are purely his or her own.

For some detailed discussions on how to run an effective corporate blog, check out the Online Marketing Blog. For example, see the "Impact of Blogging on Search Engine Optimization."

And just because I think it's got some great recommendations on finding new topics to blog about, "100+ SMB Blogging Ideas to Kick Start 2010" from Small Business Trends.

Posted by Laura Kempke on February 9, 2010 at 3:15 PM
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Katie Delahaye Paine on Measuring Social Media Campaigns

Social media is an integral part of many companies' marketing programs today. Tech companies in particular no longer view social media as optional or an experiment; rather, it's a core element of their outreach to customers, partners, employees and other constituents. Naturally, companies are starting to think about how to measure social media's impact.

On Tuesday, February 2, Katie Delahaye Paine will speak at a Mass Technology Leadership Council breakfast seminar on measuring social media campaigns. The author of All You Need to Know About Measuring Social Media and the Complete How-To Guide to Measuring Social Media, Ms. Paine is widely known for her expertise in measuring PR, social media, media relations, public affairs, internal communications and blogs.

The February 2 event runs from 8:00-10:00 a.m. at the Foley Hoag Emerging Enterprise Center located at 1000 Winter Street in Waltham, Mass. Breakfast starts at 7:30 a.m. You can register here.

Schwartz is a sponsor of Mass TLC's social media group. We look forward to seeing you there. 

Posted by Laura Kempke on January 22, 2010 at 10:27 AM
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B2B PR and Marketing: Five Indispensable Blogs

I'm a technology PR person and, as you'd expect, I read a lot. Most days, however, I don't have time to look at blogs that won't give me readily usable information. So lately I've been sorting out the stuff I really must read from sites that provide food for thought, but are maybe a little more academic or philosophical.

I thought I'd share a short list of blogs that I believe consistently give readers relevant, immediately usable information about B2B marketing and PR.

1. Social Media B2B--I recommend this one to clients every time I get the chance. One or two posts a day, many with an eye toward lead generation. This blog's total devotion to B2B is impressive; I think they know their audience well.

2. Journalistics--Practical insight into how media relations is really practiced today. (And no, it doesn't begin with a Vocus or Cision list.) If I were managing a PR agency or in-house program, I'd read this to help gauge whether my team was keeping pace with changes in the media and in PR.

3. B2B Ideas@Work Blog--If you like HubSpot and the concept of inbound marketing, as do a number of Schwartz clients, you'll be interested in this ad agency's blog.

4. CK's Blog--Help for traditional marketers who need a guide on getting going with social media and making it integral to their programs.

5. Social Media Today--Essential (yes, really) compilation of posts on all aspects of social media from dozens of bloggers. Theory plus execution ... what could be better?

Posted by Laura Kempke on January 19, 2010 at 4:08 PM
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Games People Play: Website Traffic, PR and the News Media

Tom Foremski, one of the more thoughtful observers of interactions between PR people and journalists, has a couple of fascinating recent posts on "the killer pitch." In the first, he says that because some reporters' compensation is based on page views, the killer pitch would be the PR person's claim that they can drive traffic to the journalist's website. He goes on to say that PR people don't really know how to do this.

"Well, that's not entirely correct," I thought--PR people understand that clicks matter and we aren't completely unable to influence them now and then. Certainly, we've had people comment, and sound pretty happy, I might add, when they've enjoyed a boost in traffic after a company links to a favorable article. So as I read the first post, I thought, "okay, I may personally not have enormous ability to pump up a story that makes my client look good, but I know how to advise the client on promoting it, which can have the same result."

Then, in a follow-on post, Mr. Foremski puts a finer point on the question and wonders whether agencies can "reliably drive traffic to specific stories." This idea is more focused and far more interesting. 

If journalists are evaluated based on page views and, at the same time, PR people create a repeatable approach to promoting the stories their clients like, and do so in a way that affects the reporter/blogger's bottom line, the media's role as a critical observer of an issue or industry can't help but be negatively impacted. (You really want to read the original posts and comments.)

It's a big topic to consider. When I initially read this, I thought that the question of "the killer pitch" was a timely twist on questionable but sadly common tactics like trying to buy positive editoral coverage by advertising or sponsoring publications' conferences, currying favor by giving select reporters exclusives on news items that you know more than just one would find appealing and--the PR equivalent of holding your breath until you turn blue in the face--not communicating with reporters who don't see eye to eye with your client.

