Over the past three blogs, I have mused over the expanding role of the news release since the very first one was issued about a century ago by the Pennsylvania RR at the urging of one of the very first PR practitioners, Ivy Lee. While the news release continues to fulfill its original role as a factual, succinct summary of a newsworthy development, it has proved over the years to be a more powerful marketing tool than meets the eye.

Because the process of writing a news release is deadline driven, its sense of urgency naturally commands the attention of all key stakeholders (often the CEO) in the messages that the release is to impart. As I have noted in a previous blog, the process of drafting the release often unmasks a lack of consensus among the stakeholders about key messages — and in some instances, an embarrassing lack of strategic marketing and/or weak product/corporate positioning.  Thus we find the news release performing an unintended but very critical role of driving consensus around marketing issues and key messages. In the best of circumstances, this consensus is reached before the deadline, otherwise the news release is postponed until such consensus is reached.

In the Internet Age where virtually anyone can become their own publisher, the news release takes on heightened importance as a communications and marketing tool.  Not only can it be distributed worldwide instantaneously and picked up by major portals just as quickly (thanks to electronic distribution by providers such as Business Wire), but it also becomes a searchable document that will be accessible on the Internet virtually forever.  Therefore, news release craftsmanship today needs to carefully consider the key words that its target audience is likely to search as well as what is said today may read in the future, perhaps years from now.  Indeed, the news release serves as a factual milestone that could be drawn upon in the preparation of future articles many years hence.

The real beauty of of distributing news releases in the Internet Age is the third dimension afforded by using hyperlinks within the release.  In the old days of printing and snail mailing, best practices and media preference suggested the length of the release be no longer than 3 pages double space.  But not so on the Internet where releases need be no more than 1 page single spaced with embedded hyperlinks that will zoom you to a “landing page” or photos, charts, graphs and even a video to get more information about the newsworthy topic.

In closing this final chapter on news release evolution, I would be remiss if I did not cite how effective the news release can be in directly communicating with current and prospective customers.  By emailing customers advance copies of the news release about a week before its released to the media, you’re telling your customers that you want them to be the first to know.  This not only flatters customers in that you consider them important enough to tell them the news before its news, it also compels them to read the release immediately owing to its deadline nature.  I have effectively used advance copies of a product news release to invite customer prospects to an event at which the new product would be formally unveiled.

Thus Ivy Lee’s “press release” of yore, which I prefer to call a news release, has evolved into a more powerful communications and marketing tool than meets the eye. Those who do not treat it as such are sadly shortchanging themselves.

Nothing gets misused these days more than Moore’s Law.  I worked with Gordon Moore at Intel for a few years, and we used to chat about his “law.”  If you know Gordon, you know he graphs everything… ask him about anything, and Gordon will dig around in his desk and pull out a chart he’s been keeping on the subject, points hand-plotted and trend lines drawn in.  He told me how he had been worried about when Intel would have to build a new, more advanced wafer fab and had been plotting the increase in chip complexity year by year.  That plot led to the famous conclusion that the transistor count on chips doubled every two years (actually he modified this a couple of times over the many years he kept that chart).  The answer that Gordon had been searching for came out clearly — Intel should not simply double chip complexity with each generation, it should quadruple it because otherwise it would not be able to build new fabs fast enough.  (It turns out he kept a second chart on how long it took to build a new fab as well, and how that was changing over time).

The big difference between Intel and other companies in the chip business is that, if someone like Gordon charts trends like this, the company acts on it and builds it into its annual planning process.  So at Intel, people translated Gordon’s conclusion into the implications for photolithography, fab equipment, wafer sizes, new chip designs, and so on.  The entire Intel planning system was built on the idea that chip complexity would double every two years.  And the continual drive to meet that trend on Gordon’s chart carried over to other companies as well.  Moore’s Law became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  It’s the basic reason that memory chips go from 4 to 16 to 64 etc… instead of 4 to 8 to 16 to 32…

Since those early chats with Gordon, I’ve reflected on just why his chart was correct (besides the fact that since everyone assumed it was correct, they all drove to keep up).  My conclusion was that what he was getting at was actually the change in “feature size” in the basic chip geometries, and that it was the feature size that was being cut in half every two years and THAT fact was driving the quadrupling of complexity.  Because feature size reductions help you in two directions  — x and y — you’re seeing an “area” or two dimensional phenomena based on a one-dimensional change.  Cut the feature size in half and you can pack four times as many transistors into the same area.

Another technology that follows this geometric trend is hard-drive capacity.  If you cut the size of a magnetic bit on a drive in half, you can pack twice as many of those bits on the track that circles the disk.  But you can ALSO CUT THE WIDTH OF THE TRACK IN HALF, and therefore double the number of tracks.  Twice as many bits on a track and twice as many tracks quadruples the capacity.  Bingo… another technology following the geometric progression laid down in Moore’s Law.

