BB Bye Bye

UPDATE : Blackberry has now been taken private and is reportedly having issues with its suppliers [We would like to state for the record, to our knowledge, it had nothing to do with Paul’s decision]

After what many, perhaps prematurely, called a disastrous weekend for Blackberry, with massive job losses, a ‘falling knife’ run on its share price and announcements of delays spoiling the launch of an otherwise critically acclaimed BBM integration with Android, there’s even more bad news – my first ever iPhone, in gold, arrives today.

Not that this will be devastating for the management at Blackberry – they have lots of other issues to deal with. Its just that as I retire from a decade-long love affair with Canadian hardware, there are (at least) five lessons an independent Blackberry needs to learn and fast.

1. B2B marketing is not the same as B2C. Hiring prominent iPhone users as some sort of pathetic brand ambassador is lame – to say the least.

2. It is now clear Social Media apps are not all equal. Our B2B tech clients care much more about LinkedIn and Twitter than Facebook or Pinterest for instance. So perhaps some extra features on the business-related apps would be a smart move.

3. The keyboard advantage may be sustainable. The addition of Swiftkey to the BB10 operating system may be enough for heavy texters. I for one, will be back if the iPhone lets me down when sending rapid but detailed messages.

4. The incessant bad news about cloud outages and Cyber-Security issues could provide real strategic advantage. While the youngsters slowly waking up to Facebook and others milling their data, enterprises are now showing signs of wanting to remove Cyber Risk. Play this card.

5. BBM has some real challenges in Asia and increasingly elsewhere. Either you play this game and enable it properly on cheaper smartphones, or you sell what you can and get out. Hyper focus is what you need.

I know my treacherous handset switch will have repercussions, I am already worried about frittering time away on pointless ‘pastime apps’ – ‘Draw Something’ or ‘Word with Friends’ anyone? Another concern is that my ability to send correctly punctuated emails of over three paragraphs will wither due to the virtual keyboard and man-sized digits.

Finally though the upside of staying loyal to Blackberry is now not worth the iPhone upside of a diary which syncs properly with Gmail, a decent camera and the same access to apps as clients. The real issue though for Positive Marketing’s trendy young team is image. How can they be so hip and happening, now the boss has got the same phone as them while the rest of the world ‘drives a Samsung’. Maybe there is a chance for Nokia and Microsoft after all….

Atomic Watch is the Bomb

With the launch of futuristic Google Glass sweeping the nation, 2013 is the year of technological ingenuity.  Watches have jumped face first on the high-tech bandwagon; what once was a simple timepiece now evolves into a wearable computer. The launch of Pebble, which has internet connected apps, epitomises a new generation of watches, and the technology rumoured for iWatch has sent the world into a frenzy.

So when we were told Hoptroff’s No.10 has started ticking, a watch that uses the same technology as cruise missiles to ensure precision, we realised this watch is in a league of its own.

London’s luxury watch designer and manufacturer Hoptroff wanted to spread the word that a new breed of watches had been born – or rather, had started ticking. But maybe the world wasn’t ready to believe this watch has an accuracy of one and a half seconds per 1000 years? Armed with an image of the watch’s components, and a less than engineering-level understanding of what a microwave resonator status reader meant, we were let loose. We never expected to receive the sheer amount of interest that followed…

The coverage went nuclear.  US publications, such as Global Post, covered the story and news channels from as far away as Thailand wrote and tweeted about this remarkable device. #Hoptroff quickly became a tending topic of Twitter. Tony Smith from The Register summed up the innovation and technology that the No.10 has when he asked, ‘Could this be the chronometrist’s ultimate timepiece, the peak of horological haute couture?’

BBC Click were also blown away with the No.10. Armed with cameras and questions, they personally visited Richard Hoproff, the mastermind behind this watch, at his quirky London offices above the Clink Prison. Look out for the upcoming footage of the No.10 and its inventor on BBC News and iPlayer!

Two weeks on from when we first introduced the story to the press we still have plenty of daily requests from journalists who want to cover the story.  The success of coverage we achieved just goes to show that, when you have a passion for something (and a PHD in Physics), you can grab the word’s attention with your creation.

