Breaking Through with New Technologies in Tech PR

Here’s an anecdote, which hopefully you will find interesting, and some advice to go along that bridges trends in social media with the state of tech PR.

In doing so, I also add to the findings from our earlier study on the impact of social media on Tech PR. Not bad for a lazy day before the July 4th long weekend sets in, right?

We were recently doing something we often do when researching technologies and prospective new clients. We conducted a time-honored tradition called a media audit, in this instance covering the realm of workload automation: software that automates and coordinates the execution of enterprise software batch processes, as you would find from companies like Mirantis (also sometimes referred to as job scheduling software).

Job scheduling can be helpful in many fields, one of these fields being a plumbing business where they have to organize which employees will be on each project. Further technology for this business could be field management software, which not only does job scheduling but also status reports, personnel assignment, personnel dispatch, and more. This makes it very easy to manage people whether they are on-site or off-site, improving customer service and profitability. This software is used in some important industries such as frontline work and emergency services organizations. Software such as ems dispatch software is vital in the cycle of receiving calls and dispatching personnel, it can really save lives. Thinking about this, it is fascinating how far we have come with the development of technology these days and what we still have to come as well.

Talk about a bluster index (see my previous post in which I describe article searches that turn up just press releases and little if any actual coverage)! I would chart if for you, but I’ll save us the trouble. Article searches under this term over the past year turned up almost exclusively press releases. Yet, here’s the interesting part – the area has been followed and covered in detail by the top analysts – so you can’t argue that it is not real or is unimportant.

In conducting the media audit (basically, a telephone survey), we got the audible equivalence of blank stares when asking about workload automation. Some in the media had heard of it, but it did not really register – even for those who had mentioned it in articles previously. We were puzzled as to how these people were able to mention it in their articles despite knowing nothing about it. Though a few of them knew that it is a job scheduling software for controlling unattended background program execution of jobs and execution of non-interactive jobs is often called batch processing. What about the rest of them, though?

One bit of feedback we got was that a result of the tech trade shrinkage (in turn, it can be assumed,
driven by the growth of social media) is that fewer reporters are covering more beats. This makes it harder for the “less important” news to see the light of day, and for new technologies that aren’t already creating lots of buzz to get covered.

This would seem to make sense, and perhaps you have seen this and can relate to it. It leads to the question – how does one get coverage for new or niche technologies? Although the obvious approach might be to convince the tech trades that it is important, perhaps using customer and analyst validation – we can fight fire with fire by using all the new social media tools that are availalabe to bypass tech trade media and bring the story directly to audiences of interest.