Our subscribers long have sought Tier 1 coverage, but these days there’s an urgency like never before. As part of this week’s SWMS Tier 1 deep-dive, we explore some fascinating numbers from SimilarWeb. Read on for eye-openers that will change the way you think about the edit landscape.
Most journalists like to say that they don’t need help from a PR professional, but in my career I’ve found their assistance valuable in specific situations beyond general news requests. If you’re looking to be proactive and find areas where you can assist a journalist, these areas can be the start of establishing a relationship for future pitches and client outreach.
BuzzFeed senior technology reporter Alex Kantrowitz says he’s proud of his first book, Always Day One, published last month in hardcover and online. Always Day One explores management attitudes and techniques that keep Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft on top (Apple not so much, due to its secrecy, Alex says).
From a PR point of view, all Tier 1 TV interviews should go as well as the May 4 CNBC Jim Cramer interview of Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. Jim asked only four questions during the five-minute interview, three of which were veiled invitations for Marc to say whatever he had to say — which he did.
Attention media trainers: you’ll never see an executive “master the message” like Salesforce founder Marc Benioff did last week, live on the air, with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang and CNBC’s Jim Cramer. Marc was promoting the launch of Work.com, software designed to help employers manage health and logistics details as employees slowly come back to work.
Nothing brings PR anxiety like crickets, especially when you pitch contributed content and include the submission. Was the pitch bad? Was the piece bad, or both? Or neither! Or maybe “they just didn’t see it, so I’ll ‘float it to the top of their in-box’ in a day or two.”
Among the Red Hat Virtual Summit attendees this week was veteran open source freelancer Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. Here are his thoughts.
Attending Red Hat Virtual Summit 2020 was fascinating and, at times, fun. But we could see how demanding journalists could have been frustrated. Here are two journalists’ views of the experience.
Red Hat Nation should have converged on San Francisco this week for the annual Red Hat Summit. Instead, it peered into its screens from all over the world, connecting to the first Red Hat Virtual Summit. Was the Summit worth it to Red Hat?
Conference coffee is awful, but you choke it down because there is no alternative. Likewise, a virtual conference is no substitute for the real thing. But it’s all there is, so you make it work. Virtual conferences are popping up all over in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. PR people love them as a way of keeping clients connected with journalists.
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Registration is now open for the ‘Bloomberg Tech’ F2F event, being held Jun. 4-5 in San Francisco. With the current early-bird discount, a ticket runs $1,500. There is no better way to build relationships with Bloomberg’s notoriously elusive tech reporters.
Well, for now it’s Jim Jordan… but such news illustrates the kind of world we seem to be headed for. Adweek has the details, subscription required.
No “predictions” post will appear on this site. That said, quite a number of subscribers have asked for a Zoom/MS Teams presentation on what 2025 will bring. A conversation is precisely the right tool for the job. After the election — and with AI transforming publishing and life — “2025” is best discussed among peers, not predicted. So if you’d like to have a confidential group exchange on what stands to unfold, and why, and how comms pros can come out on top in spite of it all, drop a line and we shall schedule something.
According to Adweek, Omnicom CEO John Wren and IPG CEO Philippe Krakowsky were in merger talks for eleven and a half months before the transaction was announced this week. Amazing that it didn’t leak.
Should PR pros stop visiting X, with all its lies and hate? It’s only going to get worse. Or are tidbits from targets too important to walk away from? Click here to watch tech edit vet David Strom and I disagree (at high speed) about this, as one compelling visual after another pops up on your screen. In 2025, SWMS will officially launch “SWMS Sound Thinking,” designed to be “argumentative insight in six minutes or less.” Each segment will explore a timely and controversial topic of interest to tech comms pros. This prototype runs 5:25. Hope you enjoy it — feedback vital and welcome! –Sam
New EIC Jamie Heller has asked her reporters to start going on camera — for the BI TikTok channel — to explain the big, deep-divey story they just published. Other publications do this — especially archival Fortune. BI is now on that too. Game on.
