The Next JBoss posted by Chantal Yang at Monday, March 30, 2009

One of the most common goals we hear from prospects is, "We want to be the next JBoss." The inevitable follow up question is, "How did you do it?"

I like to say "with a lot of blood, toils, tears and sweat," but that would border on sentimentality. The truth is, JBoss in 2003 had a lot going for it already: good, free technology (or, in more famous words, "It's free and it doesn't suck"); a growing community; and a firebrand of a chief executive in Marc Fleury.

What PR provided was discipline, consistency, and a soapbox. The rest was history.

You could argue that open source developers were the original online social networkers. With that in mind, there were three things that JBoss did right that went against conventional PR wisdom at the time, but are more applicable than ever today, especially given the rise of social media usage.

First, JBoss always put the community first. Under the open source mantra of "release early, release often," JBoss developers didn't wait for sign off from PR to release code, announce it on community mailing lists, and blog about it. This was initially a major headache for PR, as I often took calls from reporters asking me why I hadn't told them about such and such a release. And, as JBoss expanded the number of projects over which it had direct stewardship, this disconnect only exacerbated.

The PR team initially tried to control this, but communities don't work this way. Traditional PR often focuses on controlling the flow of information when it should focus on the content itself, regardless of whether it is delivered through press releases, interviews, blog posts, podcasts, or presentations. Once we accepted that, we used the the blogs (remember, this was 2003!) as another way to get information out that supported messages of innovation, community, and participation.

Second, JBoss did not fear controversy. We never attempted to "censor" Fleury; his strong opinions, enthusiasm, and colorful choice of words gave him an authentic voice that no amount of PR prepping/media training could ever create. But those strong opinions--not just from him but from other JBossians--sometimes rubbed others the wrong way, inviting controversy after controversy. While each episode was challenging to go through, JBoss always came out of it smarter than before.

It's always a good idea to take the high road, but there are times when it really pays to be scrappy. If you're the David in a hot market with lots of Goliath players, you can't always turn the other cheek. Those willing to put up a good fight have a fighting chance.

Lastly, JBoss was incredibly metrics-driven. The company bootstrapped itself for almost four years before taking on venture financing. PR, as Fleury liked to tell it, was JBoss' biggest investment. To track this investment, we established detailed reporting that looked at every article, every positive and negative word, and every key message we wanted to get across. This was done on a quarterly basis, and when things didn't track, we adjusted the program.

Fast forward that five years to 2009 and you will see that metrics is more important than ever. We're in the midst of a recession, so measuring spending vs. results is essential. Though PR is still more art than science, there are sophisticated tools now to make reporting that much easier and that much more valuable to the company.

If you're doing PR today, you know it's a changing business. JBoss' success was a product of its time, though it offers some lessons that stand true today. You have many more tools with which to build community around your offerings and measure adoption and visibility. You may not be the next JBoss; but you could very well create your own category and become the benchmark for startups to come.

SEO and PR – A Happy Marriage or the Odd Couple? posted by Jenna at Friday, February 20, 2009

I recently attended a free webinar, "SEO + Public Relations = Your Secret Marketing Weapon in 2009," put on by the team at Webmarketing123.com. They made the case that SEO and PR should by joined at the hip.

I have to say, I'm still not convinced (this is my view and not necessarily shared by my colleagues at Page One PR).

While Paul Taylor, the presenter, did a great job of walking us through the benefits of SEO-izing your PR and marketing collateral and results, I've had experiences where that just doesn't work.

Example 1: Optimizing a press release for SEO and PR

You can do this two ways and I've tried both:

1) Write a release, then look at a list of key words to insert.

2) Look at the key words, then write a press release with them in mind (try to use each 1-4 times and space them out).

The second worked better for me, but if you're supposed to insert your URL and keywords ~3 times each for near optimal SEO, it gets rough and the news starts to sound like giberrish. If the release then needs to go through legal approval and potentially partner or customer approval, you're in trouble.

That's only one example, but I do think there's more beyond just blending SEO with PR and, voilà, you're on page one of wherever you want to be. The challenge often seems to be a classic case of having too many cooks in the kitchen. You've got the outside agency teams, such as the PR firm, the SEO firm, potentially the SEM consultant, and then all of the internal constituents, such as the corporate marketing/advertising team, sales, product marketing, etc. Each can have different business goals and be focused on maximizing content value for that agenda. Sheesh.

BusinessWeek ran an insightful article by B.L. Ochman recently, "Debunking Six Social Media Myths." Though I appreciated every myth debunked, I really feel the writer's pain with Myth #4: You can do it all in-house. It's true – you can't!

With regards to effective and viral social media campaigns, Ochman writes:

"It is rare indeed to find an in-house team that can not only conceive and execute a social media campaign but also drive traffic to it with effective e-mail segmentation, search optimization, blogger outreach, blog advertising, Google ads, and more." Agreed.

I do believe things like SEO and PR should work together – of course it's good to have a well-oiled machine running on all cylinders – but I don't think it's as easy as simply "working together." Further, given that both PR and SEO are often outsourced strategic services, is it reasonable to expect both sides to come together without the forcing factor of the client company embarking on a holistic marcomm campaign which takes months of pre-planning and coordination? That's hard to come by when you're working with startups, particularly high tech startups.

