Page One PR Joins Twitter (finally) posted by Shelly Milam at Thursday, January 08, 2009

We've been helping our clients build and maintain their corporate Twitter accounts for so long that we pretty much just forgot about building one for ourselves. Well no longer! I would like to formally introduce you to the new Page One PR Twitter account. Here we will discuss the worlds of social media, public relations (of course), maybe some client news and probably a whole lot about the happenings at our office. And let me tell you, if that doesn't entice you, this blooper video surely will.



Enjoy! and be sure to join us on Twitter for more fun.

Happy Holidays from Page One PR! posted by Jenna at Monday, December 08, 2008

We've been working to build social media campaigns for our clients this year, but decided to turn the camera on ourselves this holiday season. Get ready for our 15 seconds of fame – lights, camera, action!

Rather than design and print our usual satirical holiday cards, we decided to save a few trees by dusting off our singing voices for your viewing pleasure.

We hope you'll check out our videos and maybe even smile. And, yes, that is a penguin in the photo! Let us know how we did but, above all, please accept our warmest wishes for a merry holiday season and a happy new year. Here's looking to 2009 from our team to yours.

Sincerely,
Your friends at Page One PR

P.S.– If you like crazy reindeer, don't forget to check out this special feature from our Santa Barbara office. Boy, that guy can deck the halls!

The Great Green Hope posted by Christina Williams at Monday, October 27, 2008

Business headlines these days are anxiety- inducing to say the least. And for anyone trying to get the attention of business reporters, it can be an exercise about as troubling as looking at your 401(k) balance.

But there’s a phenomenon in journalism known as the man-bites-dog story. And in this environment, good economic news is the odd yarn that gets attention.

Last week Page One PR helped SolarWorld tell the story of their new manufacturing facility opening just outside Portland, Ore. Here’s a German company placing a hefty bet on U.S. manufacturing and providing hundreds of those high-paying “green” jobs U.S. politicians are so fond of talking about. It was a powerful economic story and it received powerful coverage in outlets from Fortune to Greentech Media; CNN to the Associated Press.

Call it clean tech, renewable energy or the Green New Deal every recession has its recovery driver and my money is on green. As Page One client Clean Edge put it in their recent Carbon-Free Prosperity 2025 report, “We stand at a unique crossroads in history: the transition from polluting, resource-constrained, fossil-based energy systems to those built on sustainable, renewable, resource-efficient systems.”

Eventually the jobs and economic growth propelled by the clean tech sector — which continues to lead in venture capital tallies — might be less remarkable. But I would argue that the increasing noise in the sector will continue to require (ahem) good storytellers.

Who Says You Need a Press Release? MokaFive iPhone Sentinel Blog Launch posted by Jenna at Monday, October 13, 2008

Tired of drafting those pesky press releases? Why not use your blog to break news?

That's what we did with MokaFive last month for the company's iPhone Sentinel prototype. The News: Vinod Khosla-backed desktop virtualization vendor launches plug-in for iPhone users to carry a full desktop on the iPhone.

The Challenge: Drive prototype downloads during VMworld – one of the biggest virtualization industry events of the year. With Microsoft's own virtualization event the week prior and only seven days to prepare, we can generate buzz in the middle of this loud press circus, right?

Right! We skipped the formal press release and hit the blogosphere directly via the MokaFive corporate blog. Why? Rather than reach typical press release outlets, MokaFive wanted to target a very specific audience – cream-of-the-crop tech enthusiasts who would download and test the prototype, then offer helpful feedback on the product.

During VMworld, our news hit The New York Times, CNET, TechRepublic, jkOnTheRun, Life Hacker, Mobile Devices Today, DaniWeb, LinuxStreet and more. Many of the blogs were syndicated, too.

MokaFive's web traffic quadrupled on the day of the announcement. Life Hacker alone referred more than 2,800 people to MokaFive's web site. According to Radian6, there were 85 total blogs talking about MokaFive 15-29 Sept; 35 of these were posted the day of our blog announcement. There were also 50 blogs that mentioned "iPhone Sentinel" 15-29 Sept; 30 of which ran the same day as our blog announcement.