Let’s think of some others.  Um, those are the only two I know of.  Yet in book after book, presentation after presentation, people call down Moore’s Law to show why their particular business is going to undergo staggering growth.  The one I find really funny is the software business.  Not too long ago, Bill Joy, who certainly should know better, expressed his concern in a widely quoted letter to Wired magazine, that as software capability increased according to Moore’s Law, computers would take over the earth and displace us.  Joy, one of the founders of Sun Computer, should know that software capability inches along at a snail’s pace and if anything, has failed miserably to keep up with even the most conservative predictions of new capabilities.

It turns out that Moore’s Law has become the universal arrow in the quiver of every visionary and futurist.  But the next time you run into it, and believe me, it won’t be long, ask yourself, “what is there about this technology that makes it the EXCEPTION that will actually follow Moore’s Law?”

The News Release has evolved into a powerful electronic publishing tool in the Internet Age, however, many companies fail to exploit it as such. Before going into detail, let’s add some historical perspective to see how the News Release ascended to this point about a century after Ivy Lee, one of the first PR practitioners, issued the very first “press release” about a tragic accident on the Pennsylvania RR.

Up until the Internet soared to worldwide popularity in the 1990s, there was a lot of competition among technology companies to get their news published in business and trade publications. Editorial space was limited because it had to be paid for by advertising.  Publishers of print media typically aimed for a 60:40 ratio of advertising to editorial…that is 60 pages of advertising to pay for 40 pages of editorial. As the number of high-tech companies mushroomed beginning in the early 1970s, so also did the number of trade magazines grow to serve an expanding world market.  During this halcyon period of print publishing, trade magazines would receive thousands of news releases from high-tech firms either directly or via PR practitioners, whose number also grew significantly during this period.

Even with more print trade/business magazines, the competition for editorial space was still intense.  Of the thousands of news releases a magazine received each month, only a small fraction found their way beyond the trash can and into the editorial pages. Not surprisingly, those companies that were regular advertisers found that their news releases picked up more often than those companies not advertising.

Fast forward to the present where we now see print media unable to maintain the 60:40 ratio, and challenged to find ways to monetize their content on the Internet.  Effectiveness of pop-up ads remains debatable, while paid subscriptions to newsletters and sponsored webcasts/white papers are among some of the ways being pursued. Google has emerged as the great white hope with powerful search and analytic tools that enable traditional print media publishers to demonstrate how well their content attracts targeted audiences. Nonetheless, publishers of business/trade magazines are still trying to build Internet revenue models that can provide the profits they were used to getting in the old 60:40 days of print.

As print media continue to scramble for ways to monetize their content on the Internet, more and more companies are realizing that they can be their own publishers by instantaneously distributing their own news releases worldwide by using the services of a Business Wire or PR Newswire. While PR practitioners still strive to capture editorial space for their clients in trade/business media — be it print or on the Internet –they no longer rely solely on doing so. In fact, distribution and exposure via Business Wire is considered adequate for many of the releases issued by a company. Moreover, the use of a Business Wire gives the release the imprimatur of officially being published.  This along with the simultaneous posting of the release on the issuers web site serves to attract the targeted audience on a 24/7 basis.  Not to be overlooked, once published on the worldwide web in this way, the release via its key words will be “searchable” virtually forever…which should make companies consider how well their key messages in the news release will play over time.

The real beauty of the electronically published news release is that it can be immediately accessed by Internet visitors worldwide on a 24/7 basis.  Those who search on key words in the release will most likely fit within the target audience profile.  Moreover, the news release can contain a hyperlink that will take the reader to a “landing page” that provides more in-depth information than the news release imparted. In moving the release over the wire, it can also be accompanied by photographs, charts, graphs and even videos

Without question, the news release today is relied upon to communicate (and control) virtually every aspect of news, both positive and negative, and to do so in a manner that builds both credibility and brand equity for the issuing entity. Over my 30-plus years of providing strategic communications counsel to high-tech clients, and writing more news releases than I can remember, I have come to regard the news release as an unsung hero in driving succinct, timely and disciplined communications both internally and externally. And unfortunately, I have often seen the news release development process expose a surprising lack of strategic and product marketing that should have taken place before the sourcing of the news release began.

Indeed, the news release has come a long way since Ivy Lee issued the very first “press release” in 1906 for his PR client, the Pennsylvania RR, which fell victim to a tragic railway accident at the time. Because news releases must be brief (ideally no longer than 3 pages, 11 point type, double spaced), they demand that the “who, what, why, when and where”of the news be factually and creatively woven into key messages that have been strategically fashioned to burnish the issuer’s corporate and/or product brand.

The brevity of a news release, even more critical in the Internet Age, forces the issuer to re-think carefully all key messages supporting corporate/product positioning vis-a-vis the changing competitive environment. More often than not, I have begun gathering inputs to write news releases to launch high-tech products only to find out that there was a lack of consensus among key execs about product positioning against competitive options.  As a result, the iterative revisions of a news release draft perform an unintended role of driving consensus.  This in turn surfaces the need to do additional market research, which can lead to  postponing the announcement until adequate strategic marketing has been performed to validate product positioning.

Thus the news release becomes the unsung hero in driving consensus among execs on important issues such as product positioning — and in the iterative editing process, it further drives the execution of strategic/product marketing that should have taken place before the sourcing for the news release began.