However, the issue that Mr. Foremski describes is new. The question is what happens when the reporter covers his or her industry carefully and thoroughly, with an eye to clicks but not primarily motivated by them, but companies become adept at elevating the prominence of coverage they find most flattering. Obviously, companies will effectively hide from search engines coverage that's negtive or even just balanced.

It seems to me that it would take more than a few submissions to Digg and some tweets to do the trick, but when I check out one client's Twitter following of a couple thousand and then consider that some of those people are active re-tweeters of links to our news coverage, I wonder whether the scenario that Mr. Foremski is talking about might really come to pass. In particular, I can envision it in segments of the tech industry that have relatively few reporters left.

Really, it's the flip side of what some companies already do when they try to bury a particularly bad article by stepping up the pace of their own news releases for a few months, thus loading down search engines with fresher content.

At any rate, Mr. Foremski's posts are the most interesting I've read so far this week.

Posted by Laura Kempke on January 14, 2010 at 6:20 PM
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Marketing Budgets: Up, Down or Standing Still in 2010?

As we all hear reports about some parts of the economy rebounding, while others still lag, it's natural to wonder where marketing budgets will land in 2010.

Many of the marketers we work with are either just finishing budget planning for 2010 or are working with their CEOs or boards to determine how much their budgets will be. As they're muscling through this process, some marketers are supporting their requests for more dollars by looking to their peers for signs of what they're doing.

It's with this in mind that we spoke with 20 top marketing and business execs to get their take on where budgets are going, as well as tips they'd give other marketers during budget season. We took their feedback and assembled it in this white paper with the hope that it will help those marketers still fighting the good fight.

Posted by Laura Kempke on December 8, 2009 at 1:58 PM
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Measuring Social Media ROI

Here at Schwartz, we've been talking quite a bit lately about measuring results of social media programs. Not just programs we've designed for clients, but those of people who we meet at conferences or with whom we're just chatting.

Without a doubt, many companies are thrilled with their involvement in social media. They love the outlet that participating in blogs or forums gives them, they're able to talk with people on Twitter whom they'd likely otherwise miss and they're connecting with patient communities on Facebook. (One client, Digium, gives us a tour of their use of social networking technologies here to gain "customer feedback, suggestions, highly qualified sales leads" and to talk with people in their industry.)

Some, though, are a little disappointed in social media. When I hear that, my first question is always "what did you hope to gain that you're not seeing?" I often wonder whether they're measuring success based on number of Twitter followers or Facebook fans--today's corporate version of a teenage popularity contest. This would be unfortunate because such metrics are nearly irrelevant for many B2B companies.

PR people need to keep in mind the Cheshire Cat's words of wisdom to Alice: "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there." It's our job to help clients think through exactly what they're trying to achieve and to recommend use of social platforms because they make sense, not because they exist and are free.

Last week I attended a Mass Technology Leadership Council discussion on social media and lead generation. Mark Roberge, HubSpot's VP of sales, led the talk. Toward the end, he turned the group's attention to measuring social media ROI--certainly a topic of interest to a number of people today. (Some great reads are here, here and here.)  

Mr. Roberge talked about website visitors and sales leads--reasonably straightforward things to quantify and important metrics for any B2B company. He also talked about "SEO assets" such as inbound links and improved performance in organic search results. Those things take time to build--perhaps a problem is that some companies look for an immediate impact in this department when it may be more reasonable to expect a change in six months' time. 

Just guessing, but I bet some of the letdown that a few companies feel stems from their desire to get something for next to nothing--a measurable impact from use of free technology. Certainly using social technologies is free, but so is calling up The Wall Street Journal or "Good Morning America." Anyone can do it--the question in every case is whether you've got anything interesting to say and can articulate it in something like a compelling manner. In any case, it's your PR person's job to figure it out.

Altogether, these things are a great reminder to me that B2B companies using social media--and their PR people--need to be clear in setting objectives and in understanding the likely timeframe for success.

Posted by Laura Kempke on September 14, 2009 at 4:35 PM
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Press Release Titles Matter for SEO

We've all heard that Google likes short press release titles. Write short, we're commanded--I'd heard that we should use a maximum of seven words. So I'd try to restrain my verbose self and write short. I got more detail on this subject from Malcolm Atherton of BusinessWire's Phoenix bureau and thought it was useful, so wanted to share it.

Here's the deal: Google will truncate press release titles--it will stop reading them--after 61 to 64 characters. Depends on the day and how Google is feeling--some days you get 61 and others you get lucky and get 62. So the "seven words or fewer" rule doesn't really hold--what matters is characters.

