Is PR dead for B2B startups? No - but it's changing
- Summary:
- I'm fond of saying 'PR is dead.' But then I found myself in a room with an actual PR person. So is PR dead? No, but it's changing.
[sws_grey_box box_size="690"]SUMMARY - I'm fond of saying 'PR is dead.' But then I found myself in a room with an actual PR person. So is B2B PR dead? No, but it's changing. [/sws_grey_box]
My cynical views on press releases were also confirmed - kind of. I used our conversation as the chance to launch my new semi-occasional video and podcast series, Enterprise Media Hackers (you can download the audio of my talk with Gundry here), Here's the boil-down of our convo.
Q: Is PR dead? A: No, but it's changing. In B2B, PR used to be about buying a list of journalists and dialing for attention. Now if you want to succeed, you must be content-driven, and relationship-based.
Gundry: There's a lot more content creation involved in PR today - writing, videos, podcasts - you name it. It's not strictly write a press release, get it out the door, and people will cover it.
Q: Is the press release dead? A: As a way to validate news developments, the press release still has use cases. But the idea that you can put out a press release and get a deluge of coverage is now a fantasy.
Gundry: We only issue news in press release form to indicate to journalists this is official. As an information and approval mechanism, the press release is still used, but the wire is dying.
Q: If a small B2B firm is good at blogging or sharing IP, like open source code, then why would they need outside PR at all? A: Because content isn't everything. If you're not organized and you don't have a coherent marketing strategy, your content will fall short.
Gundry: When you're working with startups, you're dealing with executives who are wearing many, many hats. One of the hats that often get pushed to the bottom of the pile is proactively talking to people who may be curious about what you're doing, your product, and your customers. That's where PR fits in. Do you track your coverage? Do you track your competitors' coverage? Do you have a solid FAQ that you reference about your own product messaging?
Q: Plenty of firms can write how great their product is, but why is it so difficult to write about bigger picture topics that would draw in new audiences? A: Companies - especially startups - get buried in their own product world. Basically, they need to get out more. An effective PR firm can help them to speak on broader issues where they have earned expertise.
Gundry: This is definitely something that we work on with our clients. We'll send a daily news scan of everything we think they need to be aware of outside of their product bubble. Once you get them talking outside their product, they have all this incredible industry knowledge to share.
Q: Is it wise to evaluate PR success based on number of articles published, when the majority of them are crummy? A: 'Clip counts' are one way to measure the success of a campaign, but smart companies look at a range of factors such as the caliber of audience reached.
Gundry: We track coverage for every client differently. For some, it's a brand awareness play. In that case, a top priority for might be, 'If our three biggest competitors are getting named and we're not named, that's a problem.' We have other clients where it's really quality over quantity, and an in-depth Q/A in the right trade publication carries more weight.
Q: Why do some companies insist on bracketing 'influencers' into reporters, bloggers, and analysts when we all hang out in the same bars anyhow? Isn't a personalized program for each influencer better? A: PR firms should educate companies about the different types of influencers, why they matter, and how to engage with them.
Gundry: Unlike some firms, we do handle analyst relations for our clients. Every influencer is different. It's a huge missed opportunity to discount certain people's voices simply because they only do reports every quarter. A lot of times, we're doing education around what activities are valuable and what activities will have a longer term payoff versus a shorter term payoff. Five years ago, people would say 'They only write a blog. They don't work at Fortune. Forget it.' You used to discount people like that. Now we're getting to a place where 'If that person is an independent analyst, discount that.' Forget it.
It's a legacy mindset of some PR people, but I do think that it's changing. If you don't let somebody have access to an executive because you think they're not worthwhile and then somebody else wants to talk to your executive and you make it happen, it's going to damage another relationship that you should've just built from the beginning.
Q: Fess up - PR firms prepare dossiers on so-called influencers, don't they?. A: It's true.
Gundry: If you are not prepared, and you go into a meeting, you're not going to get any value out of it. It's the onus of the PR firm to make sure that the executive is educated about why the meeting is important and what the conversation is going to look like. And yes, we do prepare a little dossier. I will say that it's really important to make sure that your PR contact has the confidence to call up that executive and say 'Look, there's some stuff that's in the dossier, and then there's stuff that's not. Give me five minutes so that you don't walk into this dinner and put your foot right in your mouth and kill it.'
Q: Before we wrap, what's hot in the B2B startup space? A: Despite privacy concerns, personalization themes are a potent topic across cloud and mobile market plays.
Gundry: Ironically, we only have one company that really talks about personalization in their own messaging. But I really think it applies across all of what we're seeing in the industry at large, and also in our client pool. Employees of any business are consumers first. Mobile devices used to be about functional capabilities. Now people really want personal interactions. They want to get an email that uses their name and their preferences. We're seeing a lot of companies that are consumer-first push personalization into the enterprise.
People are looking for humanized interactions. We're reading a lot of coverage lately about how the technology of the last few years has tried to take human element out of things. But now we're seeing a lot of coverage about how important that human element is. Personalization across all kinds of different fields is really valuable. People love how technology enables, but for the most part, they don't want to be treated anonymously.
Q: Are bloggers divas? A: Yes.
End note: I didn't get to the Klout bashing in the writeup, or into some good stuff on the raw experience of social media and the challenges of transparency. For that, check the second half of our B2B PR podcast, also embedded here:
Image credit: frau ruft in megaphon © contrastwerkstatt - Fotolia.com
Disclosure: diginomica has no financial relationship with Pluck PR. I got to know Gundry via a Sailthru CRM event she coordinated.