MokaFive saw an increase of 273% in visitors to their downloads page. In addition, the MokaFive Player page went from fewer than 50 visits the week before VMworld to more than 8,000 visits during the week of our blog announcement. In addition, downloads from MokaFive's community site increased by 50%.

Key takeaways:
1) Consider strategies to build up your blog readership so your first blog-only launch is sure to reach your target audience.

2) Messaging and important talking points can easily get lost in the fast-paced start-up environment. While the exercise of writing a press release often helps distill key takeaways you want to communicate, it's not the only tool for grooming spokespeople. Make sure you always carefully prep spokespeople – with or without a press release – or they may look sloppy in interviews.

3) Don't expect your blog to do all the work. Consider ways to market your blog to make it visible within the communities you want to reach. Then, get your PR team to pitch like crazy. For example, our top blog hits (NYT, CNET) came from personal relationships and hardcore pitching.

4) Make sure the "news" is worthy. Although Microsoft, Sun, VMware, Citrix, HP, Dell, Red Hat and a variety of startups were making desktop virtualization product and customer announcements last month, MokaFive is the first to move virtual desktops to mobile phones.

If you're considering using your corporate blog as a platform for breaking news, go for it! If you're a seasoned PR pro with the right relationships in place, what's to lose?

PyCon 2008: Small Project, Big Impact, Lasting Effect posted by Daniel Schneider at Thursday, September 18, 2008

When the organizers of the main community conference for the Python programming language contacted Page One to do PR for them, their goals were modest -- just stir up some interest… oh, and turn it into the JavaOne of Python. Yikes!

Fortunately, Google (and YouTube), Microsoft, Canonical, and many, many other big brands backed PyCon. Page One loves working with developers so we accepted a small project to give back to the open source community and to gain experience with the Python community. Due to the small size of the project, PyCon organizers were only expecting a few press clippings here and there. A couple clips = success. Not hard, right?

Right away I realized that PyCon had almost zero name recognition. “What is PyCon?” or “Who do you represent?” reporters and bloggers kept asking me. Pitching the conference as a standalone event proved quite challenging. So I moved on to coupling it with other Python news (oh, by the way Guido Van Rossum is leading a session on that topic at PyCon next month!). In my opinion, that was the most fun part of the whole experience – looking for story pitches where I could legitimately insert a PyCon angle. And it worked. One story in particular was completely focused on a separate issue altogether, yet the PyCon people dominated the copy.

So what effect did Page One actually have on PyCon? Statistically, we blew away the coverage of any previous PyCon with 25 press clippings (versus a half dozen clips for the 2007 event). But it’s not the multiple podcasts, radio interviews, features in publications such as Dr. Dobb’s Journal, InfoWorld, and Internet News, or the 77 percent increase in attendance that really stands out. More important were the intangible effects – we got the word out there. People stopped asking me what was a PyCon? And that was the real aim of our work for PyCon – to maintain the grassroots, community feel while putting PyCon on the map and stimulating interest in Python in general. I'm sure attendance and press interest will increase next year… maybe not entirely because of Page One, but we definitely got the ball rolling. Have you heard of PyCon?

A Dancing Cow Increases Website Traffic by 43% in 3 Days posted by Craig Oda at Thursday, August 14, 2008

We took a recent Stanford University graduate, convinced her to wear a cow suit and increased web site traffic by 43% for a Silicon Valley startup in three days. Well, to be fair, we also had a fox, a demon, and penguin to help us.

At LinuxWorld in San Francisco last week, we walked around the show floor in costumes, recorded video, danced, sang, and convinced attendees to participate in choosing the Next Open Source idol. The results were hilarious and great for business. GroundWork Open Source saw a 43% increase in traffic to their corporate web site in three days. They also had 1,133 people go to the community portal on their main web site and interactively vote on their favorite idol. The videos generated 5,000 views from a targeted open source audience in one week.

The PR campaign also generated buzz in the IT media community, including this short blurb in NetworkWorld.

The project was viewed as a success, helping to increase the visibility of GroundWork Open Source in the technical community and driving relevant traffic to their web site. We also got to dress up in funny costumes in public a full two months ahead of Halloween.