This matters because the two biggest factors, by far, that Google takes into account when looking at your press release are the title and the optimized presentation in the body of the release of key words or phrases. When considering the body, the first 200 characters matter more than those that follow, but the body of the release taken in its entirety and the title are The Big Things to Pay Attention To.

So if the title matters, you want to write them so that key words or phrases that your company really wants to optimize on appear in the first 61 characters.

This means that you may, if you can't keep your title to 61 characters, have to put those words first and your company's name later in the title. This is the reverse of how many of our clients want releases written--they like to see their name first. But if they're into SEO, we want them to understand that if the title can't be short, it at least needs to be worded in a way to get that key word or phrase into the first 60 or so characters.

Posted by Laura Kempke on June 23, 2009 at 11:18 AM
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Local Medical News and Seniors

Over at Journalistics, Jeremy Porter considers a timely and under-appreciated topic: "The Impact of Dying Newspapers on Older Readers." He notes, "While many media companies work to preserve their future with digital strategies aimed at younger audiences, they are simultaneously alienating themselves from their older (and often most loyal) readers." It's worth a look.

A parallel trend that we're seeing is a decline in local TV affiliates' ability to cover healthcare news. ("Local programs" that medical or healthcare PR agencies run are designed to reach target audiences, including patients, through their town's newspapers, radio programs or TV news.) Many affiliates don't have the budget anymore to cover medical news more than a few times a month. One Boston TV station isn't sending camera crews out anymore to gather healthcare stories. A sad statement if you consider how important medical research is to Boston's economy, not to mention the individuals who live here.

I'm sure that some older people are comfortable getting their news online and that more will follow. I do hope, though, that it's not all WebMD and stories created for national audiences. Hopefully it'll still be available in most towns written by local journalists who know the community and medical centers and have the professionalism (guess I haven't seen any hyperlocal sites covering healthcare news) required to work with patients and their families.

Posted by Laura Kempke on May 12, 2009 at 6:41 AM
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Search Engines, Traditional Media More Trusted than Corporate Blogs

Really interesting info from Josh Bernoff, author of Groundswell and Forrester analyst. (You've likely read his book, written with former Forrester analyst Charlene Li, about the use of social technologies to reach customers.)

His general conclusion, described in a recent blog post about survey data collected in Q2 of this year, is that consumers trust corporate blogs less than any other information source included in the survey. Tops were, naturally, info from friends or groups of other consumers.

He does add more nuance to the issue of lack of trust in corporate blogs and makes some recommendations. The many comments on his post add further dimension and are well worth a look.

What's equally interesting to me, despite the fact that it isn't Mr. Bernoff's main point, is that traditional media fares pretty well, which is not surprising. Much of the value that technology PR brings is reaching journalists (AS WELL AS bloggers, but not one to the exclusion of the other) who themselves vet information about clients or their products or related issues and then, by writing about companies/products/issues, may lend a certain degree of legitimacy to the information.

Journalists generally take care to present "the other side of the story"--information about competitors or different perspectives. Not always, but normally, and that sensitive BS detector and the resulting trust it can create in many people is what makes the media one of the best routes for communicating with target audiences.

Another key point, I thought, was that search engine results are seen as pretty trustworthy. Tech PR, when pursued in concert with smart search engine optimization, can boost organic search results. To me, this survey shows the important benefit that we provide clients when we make technology communications work in concert with SEO.

Posted by Laura Kempke on December 16, 2008 at 10:23 AM
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Tongue-in-cheek marketing from the neighborhood realtors

Blogs are a delightful creation, but so many bloggers are a tad big prickly ... evidently looking for ways to skewer someone just a little more effectively than the blogger they just read. We all know this. Maybe it's the next Olympic sport--lobbing insults via blogs. Feel the burn.

It makes me look for multiple meanings in otherwise mundane stuff that I read. Do I "get" what the writer's trying to say? Do I want to?

Into this larger context drops a postcard from our local Coldwell Banker realtor, sent to "postal patrons." There's a nice photo of a meadow on the front. [My town has an abundance of trees. Deer like the woods and ticks like the deer. It's a problem because much of the town seems to get Lyme disease each year.]

The realtors write, "Through the years, we have become aware of the tick population which has led to the discovery of a tool which removes them. This handy gizmo is called 'Ticked-off.' If you would like one, call either of us. The supply is limited, so call soon for your free tick remover. Happy Summer!"

