Tech PR – what you need to know part 1
The sub-title for this post is: “Teaching English as a foreign language”. It’s a presentation I gave to the PR-Net meeting in March 2008. I was asked to speak to non-tech PR folk about working with tech clients.
The presentation: What I would like to do is give you a bit of insight into my world, the good, the bad and the ugly. A bunch of stuff you are going to hear is going to sound quite familiar – good PR practices hold true whatever the vertical your client happens to be in, but I will try to show you particularly how they apply in the tech world. Other things are quite specific to tech, so hopefully I can give you a good picture of what it’s all about.
Firstly though – so who am I and why do I get to stand here and talk to you about this? I am currently the marketing manager for Clickatell. [This was in April 2008 remember] We’re a mobile messaging company that provides the plumbing for alert services like transactional alerts from your banks. I currently support sales offices in SA, the UK and across the USA, as well as an e-commerce business. PR always been important to us both locally and internationally as well as online.
Previously I worked for a company in the UK called Band-X. It was also a start up, selling wholesale telecoms capacity by all sorts of clever new ways to telecoms operators and big companies. That was a roller coaster ride through the boom and bust years of the dotcom fiasco where I went from opening press offices across Europe, in Brazil, the US and India, to closing most of them down again less than a year later when the market started shrinking.
And believe it or not I started my career as a tech business reporter, writing for a publication called Total Telecom. That was a complete accident as I had a journalism degree and could do some HTML way back in 1997.
So the point is, my career has been steeped in tech to one degree or another for over 10 years – and I would be interested to hear how much of this applies to your areas as well.
So what’s tech PR all about then? The first thing that springs to mind is what made me think of this sub-title – Teaching English as a foreign language.
Yes, you are going to have to learn a new language, and then try to translate it into English. And then explain why you translated it in that way.
And you are either going to love it or hate it.
And there you have it – one of my top reasons for working in tech PR: You truly get to exercise your communication and PR skills – but more on this later.
Read more in part 2 here.
[This is an extract from a presentation I gave in March 2008, prior to my founding Twokats Communications.]