Trying not to suck at Marketing

Having previously teased with the reasons why Marketing can suck and before we embark on the five part response, here are five ways we are trying hard not to suck.

1. Freshen your look
Not externally visible yet, but working with the extraordinary talent at Stone Creative to revamp our document suite and brand. Clients judge marketing teams internal and external on how they present themselves – it helps them gauge how you represent them.

2. Get offsite
Taking the team away from the work environment, despite hilariously cruel parodies  is almost ever a poor investment. We use High Road House just down the road from our Glamoursmith bat cave which we share with Celebrity Juice. This time our external perspective will be provided by analytics guru Andrew Smith.

3.Re-ping the ‘ones who got away’
Those customers who said ‘thanks, but the time is not right’. We have waited for years (the record is eight) for clients we liked and thought we could work well with, to give us a green light. As Churchill, himself an overlooked leader, who only achieved greatness late in life and in death,  said ‘Keep on, keepin’ on’ (the actual quote is a little more, er, British)

4. Question your processes
Boring you say? Crucial is what we learnt. Our new bag of tricks for 2013 including working with clients on Google Analytics to learn which of our tactics works best for them and a move to a suite of sweet new Gmail-friendly apps like Smartsheet.

5. Keep thinking bigger
It is a depressing fact that while the European market continues to wallow in self-pity. Elsewhere, there are plenty of bright spots, for those who look. Silicon Valley continues to boom which is why we visit regularly (January’s roadtrip will now be followed up by a June tour). In addition, our current client roster includes companies HQ’ed in Finland, Romania and Israel. Pleasingly, we are chosen to lead Thought Leadership globally for many clients. We, like our clients, dream big.

The results? New business this year is tracking nicely. New clients from the emerging tech sector in Eastern Europe, inroads to London’s world-class insurance technology market as well as the world’s largest IT security firm.

Why Earned Media sucks (#5 of 5 Marketing Tactics that suck)

This company opened its doors three years ago inspired by two decades of B2B ‘Earned Media’ experience. The goal was to build the best boutique media relations firm Europe has ever seen. Things changed fast. As intended, we built a team of PR and Social ninjas who ‘earn’ indecent amounts of exposure for our clients in national and business media, vertical press and the technology blogosphere.

But what we do now is very different from Old Skool PR. Earned Media sucks because it can suck you dry of content and fresh approaches. The reason? Consider these five radical changes to the media landscape –

1. Freelance blogger/analysts now vastly outnumber in-house journalists and work differently.
2. The editorial ‘action’ moved online and mobile – with radical consequences for content.
3. ‘Stories with legs’ have a shelf life of minutes, not days or weeks.
4. Done right. Social Media is finally proving as effective for B2B brands as B2C.
5. Publishers prefer to curate, rather than create, content – it saves cost

Newsweek’s last issue

On both sides of the flack/hack divide, these changes to Earned Media, what purists still call PR, have proven hard. Pleasingly, this meant Positive Marketing has flourished, growing six-fold as we did what all start-ups do – adapt. Our lesson learnt ? If you can learn fast, evolve and execute it is possible to create great advantage from the market forces bearing down on Earned Media (N.B. the opposite also applies).

1. Smaller editorial teams mean more curational opportunities for original content.
2. Stealth editorial outsourcing via ‘contributed articles’ makes editorial skills more valuable.
3. Brands can win or lose in the course of a Twitterstorm requiring social teams who are ‘on it’.
4. Despite the rise of gadget tech, B2B stories are more relevant in economic downturns.
5. Apple/FaceBook/Google link baiting is an editorial ‘fact of life,’ PR leveraging this is crucial.