By some accounts, it was Ivy Lee (1877-1934) who was the first real public relations practitioner, and it was he who issued the very first “press release” in 1906, the same year of the great San Francisco earthquake. At that time, Lee was on the East Coast dealing with another disaster as the Pennsylvania Railroad, his PR client, had a serious railway accident. It was Lee who persuaded railroad execs to issue a statement to journalists to preempt any inaccurate speculation from spreading and to also control the news in a manner that would minimize damage to his client’s reputation.

In addition to issuing a press release, Lee wisely invited news reporters get a first-hand look at the accident scene, taking special measures to transport the journalists to the scene and nurture open communications with them.

Now a century later, the press release — or as I prefer to call it, the “news release” — continues to do the same yeoman job that Lee intended. However, this brief 2-to-3 page document has taken on a much broader and critical role over the years…and it is this evolution I plan to discuss beginning with this blog and others to follow.

We talk a lot about Big-M Marketing around here — in fact, we’ve written a book about it — and when we use that term we mean marketing in a very broad, inclusive way.  It’s true that in a lot of industries, marketing is used as a synonym for advertising, but in the high-tech world, the term usually means a product marketing centric activity.  Big-M marketing then includes product definitions, product planning, competitive analysis, pricing, sales training, forecasting, strategic planning, documentation, customer visits, and yes, promotions including advertising.

To put numbers on it, when I was VP Marketing at Zilog, then a $100M microprocessor company, there were 120 people in marketing… one of them spent half his time on advertising.  That means in this company, roughly half of one percent of the people worked on advertising.  All of the rest were involved doing the things just listed… ie, Big-M Marketing.  Getting a group like that together is a big deal.  For one thing, the various activities demand different kinds of people… different personality types — that make it really hard to execute with just two or three individuals.  With a larger group, it’s easier to split the functions into well defined activities with dedicated personnel.

But even without a large group, it’s vitally important that the company do all of those marketing functions.  In our vision of Big-M Marketing, we include six different functions:

• Product marketing
• Tactical marketing
• Technical marketing
• Strategic marketing
• Promotional marketing
• Order entry and customer service

Together those six make up what we refer to as the complete marketing function and somehow you have to all six to succede in the high-tech marketplace.  If you don’t, you’ll be knocked off by someone that is.  Many companies do those activities, but some of them are not in marketing.  That’s too bad because it means busy executives are doing this stuff part-time.  These are marketing functions and they really should be done within the marketing group by experienced people dedicated to those activities.

Obviously this is a posting that sets the stage for others yet to come.  In some cases those function names are descriptive enough to intuit what they mean.  Others are probably too cryptic, and in any event we have some tweaks to make those functions more effective.  We’ll cover them in detail in future posts along with an acre or so of ramblings about the subject — after all, this is the home of Big-M marketing.

Every company has a organizational hierarchy of sales people… in some, “Area Manager” is the top slot… in others, it’s “Regional Manager.”  Add in District Managers, Sales Associates, Sales Engineers, and on and on.  The problem comes when companies add the term “Sales Representative” to their list of company sales personnel.  And when we refer to them as company personnel, well that’s the point.  All of these people are on the payroll… they work for us… why they’re, um, employees.

So what’s wrong with calling some of them “sales reps?”  Because, by definition, a sales representative is NOT an employee.  More typically a firm, a sales representative firm is an independent company that does not take title or possession of the goods.  They represent you, for a commission, along with the other companies on their line card.  Have any sales employees selling other products besides yours?  Not that you know of, right?  Cause if they were, you’d be calling them for career adjustment meetings.  But that’s what reps do, and it’s a good thing that they do it because that’s the only way they can afford to call on customers to small to send in a direct sales person.

The key isn’t that they are carrying other product lines… it’s that they don’t carry competing product lines.  And because of that, they tend to be loyal parts of the channel.  I know rep firms that have kept some of their major lines for 15 years or more.  In Silicon Valley, at one time the average employee changed companies every 7 years.  Now tell me, who has the most loyalty?  So don’t call your direct sales employees “sales representatives”… it just confuses the heck out of people.

Everyone faces this issue from time to time.  You need a rep firm in, say Huntsville, to carry your products.  How to find one?  The time honored method is to ask the customers in that area.  After all, you must have some customers or you wouldn’t be worried about a rep, right?  So you ask the customers who their favorite reps are.  The quality of response you get to this question should only serve as a starting point, since their view of a rep firm can be dramatically influenced by whether or not they got invited to the annual rep BBQ, or whether he brings donuts to the early morning meetings.

Another way, in my view a better one, is to find a couple of complementary products, and then look to see who they have for reps.  By complementary products I mean those that are normally used side-by-side with yours.  The obvious example is a company selling bolts.  If you need a rep, look for the ones selling nuts.  Then contact the nut guys — believe me, they’ll be very interested in taking on a bolt line.

Finding complementary products is usually not this obvious, but it’s a good thing to do.  Once you have, make a list of ALL their reps across the country.  That gives you a candidate list when unexpected things happen and you need to replace someone quickly.  Not a bad idea to be in communication with them anyway… you can get a lot of local market intelligence from them.