First I rolled my eyes (bad habit), and then I thought ... well, we do have a tick problem. Then I thought a second longer and figured that this is actually a brilliant attempt to turn people off to the town and list their houses with this realtor. Now I don't really care what motivated this post card campaign, but am mystified by my own inability to take at face value what I read and to stop questioning the agenda of the writers.

For this, I don't thank graduate education, living in a "liberal" state or any of the traditional guilty parties. For this, I thank too much time spent with blogs.

Posted by Laura Kempke on August 13, 2008 at 9:20 PM
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Does "Face Time" Still Matter?

I was reading the latest from BusinessWeek Online and didn't have to get past the headline "Are There Too Many Women Doctors?" to get a bit irritated. 

It turns out that women work slightly fewer hours than men because they spend more time taking care of their kids. This disparity puts pressure on other doctors--generally male, oftentimes older--who are left to pick up the slack. The study also points out that women often go into underserved areas like primary care or pediatrics, which pay less than other medical specialties, in order to gain scheduling flexibility. Anyone who succeeds in scheduling an appointment with a primary care physician or pediatrician likely benefits from the decisions many women doctors make.

When you need to be seen by a doctor, you need to be seen by a doctor, but the article got me thinking afresh about the value of working in an office building surrounded by coworkers vs. the obvious trend toward electronic communications and remote work. Indeed, I've always wondered what it says about me that my best client relationships are often with the people who I rarely see.

At the same time, I benefit enormously from being able to walk down the hallway and ask 15 other VPs what they think about my PR conundrum of the day. It's hard to say no to collaboration when someone plops themself down in your office, but certainly my colleagues could make their excuses about being busy and I'd clear out.

This is nice, but what I always find interesting is that colleagues working in other cities, whom I've never met in person, are just as willing to help. A little stroll down the digital hallway is just as effective as seeing people face to face.

Of course there's business you can conduct only in person. But when you've got a group of people with common interests, do you have better relationships with those you can see? Is there clear value to being in the office simply to be in the office--to putting in that face time?

My hope, and I'm pretty optimistic that this is really happening, is that social media allows groups of people with similar interests not just to compare pet peeves on Facebook or to post photos of their vacations, but to remove most of the need for face time. It'll probably be of minimal use to the 50 percent of medical students today who are women, but for the rest of us who are looking to "be there" for both our families and our employers, the ability to interact in a way that's increasingly targeted and personal--yet is entirely electronic--sure holds a lot of promise.

Posted by Laura Kempke on June 25, 2008 at 12:54 PM
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Tech Print Journalists Take Up Multimedia

On Tuesday night I attended a wonderfully informative PRSA Boston / Social Media Club event on the future on journalism in a social media world.

I'd gladly have sat for an hour to hear any one of the panelists (listed here) speak about his own thoughts and experiences. Moderator Paul Gillin, author of The New Influencers and upcoming Secrets of Social Media Marketing, brought the big questions and kept the discussion moving right along.

Too much great, usable information to summarize, but one thing I took out of it is the need to help reporters make their stories more visual.

[I should note that my clients are technical--biotech, nanotech and business-to-business computer technology. There's no obvious visual element to most of these stories beyond the obligatory headshot of the company spokesperson (suit or golf shirt?). Sometimes we mix it up with a network diagram or image of a 96-well plate. Our teams that represent consumer technology and medical companies have long understood the need for beautifully conceived and produced visuals.]

Tech journalists who used to just write are now carrying around cameras and other equipment in order to capture more elements of the story at hand or to be able to present it to a wider audience. It's increasingly common that reporters will talk with a client and then videotape an interview or record a podcast. (Some examples are here, here, here and here. Disclaimer: they're Schwartz clients SpikeSource, Appcelerator, Sentrigo and SugarCRM.)

Nice for a start. The next step is to contribute more to the slide shows that media are starting to rely on because each slide requires a click--advertiser heaven.

Our job has always been to make technical stories accessible. Now, as the media looks to layer a multimedia dimension onto reporting, look for entrepreneurial tech companies to differentiate themselves to reporters by providing new types of ideas and content. Most aren't doing it today--clearly an opportunity for those willing to try something new.

Posted by Laura Kempke on May 22, 2008 at 9:35 AM
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The Future of Journalism in a Social Media World

The rapid evolution of tech journalism as it's impacted by social media, among other factors, is affecting every company in the tech industry. Media relations isn't what it was last year, and it's monumentally different than it was 10 years ago.