On this last point means we regularly have to persuade cynical European media of the merit of a story without major brand as linkbait. This requires more planning than ever plus the sort of tenacity which generalist in-house teams may, understandably, not naturally possess – theirs is a wide scope of skills, but not necessarily those needed to succeed in today’s new world of Earned Media.
Speaking from experience, most in-house teams, are more natural content curators and storytellers than frontline ‘story sellers’ and may not have the stomach to hear a time-pressed journalist ‘call their baby ugly’ (rejecting their new product launch). In-house teams are also handicapped because they have only one flavour of story to sell (theirs), whereas agency teams sell many and frequently switch between clients in a single email or, increasingly rare, phone pitch.

All this makes content consultants, who can create great pitches and can convert these to great stories more valuable both to clients and writers, who still have to ‘feed the beast’ which devours online content, despite their much-reduced staffing rates.

Earned Media has changed irrevocably, so how do B2B brands make the most of it? Firstly, editorial coverage is still powerful, especially in reaching non Digital Native senior decision makers, who are partly for historical reasons, or, just because of time pressure, less likely to devote time to surfing blogs. For instance, The FT’s pink paper still rightly holds a jealously-guarded place in the heart of CEOs.

Second, as news reporting becomes commoditised and democratised, exactly the opposite is happening to news analysis, which is becoming a rarer, more valuable commodity, increasingly protected behind paywalls. Once a news story breaks, whether read first in a magazine or newspaper, on a tablet, PC or phone, readers immediately seek strong, trustworthy editorial opinions. This makes news analysis stories which make it through editorial scrutiny more valuable than ever as part of a brand’s customer perception. It is this ‘second bounce’ which is the entrance point for many B2B brands stories – especially when they missed out initially on editorial stories driven by link baiting.

The point of Earned Media is that it is earned. The harder earned, often the more valuable. This is why, while we do less media pitching these days, it is valued more highly than ever by clients who realise the newfound scarcity of quality B2B media outlets, drives value for their brands. If they needed any proof, they need look no further than the publishers, who while struggling to justify print advertising rate cards, are only too happy to capitalise on the demand for internet usage with higher-than-ever website reproduction fees once the story is online.

Earned media ain’t dead it just grew up a lot and now gets on better with its neighbours. What was once B2B PR, and unthinkingly labelled ‘free advertising’ by some, is now more complex. As publishing economics blur the lines between owned, earned and curated brand communications, it remains a tough, but worthwhile benchmark of a brand’s credibility. Customers know editorial endorsement matters, even though they will no longer pay directly to receive that editorial.

At Positive Marketing the game is on to achieve the optimal blend of Earned, Curated and ‘Paid For’ media and we think we play it more enthusiastically than anyone else. This post is one of a series of five exploring the myths surrounding today’s B2B marketing buzzwords and is designed to stimulate debate, reconsideration and in some cases mild nausea. Please do add your comments below. Sign up to the blog as a subscriber and we will let you know how to turn these five disparate marketing tactics into campaigns which work in today’s market.

Why Content Marketing sucks (#2 of 5 Marketing Tactics that suck)

As mindless jargon goes Content Marketing is right up there. To ‘market’ anything, from salt to silicon chips, requires informational content in addition to the goods themselves. Whether that’s a brandmark or, that holy grail of Content Marketing, the pseudo-scientific but not peer-reviewed Whitepaper. The idea is to reassure buyers that branded goods are of high enough quality to justify the additional premium buyers are expected to pay.

Technical buyers are different from salt or pepper shoppers. They want to know exactly WHY a solution will work for them by understanding HOW it works first. The Whitepaper and its ‘live’ equivalent the Webinar were until recently effective, if time-consuming, tactics to educate buyers about the HOW. They build credibility, helping convince IT buyers that a particular technology could work for them.

Content Marketing is reassuring, WhitePapers downloads and Webinar registrations (or even attendees) are measurable. Today though, the vast Whitepaper ‘farms’ hosted on technology publications’s websites give buyers an experience as confusing as Borat in a US Supermarket.

If buyers like the HOW from the Content Marketing, they could next learn WHY a solution might work well for their company. Traditionally they did this in three ways;

     1. Asking peers (if they were not competitors)
2. Consulting technology analysts (if you had deep pockets)
3. Reading ‘Success Stories’ from companies like yours who had implemented
the technology in the media.

