Taking charge of better media

I had reason to think about media relations more than once this week, and how companies either botch this opportunity to maximise their positioning and exposure, or make the most out of it.

Managing perception

If your company is perceived to be arrogant, it will sooner or later be called arrogant, and people have voted with their feet before.

First, I met with the media representative of a major bank, to "put a face to the name". She "managed my expectations" right away, warning me that there was probably no news, which is always advisable if, in fact, there isn`t any. Most journalists worth knowing will invest time in their subject and sources, even if the returns aren`t immediate.

Media spokespersons being inward-looking sorts, she showed an interest in my experience with other PRs and 'marcoms` departments, and generally in how media-friendly I thought most SA IT companies were.

I was surprised to tap into a profound pessimism I never suspected I had. The local multi-nationals are generally good, I said. Not all of them, but at least they know the first thing about their media dealings, which is to communicate.

But large home-grown companies can be unpleasantly reticent, especially in the networking communications sphere. This is not true of their every move, but the feeling in journalistic circles is that it`s often not worth the call.

Among those who get it right, Microsoft got special mention. Its agency is on-site, informed and responsive. But more to the point, Microsoft understands it is a marketing organisation. Its customers and partners are informed - its software is written with usability in mind, it has countless partner events and customer training sessions, and it knows its spokespersons must be on hand to answer queries and criticism. It chose a consultancy with a good track record, and it shows.

Since the media serves its target audiences, Microsoft knows it must be responsive to media inquiries, however insane the deadlines, as a small sub-set of its marketing efforts or other areas of involvement.

A little less inspiring is the habit of an anti-virus multinational, which, I can tell you with almost absolute certainty, will tell me 75% of my queries are corporate matters and cannot be answered by the branch office. At least they often track down an official statement within minutes, and I suppose one can sympathise with this approach, but not completely.

There are several things wrong with that - it could mean intra-company communications haven`t filtered through - and this has proved to be the case before - or head office thinks local coverage is inadequate and ill-informed, and has shut down certain areas of local media-liaison. That would be sad, but could be the result of many things, including a failure to inform the media, and it will lead to a vicious self-fulfilling prophecy of bad and inadequate press forever more, if not rectified in the most obvious ways.

Not all of them even do so much as respond, though. A well-known cellular handset and mobile infrastructure manufacturer has the attitude of never commenting at all.

"We do not comment on such matters," is the usual response. "Such matters" have ranged from faulty screens to a host of other complaints, which Microsoft, for one, would have been keen to address.

Far be it from me to suggest that journalists develop a vengeful attitude about such companies, but we all know PR is about perception. If your company is perceived to be arrogant, it will sooner or later be called arrogant, and people have voted with their feet before.

My point is that companies can take charge of their PR, whether in-house or agency/consultancy-based. View it as part of a concerted effort to communicate effectively on the whole, which is, in turn, one leg of the marketing drive, or sometimes, related to other lines of business, such as HR. Any company that doesn`t view its communications imperatives as part of serious business will be misunderstood and, sooner or later, find its position unmanageable.

Perhaps the most interesting release I ever got was the one sent to ITWeb by Veritas, the storage management company, a week ago. In short, it had commissioned independent research into e-mail usage patterns, and reactions of different users to downtime. One of the findings was that IT managers preferred getting into a minor car accident, hearing about retrenchments or moving house to being in the middle of a week of downtime.

It was perfect. Having read it and laughed out loud several times, I e-mailed the sender and thanked her for what was truly the best bit of PR I`d seen in a long time. Another PR mailed me in response to the story and said, simply: "Too bloody right!" SAFM wanted to interview someone on the findings right away, and the story was among the most well read of the week.

Why was it so good? Well, it was funny, to begin with. It gave the user, often out of the IT loop, some sense of his own importance and power. It put paid to the idea of the almighty IT manager. It was unusual in many respects, not least because it didn`t even think to mention product. It was creative and original, and humming away beneath that exterior of "fun" announcement, it answered practically any question you could have on the topic.

Congratulations to Veritas, which understands the need to be seen as a thought leader, not a product evangelist. Chances are I`ll phone you when I have a question on storage.