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Terrorbyte
wanted to publish his
autobiography. He knew Megabyte
was the editor
of some publication
or other so he asked for his advice. | |
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| Storage PR
Agency of the Year 2007 |
Editor:- October 29, 2007 - STORAGEsearch.com
today named A3 Communications - Storage PR Agency of the Year 2007.
The
award recognizes the outstanding quality of client-editor interface by A3
Communications in the past year.
"I work with thousands of
content contributors" said STORAGEsearch.com's Editor Zsolt Kerekes. "Effective PR Agencies
are a helpful tool in getting the right content to my readers. Sometimes I'll
miss the significance of a news
story when I see it first time round on my screen. Follow up from
intelligent agencies which understand the market can sometimes make me
reevaluate my snap decisions. PRs who respond quickly to requests for follow
up info - help me, their clients and readers. Many other agencies do all those
things too - but this year the work of Federica Monsone
founder of A3 Communications
was outstanding."
In 2005 the award was given to
JPR Communications. In 2006 no award was
made, because although the overall quality of PRs in the industry had risen, the
"best" was too close to call between several agencies. | |
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| What Lies
Beneath the Storage News? |
Editor:- October 11, 2007 -
You'll often see storage news
on other sites which you don't see here on
STORAGEsearch.com. When the news
item sounds significant, you may be wondering why?
Is the editor
asleep? Or is there a more Machiavellian reason for the news drop out?
For
example is the editor suppressing news from some companies - because they
compete with an advertiser?
Not guilty! That kind of publication
wouldn't last more than a few months for 2 reasons.
1 - most new
advertisers become advertisers because they've already had a lot of inquiries
coming from editorial. The pressure from that direction would be to run and hype
all press releases (which is the opposite to excluding them).
2 - the
most important asset that a publisher has is readers. Advertisers may come
and go - but without
high quality readers who really care about the subject and work hard to find out
what they need, and are people who make a difference to the market by what they
do - a publication is just fodder for search-engine robots - and has no value
whatsoever.
Sadly a common reason for a news story not appearing is
that the core statements in the press release are simply not true.
Every
week I get press releases from vendors making bold claims such as:-
- first company to launch this type of product
- fastest product (in its class)
- lowest cost storage product (in its class)
- biggest customer installation for this technology
- highest market share in market segment
Unlike a robot, or software
news aggregator, I actually read all the press releases which come into this
publication.
I've probably read more than 100,000 press releases
related to the storage market in my 16 years as editor, and I've seen thousands
of web sites in this industry. But because I care a lot about the progress of
this industry and because readers are the most important resource for any
publisher, I always check the facts before running this type of news
story.
The simplest way is for me to search our
archived storage
news pages. But I can also search email going back 10 years and if that
doesn't give me a good confidence level - I'll search the web for previous
examples of similar claims.
When I don't run a story for this reason -
I always reply to the sender of the press release saying why. That often starts
a dialog which pins down the root cause as being the writer didn't know
about the earlier published example.
Back in 2000 I wrote an article
to help news contributors understand how to interface better with editors. I
called it
Why I won't publish your
press release? - Press Release Errors I see every day. Then 5 years later -
I added some more notes to that.
One thing I never thought I'd have to
say explicitly in that PR guide is that I will never run a news tory which I
know in advance is untrue.
Human nature being what it is - most of us
aren't so interested in news stories about the 2nd or 3rd fastest/newest
products - even though that's what usually sells in the most volume. I guess
the reason may be because we like to know where the boundaries are. If something
shifts the boundaries - such as a 10 terabyte 3.5" hard drive - then we're
more interested to read about it than the 3rd or 4th terabyte drive.
When
the incorrect claim stories come in - I always try to find if there is anything
else interesting in the story that I can run with - while leaving the suspect
claim itself out.
As a general rule I remove adjectives like "fast"
or "leading" (company) unless they are supported by figures or hard
market data in the text. So if you see those words in this publication - their
value has not been diluted.
A more common reason for not running a
news story is that "it's not newsworthy" or it has already been
mentioned here before - and not much has changed since. Or it's the latest in a
long line of me-too announcements.
Another reason for not running a
news story is that the idea behind it is just complete nonsense. In this
category are many product comparisons, benchmarks and badly designed surveys
which are as useful as measuring the speed of a Porsche 911 driving across a
freshly plowed field.
I get a lot of queries from PR writers about why
I didn't run something. If I really did miss it - and if it's significant
enough - I'll go back and look again.
What's important is that you
should be able to rely on the information you see in these pages. And that when
you see a claim about some
record breaking
product - someone has actually done some simple checks before making the words
appear on your screen | |
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