This last means of checking, although prone to intervention by Positive Marketing and others seeking to push their clients’ successes, did at least have one guarantee of independence; the technology writer. The editorial process claimed to debunk as much ‘PR spin’ as possible and help readers understand if the claims made by vendors were true.

Now though, with B2B technology journalism in decline and advertising revenues moving online, Content Marketing has ‘worked around’ this journalistic scrutiny. In fact it has co-opted the very journalists who used to ‘look after’ the interests of their readers. Inboxes are full of ‘Last chance to Register’invitations and ‘Latest Technology News and Expert Advice’ apparently sent directly from the editors of publications. Although on checking with them, it turns out most know nothing about these email blasts, which are in fact sent by the advertising teams.

Short term, this is a problem for the press. Where once credible writers used investigative skills and strict editorial guidelines to provide a valuable service to their readers, now they pimp unscrutinised Whitepapers and Webinars at readers whose inboxes are now overflowing with very similar offers direct from marketing pros. Where once they could be relied upon to check the truth of the claims made by brands, now they are sending out un-edited propaganda in their own names, making them, well, samey and undermining their role.

Medium term it is the brands themselves who suffer, with pay-to-play Content Marketing now just seen as a form of brand advertising (never popular with technical buyers). The sheer volume of webinars and Whitepapers as a tactic also means they are having diminishing returns. Undifferentiated marketing makes for a lower brand premium over time.

Longer term, Content Marketing, as we know it today is doomed. As always with marketing, differentiation, authenticity and innovation will win out. Content Marketing is just too samey, too generic and plain lazy a tactic to keep the attention of discerning buyers. If you can’t tell your story these days in a better fashion, perhaps with the help of animation, video or an Infographic, you risk appealing only to IT folks of a previous era, one before smartphones, respected opinionated bloggers and ‘Try before you buy’ freemium software – all of which change the decision-making process.

The future will be much more Social, which implies briefer content, more fleetingly sampled, but delivered in increasingly integrated marketing campaigns, where content is less formulaic. We are building some of those campaigns right now and would be happy to explain more, so feel free to get in contact. Feel free to check out our previous post in the ‘Marketing Tactics that Suck’ series and check back for some ideas which do not suck.

Why Inbound Marketing sucks (#1 of 5 Marketing Tactics that suck)

Inbound marketing is hot. Who says so? The opportunists taking lots of VC money and building fast-growing businesses ‘while the sun shines’ and before the inevitable ‘consolidation of platforms’. We too love fast-growing technology businesses but the hype level here is off the scale. As one prospect we met last week acknowledged, the high-pressure “Create Marketing People Love” message is just not credible.

Full disclosure, Inbound Marketing competes directly for marketing budget with one of our core offerings, influencer relations. But that is not why it sucks for its buyers. It sucks because the vendors who are selling high-ticket item solutions for Inbound Marketing are claiming they have a Holy Grail a One-Size-Fits-All ’ERP for marketing’, a panacea to make B2B marketing easier.

Of course it is great to have a ‘Web to Lead’ process more sophisticated than first generation web forms and for SEO it is also fabulous to have click tracking which can automate the A-B Testing of headlines, copy and images, especially as Web Designers charged so much for these basics in the past. However, automation alone is not a strategy and the dirty secret is

A better mousetrap is useless without cheese

Without a compelling message and great content , it doesn’t matter how you track ‘website journeys’. If you just don’t have the traffic, you just created your own Zil Lane, which a select few travel up and down as they please, while the world moves on around it.

As the ultimate creator of content, Einstein, once said ‘Not everything that matters can be measured and not everything that can be measured matters.”. Belatedly, to address this gaping hole in their offerings, some of the leading players have been farming out a ‘commoditized’ version of content creation out to their partners. You can see this sneaking concession to the all-important content buried here on a leading inbound marketing provider’s website. This in itself tells a story – not so much ‘Who moved my cheese?’ as ‘Please sir can I have some more?’.

