Tech PR – what you need to know part 3

So you are thinking of taking on a tech client? Here are a few guidelines to engagement:

•    Find out what your potential client wants from PR. Not only the marketing person that hires you, but the exec that pays the bill and the person you are going to be relying on for time and information.
•    Is it simple brand awareness they are after?
•    Do they want to be positioning as a thought leader and expert in their field.
•    Or are you expected to educate the market as to WHY they need your client’s product or service?
•    Are you expected to be almost part of a lead or sales generation arm?

These are important things to pin down at the outset and to decide whether you are on the same page as your client.

With budgets getting tighter, and I bet this isn’t only happening in tech – PR is expected to do so much more than just generate editorial. Sometimes I get the impression that editorial is tertiary to all the other things going on. Especially with releases flying straight into execs’ inboxes without any mediation from any sort of editorial creature, and the execs not knowing the difference.

Decide if you have the stomach to take on these additional roles, or whether you want to stick to your core offering.

Once you have decided to plunge into the wacky world of tech – for me there are 2 vital things you need to do to succeed.

Firstly REALLY REALLY know where your client’s potential customers are and what is keeping them awake at night. Don’t take your client’s word for it. Your client will think that their customer is lying awake at night gnashing their teeth in angst because they don’t have the latest service your client has launched. But Vanessa, it’s got a 180 gig doo hickey with 50 times more widgets than its closest competitor – how could they not want it?

Believe me, they don’t. Your client’s customers are lying awake at night wondering how they can keep costs down, or get sales up, or keep customers coming back. They don’t care how many widgets your product offers,

They care about what’s in it for them and how is it going to make their lives easier, and how much is it going to cost and how hard is it going to be to make happen.

So they aren’t scouring the IT pubs looking for technical features or lengthy technical white papers. They are reading the one or 2 trusted publications in their space that talks to them in a language they understand. That understand their business issues, and can offer practical ways to solve their problems.

So we are back to that translation thing again – you need to translate all the tech babble into real business benefits, appropriate for a certain group of customers, and then sell it into Vegetable Sellers Weekly, or Car Manufacturers Monthly, or whatever it is your potential customers are reading/viewing/listening to.

Linked to this idea is ruthlessly removing all the hype your client probably wants to add in. I call these the weasel words. Of course they are tremendously proud of what they have built, and that it’s got twice as many spickets as anything else on the market. But there is an understandable skepticism, weariness and wariness about tech hype. And anyway, where is all the good stuff about how this is going to improve your customer’s life?

So what is keeping your potential customer awake at night? And where are they going for a solution? What are they reading? Who are they talking to? Where are they researching?

Another important thing for me in tech PR is bringing in the human element. What does this mean for the person in the street? How can I use it? Why should I care?

A key element through all this is that you shouldn’t speak tech unless it’s appropriate. This is important. You shouldn’t speak tech, but you need to understand it to translate it into English!

The last in this series, part 4 coming up here.

[This is an extract from a presentation I gave in March 2008, prior to my founding Twokats Communications.]

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