Tech PR – what you need to know part 4

Other things to remember about tech PR:

Know your subject. Use your client’s product. Or ask for a full demonstration early on. See the lights flashing and the messages whizzing past. Touch it. If possible, get the journalists, bloggers, key customers and analysts to trial the product or service.

Understand the wider market. Know that something called the Application Service Provider (ASP) model is now called Software as a service (SaaS) and why it is important to your client. (I told you, you would have to learn a new language – and most of it is in TLAs).

You will become very familiar with TLAs, or three letter acronyms. For a bit of fun, here’s some info on TLAs from Wikipedia:
•    There are potentially 17,576 TLAs possible if you add up all the combinations of letters of the alphabet from AAA, AAB to ZZZ.
•    Probably the most common and well known tech TLA is WWW, or worldwide web. Ironically this is the longest possible TLA to pronounce: it takes 6 syllables to say abbreviation and only 3 for the full term.
•    This is a fun one that I hadn’t heard of before: Y-A-B-A, or YABA, or yet another bloody acronym. Apparently the malevolent forces that sit down and think up TLAs check if something is YABA compatible, ie the abbreviation doesn’t form a rude word. Would you want to be a computer related application programmer (yes I know that’s a 4LA, but it’s funny ☺)

So here are some other translation issues you might stumble across:

Especially if you work as the local PR arm of a multinational company – know your local market. Be an expert on the SA landscape. Know what your journalists, bloggers, end users want and expect and be an ambassador for this in the context of the global team. Don’t underestimate the role you play in localizing a story. And conversely, look for the international angle in local stories – you’d be surprised how often it’s there.

Remember also we work in a global environment, even if you are pitching to a local publication; it is going to end up on the web, which knows no borders. So your challenge is to keep the spirit and relevance of a local story, within the framework of global corporate messaging and positioning. You can’t have a customer getting conflicting messages from a company, even if they don’t sit in your territory.

Another thought on working as part of a global team, which fortunately ties into my translation theme ☺ – you will need to get used to working with some very different business cultures to those we are used to in South Africa.

Even if your colleagues speak English, you are going to have to learn to speak and understand a new business language. Especially if you work with a team based in Silicon Valley – which frankly sometimes feels like another planet.

Before I close – a couple of tips: read widely around your topic and talk to people both in and outside your client’s company. There are a host of resources, glossaries and so on on the Internet that you can use to help you navigate this world. Make friends with an employee of your client that you can ask stupid questions and get useful information. If you are part of a global team, insist on access to all the current and past resources so you can get up to speed and understand the thinking.

Bottom line – tech has to interest you. If it doesn’t, you will experience misery. If it does, you will seldom have a dull moment, you will get to make a real difference in some great South African companies, you get to play on a global stage, and you will really get to ply your craft. And frankly it’s a hot space to be in right now.

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