The truth is while you want an industrial strength mousetrap to be built sturdily in a factory, most of us prefer the taste of hand-crafted cheese to processed squares (even if the barcodes are great for tracking where we buy them). Great content is a pre-cursor of Inbound Marketing. Without it, the promise of torrential leads effortlessly flowing into websites rings as hollow as ‘jam tomorrow’. Just check out the outbound emails in your inbox and sales calls from inbound marketing firms for further proof.

Next time we debunk another ‘great white hope’ of modern B2B marketing – Content Marketing. Feel free to comment on what you have read so far and expect us to come out swinging again next time.

POSITIVELY NEGATIVE – Five B2B Marketing tactics that, individually, suck

With a brand like Positive Marketing, you would expect us to be upbeat. We are – ridiculously so. Our clients notice how much we high-five and giggle as we create results. In fact we know how important it is to laugh hard while working harder.

To change things up a little and be contrarian, our next series of blogs looks at five of the hottest, some would say over-hyped, buzzwords in B2B Marketing and explain how, on their own, they portray a negative impression of our sector’s progress, especially compared to our slicker B2C brethren.

1. Inbound Marketing sucks
2. Content Marketing sucks
3. Thought Leadership sucks
4. Corporate blogging sucks
5. Earned Media sucks

Given we do all of the above, you may wonder why we are so down on them. Well, all will be revealed as we conclude the series with an article which explains how you can change these buzzwords from sucking the life out of you to sowing the seeds of career-defining success. As always, we welcome your feedback, negative as well as positive. After all, it helps if marketing creates an impression…

Now let’s get going, with our first critique

How was the feedback from your latest event?

“A great event, different from the usual!”
“Event was well thought through and executed. I’m all for interactive events to engage the audience. Just a wine and cheese thing can become quite repetitive.”
“Definitely an enjoyable and insightful evening. I will definitely use the access info you have given me and spread the word.”
“I was also impressed that the more senior people in the room were more than happy to chat with me and you guys were happy to let them, which doesn’t always happen!”

Positive Marketing spent three months planning a rather special event for one of our much-beloved clients. On what for most will have been for many just another rather uneventful Tuesday – together we pulled off an ambitious live launch of a new product surfing one of the hottest new trends in enterprise applications; Gamification.

Product launches like this involve time, money and energy spent on the details to create something which can redefine a company’s future brand awareness. Get it right and client and media walk away feeling like they gained valuable learnings. Get it wrong and in a world of instant communication your shot at leadership is set back considerably.

Positive Marketing loves providing excellent client service and this often involves experiencing the same sleepless and afterwards the relief and excitement as we wave off the final guest from a successful launch event. So, in today’s environment- where on the night a 50% dropout rate is not unusual, what are the secrets to success?!

1. Minimal PowerPoint – Sounds simple but it is amazing how many companies still feel compelled to build that 30 page slide deck. Leave it. Your company is not two dimensional so don’t treat it as such. Microsoft code may have its place in your corporate board meeting but for the press it’s as popular as a stop smoking campaign in Mad Men.

2. Interactive – Let the audience ‘drive’ – How is your offering different from all the others? Journalist are invited to countless events, what can they experience at yours? Rather than telling your guests how to feel about it, let them make up their own minds with a product launch which lets them touch feel and play with your product. After all, the school teachers whose lessons engaged us hit home harder. So take a risk – everyone likes a trier.

3. The way to an influencer’s heart may be through their belly – Good food and wine are to be expected, but truly great catering could be your best differentiator. Why not theme your event from invite to venue to food? It may win you comments like this (from our event) “The sushi was kickin rad, as they say in the 1990s )”

4. Access All Areas – Rarely are journalists given access to everything and everyone, instead they are ushered from one sterile meeting to another having perfectly briefed spokespeople giving them a well scripted, news-free, company line. Having customers and senior spokespeople with the ability to have honest and frank debates is a winner for journalists.

5. Remember The 6 Ps (Perfect Preparation Prevents P*ss Poor Performance) – Yes the inevitable will happen so expect it. People get sick, flat viewings will coincide with your event (despite being in the diary for 2 months) and ‘dogs will eat homework’. So follow a simple ‘50% drop out’ rule and plan accordingly. Err on the side of caution and prepare for all eventualities, if you want to get results like this.

