Tue, 2015-10-06 10:20
Sam Whitmore
CEO Profiles, Parts 1 & 2
We've been studying CEO profiles lately -- because subscribers have been asking us to. Here's what we found. CEO profiles focus either on CEOs getting to the top, or the techniques they use to stay there. The getting-to-the-top pieces are almost always "Can They Do It" stories, portraying a CEO's quest to establish a new marketplace or vanquish entrenched competitors.
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"I'm not really a grumpy journalist," says Forbes contributor Adrian Bridgwater. "I just play one on Twitter." The ambiguity suits Adrian well. Though he's most associated with Forbes, where he writes ten to 12 posts a month on enterprise appdev and data management, Adrian writes almost as often (about open source) for Computer Weekly, a TechTarget site.
Getting to know Fusion senior editor Kashmir Hill is easy -- at least a younger version of her. Spend some time on her now-defunct personal blog. You'll learn that her goal as a journalist is to give people information they can rely on. She dislikes April Fool's Day and feels like it's smart to spend at least one week a year completely off the Internet.
San Francisco will uncoil when Dreamforce ends today. Las Vegas can handle 160,000 people. South of Market can't. Salesforce did what it could, renting a cruise ship to house attendees. For our part we learned a lot by studying Dreamforce coverage -- including the nine-step process by which CEO Marc Benioff prepared his keynote speech. Every client should consider using this process as well.
Recently we noticed that Ben Kepes moved his contributions from Forbes to IDG. When we emailed a Forbes friend to confirm this, he reminded us of all the enterprise tech contributors who remained. This week we explore the work of those contributors, many of whom carry big clout in the enterprise space. To PR's delight, some even profile vendor CEOs.
Two weeks ago we wrote that narratives were growing scarcer. Today, with the help of Forbes staff writer Alex Konrad, we explore a running narrative that spanned not one, not two, but three separate articles during 2015. Our conversation with Alex (which we recorded for you) reminded us that a relationship between a reporter and subject can span several months and produce multiple articles -- if the chemistry is right.
Re/code may now belong to Vox, but that hasn't stopped PR from coveting placements in Re/code's Voices section. One important piece of good news for PR: Re/code still accepts one-offs. Inc., IDG, Forbes Entrepreneur and other sites prefer contributors who can deliver multiple posts on a given topic. Still others, such as The Economist's Lean Back blog, prefer contributors whose posts consistently deliver strong traffic and shares.
There's a cool new way to measure the influence of top tech reporters and the sites they work for. Techmeme last month augmented its Leaderboard to reflect how frequently a reporter's work is linked to by other sites and cited in social media posts. Who's atop today's list? Mark Gurman. Know him? (He's got zero followers on LinkedIn so no one on there knows him.)
Clouds, smartphones and wearables have transformed the world of financial services. Banks and brokerages battle crowdfunded lenders and robo advisors, using M&A, partnerships, FUD and every other weapon available. “Financial services companies are at the center of the tension between productivity and innovation and security and compliance,” Box CEO Aaron Levie 
(Editor's note: Moments after we posted this profile, 