I remain optimistic, however, that there are definitely lessons both PR and SEO can learn from each other. Throw social media in there, and you've got a party!

I'd appreciate any wisdom out there about the evolution of these siloed services and think I will continue to attend free webinars on the topic to keep me engaged in thinking about the right combo of SEO + PR.

Why Public Relations in Europe is Different posted by Martha de Monclin at Monday, January 12, 2009

Late last year the Open Source Think Tank was held in Paris, France. One of the themes was the difference between selling open source software in Europe vs the US. As Matt Aslett points out in a post around this, Europe is in no way a single market. The same can be said for PR. Each country has its own culture, its own publications and in many cases its own languages. For a PR campaign to be effective in Europe, each country should be treated individually. This means press releases should be translated into the local language. With editorial teams having less and less time to write articles and needing to cover a wide range of topics, providing local language material makes it easier for them to do their job. News will very rarely get picked up otherwise, unless of course Microsoft is announcing that Windows is going open source! It is better to get a good translator to provide the local version, rather than one of the newswires, as the latter do tend to be too literal. Talking of wire services, another misconception is that wire services work in Europe. Unfortunately this is not the case. It is the personal 1-to-1 contact that works the best.

What is classed as news? Unfortunately French journalists will not be interested in a new US customer, or for that matter a UK customer. They want well-known French companies using your technology. Similarly the Germans won’t be interested in a new office in the UK. Each geography is interested in local news or news that is pertinent to their geography.
It is preferable to have a local spokesperson for the company. Otherwise journalists will cover what is in the release without seeking further information or will go to a local partner for the story, and that local partner is not necessarily going to express the messages you want to convey.

Cultural differences are many. One that springs to mind is vacation. In the US, you rarely take more than a week off at a time and only have 10-15 days per year. It is often met with disbelief, but there is very little point announcing important news in France, or indeed many of the Southern European countries in July and August. The French tend to take the majority of their annual vacation between 14th July (Bastille Day) and 15th August. It is certainly not unheard of for them to take 3 weeks off during this time. While you may get clips (you will be one of the few companies to send in a press release during this time), who will be around to read them? One of the other French specificities is that if a holiday falls on a Tuesday or a Thursday, they will also take the ‘pont’ the bridge between the holiday and the weekend. In May, the 1st, the 8th and the 31st are holidays, making May another tough month to get useful coverage in. While the French do take alot of vacation during these times, the month of September, ‘la rentree’, is an extremely busy period with many announcements.

This post only scratches the surface of the minefield that is PR in Europe. If there is one key message to retain, it is that you cannot treat Europe as a single market and a local agency/PR resource is necessary to understand the specificities of each individual country.

Public Relations Optimized for SEO posted by Nadja Blagojevic at Wednesday, October 15, 2008

As a PR firm, we are always looking for ways to promote our clients, either through traditional PR activities like press releases or new social media campaigns. A few months ago I began investigating ways to give our clients more bang for their buck by checking out search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to see if our PR activities could help us boost SEO results.


SEO is basically a way to increase your rank on a search engine results page for a certain key word term. If you want your website to be at the top of Google's list, there are a number of techniques to help you get there, like coding the term into your website, including the term on the content of your page, and having other websites link to your site (ideally using that term).


If a PR firm is supposed to be getting a client's news out all over the Internet, getting links to a client's website all over the Internet doesn't seem like a big step. However, it's surprising how few people in PR know how to improve their clients' search engine status (folks in marketing generally seem to be ahead of the curve). Public relations firms are just now starting to "get it." The upcoming Public Relations Society of America conference includes a few sessions on SEO tactics, but they are mostly aimed at beginners.

Over the past six months, we have seen a real desire from our clients to partner more on increasing their web traffic, search standings, and lead generation. With access to Google Analytics information to gain a deeper understanding of how press coverage drives traffic to their sites, we can talk with clients about the keywords and search terms that they want associated with their website.

For me, the most exciting part of integrating SEO and PR practices is the impact that clients can see as their inbound links and web traffic rise. It is cool to know that a link-rich story that ran a month ago is still sending readers to the client's site, or that a certain publication was one of the top sites sending the client traffic.

For example, the links in a June interview in Dr. Dobb's Journal with Jason van Zyl, founder and CTO of Sonatype and creator of Maven, sent readers to the Sonatype website as recently as last week. Folks who came to the site from that story tended to stay longer, and the percentage of those who were visiting the site for the first time was higher than average. In contrast, links on the popular developer website DZone tended to send people over to the Sonatype site more regularly, but most were people who had already been there. Sure this is interesting, but why is it useful?

From a PR perspective, you get a whole new understanding of the publications. Even though they have a very technical audience, Dr. Dobb's Journal is a better place for high-level stories that preach the gospel of Sonatype's Java development infrastructure. Even though they have a large readership, DZone is a better placement for stories that appeal to those familiar with Sonatype and Maven. Looking at search engine and web traffic flow can help PR firms better target story placements to advance the business interests of the client.

The big question is: why don't we see more integration of SEO and PR?

What do you think?

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?