Hope you can forgive us blowing our own trumpet just this once. But the serious point is that events success is tougher than ever – there are more reasons than ever to say No. We would be very interested in your Best Practices around media events, get in touch, we have lots more hints and tips we can share one-on-one.

UK Media’s wood for the trees – karaoke and class envy more interesting than waste

The debacle that is the London Olympics ticketing saga rolls on. The much-hyped ‘online swop system’ for unwanted tickets, promised to restore some sanity to proceedings. This being 2012 Britain, it did not of course. The system crashed spectacularly on its first day. At first a trickle and then most of the UK media picked up on this national disgrace. Well sorta.

Within two days, a few emollient grumblings from LOCOG, fingering contractor Ticketmaster for the blame had the UK’s‘newshounds’ off the scent. No explanation about why the error had occurred, why no one had thought to test the systems sufficiently before the fanfare of puffery at its launch and in fact no inkling of when the site, publicly-funded at an unnamed cost, would perform the task it was commissioned to do.

A clear case of Technical Debt (the fully to-be expected issues caused by inadequate attention to code quality)? Technical Debt, despite its links to several major systems failures recently, is just not a story the UK press feels ready, or perhaps, able to tell. Until it brings down a bank, airline or another smartphone company.

By contrast, the draconian EU data privacy directive was bound to be of interest to the UK media. After all, it has far-reaching cost implications for every UK business. Sure enough the Google News article count rose from 157 two days before the announcement (mostly a reprise of the sabre-rattling ahead of the announcement) to more than 300 as it was leaked at the overblown DLD conference and north of 450 on the day of its actual announcement (now plateaued at around 800).

As diligent Trendsurfers, naturally we were ahead of the game positioning knowledgeable technology clients as commentators on the largest shake-up of citizen’s privacy for 18 years. Our efforts paid off and we were soon contacted by several newsgatherers, including excitingly, a national broadcaster. We prepped our spokespeople for the limelight with enough facts and figures to fill an hour-long bulletin and were excited to talk to the researcher just ahead of broadcast. He told us not to bother, the story had been ‘bumped’ for another.

What could possibly rival an explanation of an additional business tax on every European business? Er, a story about whether babies would be charged for entering Olympic stadiums or not. Was there any mention about the IT blackout, which had continued unreported for two weeks? Course not.

We are not really whining. That’s life in the uphill struggle with the UK media give technology the public scrutiny it deserves. As experience B2B pros, we understand the status quo. Tech is difficult and less glamorous than sports, Westminster politics or Karaoke TV. However, we choose not to accept it.

The national scandal is, poor technology costs us taxpayers billions. So boring or not, perhaps it deserves more airtime. As one timid LOCOG official attempted to claim, it should be ‘reputationally critical’ for suppliers. Perhaps if only it were, in the way that legal, some would say, proportionate, Banker’s bonuses seem to be, we could waste less money on tech that does not work.

What do you think? Politico handbagging and karaoke singing more important news than wasted taxes? Add a comment.

 

The ‘e-smerging’ UK Tech media landscape

This post has been coming a while. Sometimes it takes some time to stand back from the pixels and focus on the emerging picture. However several recent events have led me to believe that Tech Journalism is dead. In fact, what precious little there was has now smerged into the realm of online advertising.

Not that there is anything wrong with advertising, that, plus a good World War or Two*, are how great brands are made. But it is not what many in the UK call journalism; investigative, free-from-commercial considerations and provocative. And this revelation demands a new type of response from those of us who work in the ‘earned media’ B2B space that stubbornly resists being rebranded as anything other than Public Relations. First the evidence:

EXHIBIT ONE

TechTarget acquires Computer Weekly – 28^th March 2011

When a $270m giant, whose business is to repackage and distribute content built by advertisers to a highly qualified audience, swoops in to buy the UK’s leading technology title for small change, this is a seminal moment. TechTarget’s admirable business model (slogan ‘Where serious tech buyers decide’) is built on selling eyeballs to advertisers in much the same way that broadcasters sell slots between programmes. With one difference; almost all of the content has been pre-created by the advertisers themselves. It is too early to see what that means for Computer Weekly’s readership and long-term editorial direction, but no one is claiming this move increases the freedom the UK tech press enjoys. In fairness, it is the case that ‘free’ content, mostly whitepapers written by tech vendor product marketing teams, is very compelling, more technically detailed, if a lot less objective, than much UK tech media output, which all too often focuses on IT consumerisation and gadgets (as previously ranted about).

