Cut off before it’s prime

A slight problem in the form of a broken bone in my hand is going to hinder the take-off of But Why?

 It’s a little frustrating as i really wanted to get some momentum going in this blog however a hand in plaster is making typing rather difficult, but fear not – i’ll be back with more very soon.

 Ben

Should i make the leap into Technology PR

Ed’s post 10 questions gives an excellent insight into what you can expect from your early days in pr, and prompted me to share some of my thoughts which I recently compiled for the now departed PR business magazine. The below ramblings related to my experiences of moving from a non pr technology job into pr agency life. N.B. This post is my first experiment with track backs, so lets see what happens…

- Coming from a non pr technology background shouldn’t be seen as a disadvantage, although you may have no pr experience you have a lot to offer. PR is one element of the sales and marketing process, coming from a technology company means that you are likely to have experience of working with other elements of sales and marketing and understand the importance of pr and how it fits in with other parts of the business. Chances are that you’ve only been on agency side you may have had limited visibility of this.

- Understanding the technology and clients needs. As a pr person it’s quite likely that your experience of technology has mostly been gained from presentations emailed to you by your clients comms department. Working for a technology company gives you a thorough understanding of how a particular technology works, but perhaps more importantly how a technology company operates and the challenges it faces. Then there’s all the obvious stuff about understanding clients needs etc. you have this because you’ve been on that side of the fence.

- Organisational and cultural differences. Coming from Intel (an organisation of around 76,000 people) to my current agency was a huge change. Personally this was a good thing as one of the reasons I moved on from Intel was because I wanted to feel a little more involved with a company rather than being an extremely small cog in a mammoth wheel. However the difference should not be underestimated; most significant is your mindset to work, with Intel my focus was on one element of marketing one particular product line which is a vastly different experience to a pr agency where you have to show equal amounts of love and passion to many clients, all at the same time! This took me some time to get used to.

- Something that always amused me about working for a multi national tech company was the regular air quality monitoring in the office and that fact that if you want to move your filing cabinet then you submit a request online, which brings a team of filing cabinet movers to the rescue. Agency life and office politics are very different, much more in line with my way of thinking. This is just a silly example however people thinking of moving should think carefully about which environment suits them better.

 On a different note, i have been very impressed with the standard of blogs set up by new graduates looking for that first move into PR. A great example of this is The Wages of Spin

Seeing Red

An interesting development for the world of consumer technology pr today in the form of Red Consultancy teaming up with Shiny Media, a very well respected Blogging outfit to form Shiny Red, as reported in PR Week.

Shiny Media run a number of sites including Tech Digest and Shiny Shiny two of the most influential product review sites out there today.

The article in PR Week states that ‘The joint venture is believed to be the first of its kind between an agency and a blogging outfit, and will see a ‘Shiny Red’ office manned by a mixture of Red and Shiny staff based in Red’s Soho HQ.’

In my opinion this is great news and will hopefully kick start more consumer technology pr campaigns to include more of a ’social media’ element, as at the moment I think many high profile brands are missing a trick by not engaging directly with there target audiences through these channels.

Granted it is a risk unleashing a ’social media’ element as the very nature of it means that you loose an element of control, however there has been a few examples where this has worked well. One that springs to mind was Nokia’s N70 blog which was set up to aggregate N70 reviews and act as a media/blogging resource during the launch of the N70.

In some respects a brave step as the N70 blog featured both positive and negative comments on the phone, however ultimately this openness allowed all involved to be more informed and showed that Nokia genuinely wanted to engage with the online communities.

But why?

First and foremost this is a learning experience for me. I can happily give you a description of a blog, wiki etc, i can happily justify their importance within a pr programme, but ask me to create and manage a blog and at this point in time and i will stumble. So by creating But why? i am going to learn about blogging and have But why? as a platform to share my thoughts on consumer technology, interesting examples of consumer technology pr and i’ll throw in a few other bits that catch my eye.

More from me soon…