Getting a Little Face Time

Life in high-tech PR is filled with travel. There is no getting around it. From tradeshows to client meetings to road shows to hosting press junkets, travel is just a part of the business.  While travel delays are certainly frustrating (let’s just say I had a really bad streak of luck in 2014) and flying cross country and around the world can be exhausting, there are some key benefits from travel that are invaluable.

Time with clients face-to-face is so important. As great as the promise of video conferencing is, it really is not the same as an in-person meeting, especially when you are mapping out new messaging or strategies. The back and forth banter as you work through a topic really does lead to the best results. Tradeshows also provide an opportunity to relax and get to know the people you work with on a daily basis. Many an inside joke has been created in settings such as this – how else would you learn who are the closet Beyoncé or diehard Cubs fans?

The same idea applies to building relationships with the press and analysts. This audience is so important to the work we do on a daily basis and personal relationships can really make a difference. However, these days, press and analysts are dispersed all over the country. A publication can be based in New York, but it’s highly likely the editorial team is spread from sea to shining sea. So what is a PR pro to do?

At Connect2 we do as much as we can to maximize our travel to get that all-important face time with our press and analyst colleagues. As much as budgets allow, we encourage our clients to host a press and/or analyst day at their corporate headquarters. When done right, these events give the press and analysts valuable insight into the company, their customers, executives and product managers they don’t normally have access to. The time they spend on campus can really deepen their understanding of who the company is and what they are trying to accomplish.

There are also great opportunities to have individual conversations with the press and analysts that have nothing to do with the client. I have learned about the ups and downs of the college applications process from an analyst whose kids are older than mine. I’ve also had the chance to hear about a potential career move before it actually happened. All of this makes the connections stronger and increases the chance that my email will get answered over some unknown person.

We also try to have fun with our press and analyst friends. In the past we’ve hosted “No Pitch Nights” at major industry tradeshows. We pick the last night of the show and invite all of the press and analysts that are attending to a baseball game without any clients present. After all the craziness of the week, everyone appreciates the opportunity to sit back and relax and NOT hear about the latest and great product announcement. We’ve even kept it simple and taken a handful of journalists out for tapas and cocktails at smaller tradeshows for the exact same results. We get the chance to learn more about the people we talk to everyday and they get a chance to just have fun.

The opportunities I’ve had to get to know people in person all over the world make the long days and even longer airplane rides totally worthwhile. 

SUPERCOMM or SUPERGONE

When I first sat down to write a blog about SUPERCOMM 2009, I started writing about all the things that went wrong this year that made the show…lackluster. To be fair, we had several clients tell us that while they had fewer meetings than they would have liked the quality of the meetings they had were good. The press and analyst community seemed pretty bored though with the meetings they had and the general quality of the news released at the show.

Part of this is a result of firms like ours that cautioned our clients about SUPERCOMM 2009’s viability as an industry news cycle and our counsel to make announcements prior to the show instead of at the show itself. After viewing several versions of the press list, and talking with editors and analysts about their attendance, we were concerned who from the press community was going to actually show up.

But instead of focusing on the past and bemoan what could have been, I wanted to provide my top ten ideas that can make SUPERCOMM relevant again.

Top Ten Ideas to Make SUPERCOMM 2010 Relevant Again!

1. Focus on a segment of the market and do it better than anyone else. Wireless, mobile and Ethernet are well covered with other events and the time when SUPERCOMM could be the “one” show are over. Applications and services are options for focus that will keep the content fresh as the market evolves. The equipment vendors need to rethink how they approach the show to align what their technology does with what the service providers want to offer.

2. Release the Service Provider Hounds! The US Telecom Association needs to do a better job promoting the show, and the benefits of attending, to its entire member base instead of focusing on AT&T and Verizon. As Carol Wilson of Light Reading points out in her blog "How to Save SUPERCOMM" neither AT&T nor Verizon need SUPERCOMM but other service providers certainly the equipment vendors would benefit from a more dense service provider presence.

3. Less focus on pleasing the gorillas. More focus on innovation and standards would help level the playing field with SUPERCOMM instead of focusing on the standard topics that appeal to the industry’s big vendors. In the past, SUPERCOMM did a fantastic job getting industry groups to run live interop and service demos. These programs allow smaller vendors to expand their presence and enables service providers to see combinations they might not have otherwise.

4. Start marketing now, I mean yesterday. I know there were some changes with show management but I didn’t receive any pre-show conference information until four weeks before the show and I’ve gone for the last nine years. The conference programming under Jason Meyers was strong and could have been used more effectively.

5. Show the love to those that came. SUPERCOMM could, and should, offer incentives to companies that helped make this year happen. Moving the show from June to October on short notice, changing the date structure to end on a Friday, was not popular. Folks that stuck by SUPERCOMM should get something, for you know, the effort.

6. Challenge Keynotes/Vendors to be Provocative. SUPERCOMM used to be a show where big news happened, the kind of stuff that got everyone buzzing. That was missing this year. SUPERCOMM should start working with key players to help them understand what it will do to ensure it a powerful industry news cycle next year.

7. Be honest. The SUPERCOMM 2009 website states “SUPERCOMM 2009 was a hit!” Sure, a base hit, but people want the show to be a home run. Trying to make this year out to be anything other than a small success is disingenuous and will do little to help people understand that SUPERCOMM understands the work ahead and what it needs to do to rebuild the brand.

8. Get the Press Back. Nothing creates buzz about an event than stories run on trusted industry news sites that starts with “Today at SUPERCOMM…..” SUPERCOMM needs to get the press and analyst community back to the show. While all the major publication had people there, no one had folks there in force.

9. Go Social. SUPERCOMM should set up its own new aggregation site and tap into the various social networks to drive awareness and promote the show, its participants and the conference programming. Many of the companies that exhibited and/or spoke have a presence on one or more social networks. To be fair, SUPERCOMM was on Twitter and Facebook but with only 125 Facebook fans, they are clearly not connecting.

10. Get regular input. SUPERCOMM needs to conduct a brand audit to understand what its brand identity is today and then develop an integrated marketing and messaging program that helps them become what they want to be. Without a concerted effort, based a realistic understanding of where they stand today in the minds of the industry’s decision makers with two key groups – the marketing folks that commit the spend and the operations and engineering folks that are looking to buy – SUPERCOMM is in danger of becoming SUPERGONE.