With Christmas hoving into view, here are my 4 top tips for tech firms planning for PR success in 2017: 1. Put someone with PR savvy in charge PR is a very powerful tool. For an activity that can literally define how a company is seen by its prospective customers, investors, peers and skills pool, it never ceases to amaze me how often it is led by people with little or no PR experience, or to C-levels with a very limited interest/understanding of it. Think about it. Your entire company image in your industry media left to someone who doesn't grasp or understand PR, or to an office junior who ‘did a PR course’? Seriously? Only ever assign your PR to someone who fully understands it, who w
A week or so ago, I came across a big tech jobs announcement in the Irish business and technology media. When I read it, I had to do a double take because I was very surprised where the story came from…not from the companies creating the jobs themselves, but from the Irish government development agency supporting them. It was a nice announcement, and it got great coverage for the agency involved, but I must say I was taken aback that the tech companies involved were happy to hand over what are in effect good PR assets so that a third party could promote themselves to their audience. The thing about newsworthy company milestones is that they don’t come along that often. Deals, funding annou
“If a tree falls in a forest and no-one is there, does it make a sound?” In tech PR terms, the answer to George Berkeley’s famous philosophical question is very simple: no, it doesn’t. When browsing tech firms' websites - especially start ups - you often come across ‘news’ pages fully populated with stories, blogs or press releases that quite clearly have never gone anywhere, beyond being published on their own company website. The unfortunate fact is that writing press releases and other marcom documentation solely to publish on your own website is wasted effort. Unsurprisingly, journalists and editors do not spend their time trawling websites looking for interesting stories - and so pr