Anyone who works with the media or who relies on it to help reach customers, partners or employees has to understand the pressure journalism is under and the resulting changes it's undergoing. It's that basic!

To that end, you're invited to learn more about "The Future of Journalism in a Social Media World" at next Tuesday's event sponsored by the Public Relations Society of America's Boston Chapter and the Social Media Club. (Registration is available through the PRSA Boston website. The event will be held in Weston at the American Cancer Society's offices.)

Veteran journalist Paul Gillin, author of "The New Influencers" and the upcoming book "Secrets of Social Media Marketing," will lead the discussion. Questions he'll ask include:

• How are blogs, podcasts and online video impacting both the business and the reporting of news?
• Will journalists need to master video, audio and photography in order to practice their craft in the future?
• How has journalism been impacted by the success of bloggers moving into the reporting business?
• What does the future have in store for mainstream media? How can those media stay relevant?

Panelists include:

• Ted McEnroe, director of digital media, New England Cable News
• Robin Lubbock, director of new media, WBUR
• Howard Sholkin, director of communications and marketing programs, IDG
• David Wallace, consultant, adjunct journalism professor at Emerson College and former writer for The New York Times, Reuters and numerous websites

Promises to be an informative evening!

Posted by Laura Kempke on May 15, 2008 at 10:30 AM
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CNN.com Gross Out

We're all well aware that traditional media have been under strain for years, first due to the web and now as a result of competition from "new media."

Some are handling the challenge as gracefully as they probably can, given the situation, and some are not. CNN.com (U.S. Alexa ranking: 19) splashes down into the latter category.

CNN has always, in my mind, been a mix of fluff and serious reporting. You might disagree, but I think that what CNN does well (e.g., some international reporting), it does better than just about anyone.

So that makes all the more stark the contrast with CNN.com. Mixed in with "American cancels 900 flights" and "China says 35 arrested in Olympics bomb plot," we have "Wedding bed found in polygamist temple" (voyeuristic--is this the most important element of the story out of west Texas?), "I'm a sociopath, hiker's killer tells police," "Witness: beheading victim asked for help," "Woman makes gruesome find after mom dies" and "Principal nabbed with teens, porn, pot."

Seriously?

It's depressing to see CNN.com take events that deserve careful treatment and clearly pander to site visitors' desire to read about and view the sordid, the morbid and the just plain gross.

NYTimes.com (U.S. Alexa ranking: 33) manages to pull in huge traffic without upping its eeew factor, but they're the only general news site giving CNN.com a run for their money.

Perhaps when CNN.com readers have their fill of sludge, they're heading to NYTimes.com for a more serious take on events. One can only hope!

Posted by Laura Kempke on April 14, 2008 at 9:15 AM
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Big Night at SC Magazine Awards

Congratulations to Schwartz clients Sentrigo, Fortinet and Qualys, who were recognized at last night's annual SC Magazine Awards Gala, which is held in conjunction with RSA.

Sentrigo, an innovator in database security software, won Rookie Security Company of the Year; Fortinet took home the award for Best Integrated Security Solution for its unified threat management systems; and Qualys was recognized for Best Audit/Vulnerability Assessment Solution.

Congrats to all -- details on the winners are here.

Posted by Laura Kempke on April 9, 2008 at 9:58 AM
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The Waltham Globe

My office looks out on Route 128 and since last fall, I've been watching the demolition of a building, clearing of the site and now the digging for the foundation of a new office building. They've been blasting and when this is about to happen, state police stop traffic in front of the building across all eight lanes of the highway.

I'm sure that blocking traffic is necessary to keep Massachusetts drivers, rubberneckers all of us, from driving off the road. But it also creates nasty traffic jams during times when travelers would typically expect to get from point A to point B in a reasonable amount of time.

Route 128 carries something like 200,000 cars a day and continued development of big office buildings and shopping areas along it affects people who live and work along 128.

Where should those people turn for information about the development? Big regional newspapers?  Well, no. The last time the Boston Globe, for example, covered this sort of development was four months ago.

Obviously they can't cover everything repeatedly. But where are 200,000 who wonder what blew up next to Uno's to go?

I keep heading for Wicked Local. I'm so happy that a news outlet recognizes that there's much more to the Boston area than Boston itself. And for those who love the city, a coworker recently pointed me to Universal Hub, a wonderful aggregate of all things local.