EXHIBIT TWO
Nasty US tech journalist spat Tom Foremski v Michael Arrington – April 2011 (ongoing)

There are few things more wrongly compelling than observing two girls fighting at close range – except for two grown tech journalists bitching. In the fascinating and deeply personal battle for the moral high-ground which followed failed media empire AOL’s surprise purchase of up and coming blog Techcrunch, the winner was not so much the truth, as the status quo. As both sides slung mud about whether investing in the companies they were writing about clouded their judgement – it was easy to see both sides. It got really bitchy when writer’s partners and their employers were cited, in a row that even the UK red tops would relish. Bottom line – there is a conflict of interest in writing about and investing in companies. This seems to confirm that there is a new code of ethics for those who create commercially beneficial copy about companies whose profits they ultimately share.

To recap, so far we have the cream of the UK’s tech media working for what some unkind souls might call a ‘content farm’ and reporters who describe themselves as well-paid by their employers, writing copy which may also contribute to their personal wealth. Confused? See a ‘smerging’ of roles here? Here’s more proof from another recent personal professional experience.

EXHIBIT THREE
‘they are not a PR firm’ – May 2011

OK, hands up there are some journalists who thanks to many years of careful nurturing, preferential treatment on stories and possibly the odd expensed refreshment, are ‘friends of the family’ here at Positive Marketing. On the other hand, we like all PR companies are entreated daily to submit copy for titles either too lazy or too cash-strapped to provide their own content. That is the status quo. So when we recently saw a competitor given a regular blog slot by a leading UK B2B tech title (who we agreed to keep nameless), we were intrigued at the possibility of getting in on the act. A quick call to a normally hard-to-track-down editor (coincidentally a former colleague) and then three rapid-fire email volleys disabused us of this possibility and I quote “X isn’t a PR firm as such = it’s a consulting firm”. According to this editor, the blogger in question did not work for a PR firm, so why would its hyperbolic Linkedin description be “the only PR and communications consultancy to specialise in the enterprise software industry”?

It seems the best of us can get confused in this new ‘smerged’ new world order. But rather than bleat about it, we at Positive Marketing are getting with this new charade and turning into a consultancy too, it’s just that some of our paying clients want to call what we do PR.

Hopefully these three examples confirm what many have said for some time, tech journalism, advertising and PR are ‘smerging’ together to become, well, just plain tech marketing. When editorial can be replaced by product literature [EXHIBIT 1], when journalists can promote companies they invest in [EXHIBIT 2] and when PR companies are the new journalists [EXHIBIT 3], the rules of the game really have changed. In some ways that puts us all into competition for the same vendor dollars that have always fuelled the information opportunity which surrounds the IT industry. Whether we have to change the name of our services, literally invest in our clients, create more Whitepapers (or even all three) we still love this sector and treasure its dynamism, so maybe it is better that the hypocrisy around editorial independence needs to die. Or maybe it was just a myth to start with.

In subsequent posts we will look at the repercussions of this new advertorial honesty and why with content as king, contacts as commodity and relationships the new currency, we like our position in the market for ideas more than ever. If you want to learn more about how we think, work and deliver results daily, leave a comment, email us at contact@positivemarketing or, if you can be pithy, send a tweet to @positmarket.

* If you have not yet you have to see the excellent BBC Three series ‘Secrets of the Superbrands’ where Alex Riley sees, amongst other things, the rise of Coca Cola and adidas as being aided by their roles in supplying opposite sides in World War 2