It can’t be said too often that PR for high-tech needs to switch now to mainly an interactive process, rather than making announcements to the world. To do it successfully, you have to know who you need to interact with, what they are saying and what will interest them. Here are a few tips:
1. Decide your aim. What you need to find out depends on whether you are looking at reputation management (i.e. what people are saying about you), positioning yourself as an expert (who is talking about the stuff you do), or something more oblique, such as raising the profile of your market niche in general, where the crucial conversations might be about the market, or the advantages, disadvantages and future of your technology etc.
2. Decide your search terms. Brainstorm to get items you think will appear reasonably often – your name, that of competitors, some key technologies, something specific to your market… For example, if your company produces audio codecs, search terms could also include professional associations (AES, for example), platforms that might use them, the standards (AAC, MP3…) and so on. Don’t worry about having too many at first – you can narrow them down when you start filtering your results.
3. Set up your RSS feeds for your keyword searches on boards, blogs and social networks in particular. A few useful places:
Technorati,
Digg,
IceRocket,
Google blogsearch,
Bloglines,
MSN Spaces and
Boardreader.
4. Group and filter your searches using e.g.
Google alerts and
Filtrbox, and use these to refine your search. A good tool for a quick analysis of content is
TagCrowd.
5. See who is who. You can gauge the following and the influence of a blog using Bloginfluence and Socialmeter. To find out the background of a blogger,
BetterWhois is useful.
6. Follow your leads. If you find someone with an interesting or attractive point of view, follow them up to see if you want to make contact. This is not like stalking, because you’re looking at their public profile only. So it’s more like joining a group and then making contact with someone that interests you. To do this, follow bloggers at their social media profiles. Ask to be their friend, and follow their conversations. It could be the start of a beautiful relationship!
When we do this for clients, we take a lot of care over search terms, search tools and the filtering tools. Then we have to keep fine-tuning it till it’s working exactly right, and then automating it so it works with minimal effort. So we can’t give a comprehensive list, just a starter. Your best course of action is something that may apply only to you – but even a starter like this could get you well on the way. Of course, the next steps are to respond the right way, and to monitor the effect of your responses, but that’s for another day…