Financial constraints and, certainly, assumptions about what the masses want to read have for years impacted regional dailies' coverage of companies that haven't yet reached the size of a Fidelity or EMC. As someone who believes the action is with the smaller companies, I've long been irked by this.

This opening has cleared the decks for the success of an Xconomy, which is more than happy to dive into the growing tech companies (disclosure: this one's a client) that drive much of our local economy.

Without a doubt, major media have done much to successfully rework themselves, but I have to believe that readership of newer sources will keep growing as people like me look to the news outlets in their backyard.

Posted by Laura Kempke on March 19, 2008 at 11:26 AM
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Beats Facebook Wall Any Day

A former colleague sent me a postcard from her recent trip to India. I was ridiculously happy to receive it. 

Yes, I keep up with her on Facebook and email and all, but a postcard was so much more fun to receive.

I'm sure this is just yet more proof that I need to get out more, but there's something to be said for going old school when it can make a friend stand in the middle of the hallway smiling in a way that Facebook never has.

Posted by Laura Kempke on March 13, 2008 at 1:19 PM
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Click to Confirm Your Google Alert

When Google introduced the Google Alerts service, my first thought was "Great! Now my clients don't need to pay for expensive news searches." Many of them had already pared back their use of such services because they were looking to save every dollar coming out of the tech recession, so they were just happy to find a cheap alternative.

My opinion changed when some clients became obsessed with tracking not only their own coverage, but that of their competitors. I had a number of conversations with people who had a tough time accepting that it's not realistic to expect the agency to stop--literally to prevent--other companies from getting noticed in the media. (Intruding on those companies' coverage--there's the goal.)

I still think it was mostly an emotional reaction to being able to really understand, probably for the first time, where their competitors were appearing in the media.

But now, most clients are way past the emotion. They're deep into their site analytics and are tracking visitors who come from news articles, product reviews and blogs. I love to hear that an article the PR team helped out on brought in a bunch of well-qualified visitors, some of whom went on to download the client's software.

Tech (and increasingly healthcare) companies and PR people talk about what this means for the practice of PR. Certainly, no one wants to feel like they're spending money on faith alone, so they're holding PR up against things like SEO and other marketing tools.

To be sure, measurement can be a wonderful thing. But I wonder if the techniques most in vogue today really capture the cumulative effect of steady-state volume--that stream of Google Alerts that companies love and that helps stack them up nicely to their competition--plus positive (not just okay) reviews, plus getting the Fortune 50 customer (not the no-name) to talk on behalf of the start-up, plus the CEO Q&A that gave him space to talk in depth about his or her corner of the industry ... and so on.

Some of these things have no immediate tangible effect, but does this mean they won't matter in sum six months or a year out for companies trying to establish a new category or go up against a much bigger player?

I'm thinking that PR's real value these days lies in the ability to bring all of these things--some easily measurable, others not so much--together. It's not social media to the exclusion of "traditional," or product PR in lieu of thought leadership campaigns. If I were running a tech company, I'd ask myself how I could have all of these things AND still have money left over for my Google AdWords campaign.

Posted by Laura Kempke on March 12, 2008 at 11:44 AM
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Measuring PR: Clients like it, PR people ought to love it

I recently attended a conference on PR measurement put on by the Institute for Public Relations. Hearing what’s working for other PR people is always interesting, but this conference was particularly welcome because it brought together people who are doing the deep thinking on probably the hottest topic in PR: evaluating PR’s impact.

Measuring PR is rough for a number of reasons. Just a few include the difficulty of tracking changes in perception of a company or product to editorial coverage (as opposed to advertising, opinions articulated by colleagues, etc.), the sometimes prohibitively high cost associated with measurement itself and, not least, the desire PR people have to defend their budgets.

Conference presenters included a senior director at Microsoft who’s working to represent the effectiveness of PR for that company’s product lines and executives with a single number. There’s an appeal to the simplicity of a single-number score. But I didn’t understand why obliterating the nuance associated with, for example, media reports on Vista, was a good idea. Nevertheless, good to know that Microsoft is playing with the idea of measuring PR with one number.

At Schwartz, we work with entrepreneurial companies that are looking to grow very quickly. In the past, many of them “just knew” when PR was working. They’d report more in-bound calls, greater willingness of potential customers and partners to take meetings, and so on. We liked to hear anecdotal evidence that our programs were working, but it was only partially satisfying.

A few companies found it meaningful (some still do) to look at advertising equivalents. This is okay—if nothing else, it makes the case that PR is cheaper than advertising—but ultimately not that useful.