On Friday, some folks from the Voce Nation attended PRSA’s "blockbuster luncheon event" at the Santa Clara Marriott. The PRSA did a great job bringing in media heavyweights Don Clark, John Markoff, and Susan Goldberg (Fred Vogelstein cancelled at the last minute due to a "dental emergency", huh?) to talk to a room full of flacks. Louise Kehoe, formerly of FT, moderated the event.

The mighty triumvirate shared reporting war stories and some of their favorite interviews from years past. One nit I had with the event was the Q&A from the floor. I’ve been to a few of these events now and it seems like we’re asking the same questions every time. Let’s think of something new people. We’re all smart and we read these papers daily, right? Why are we asking Don Clark what he’s interested in reporting? - end rant -

Anyway, here are a few snippets I found interesting:

When Don and John aren’t reading eachother’s periodicals, they’re perusing pubs from across the pond like The Register and The Inquirer.net.

Markoff reads Valleywag.

A couple big news items have dropped on Don Clark’s birthday. Can you name the date? Hint: Oracle’s hostile takeover of PeopleSoft began on Don’s special day a couple years back. Don, I hope you’re ready for the swarm of "happy birthday - hey are you interested in hearing about…" pitch emails you’re going to get this year as a result of Friday’s luncheon.

"Digg has replaced Slashdot" - John Markoff. He’s not alone.

"We’re not being encouraged to blog" - Don Clark.

Maybe next year, Don?

–Michael Moeschler

The net productivity of Voce client Yahoo! dropped to zero for a few hours this afternoon as employees stormed the campus cafeteria to hear Tom Cruise speak. Some really bad phone video clips follow, enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Yahoo

Typically, it’s the reporter asking the questions and the PR folks fielding them, but recently, Henry Baltazar, Senior Analyst at eWeek Labs (and one of the most respected product reviewers in the industry), sat down with the Voce Nation over lunch to give us the scoop on what makes for a great product review. Henry graciously let Voce pick his brain on topics from what really makes a product review pitch stand out to what the ideal Reviewer’s Guide looks like. Thanks Henry! — Kari Curto

Technorati Tags: eWeek, Reviews, Baltazar

What is the role of PR in driving integrated marketing and business-to-business company campaigns? We asked Voce client, Katryn McGaughey, Product PR Manager at Network Appliance, to share her thoughts:

Q: How critical is the role of PR for a massive newswave launch at a company like NetApp?



A: Internally PR is both a sounding board and a trusted advisor for helping the company cinch the various threads of new information to be communicated. I guess you can say we’re the friendly enforcers of connecting the dots (past, present, and potentially future) to make sure that the launch isn’t a point in time announcement.

We’re also often times the lucky ducks that force the company to ask itself the hard–usually ugly—questions. How is this truly different or unique (set the jug of kool aide aside), how do we really measure up against competition (everyone’s not doing it), pointing out that big impact claims require big impact proof whether that’s customer experiences, formal certifications, testing results, etc.

In short, PR’s role in massive launches at a $1.6 billion company is to:

• step back to act as outside counsel
• stomp through jargon to create a frank message that logically falls in place into the next chapter of an ongoing story
• point media, IT/financial analysts, customers, partners, you name it, to compelling and useful evidence or resources.

Q: Looking back at your recent product launch, do you deem it a success? What in particular was unique or extra positive this time around?



A: Recently NetApp announced the industry’s most comprehensive disk-to-disk portfolio with new products and services. I think what was unique for the company was that this wasn’t just a product launch, NetApp leveraged an integrated worldwide marketing team to produce a massive online customer/partner event. We also incorporated some non-traditional PR elements to the launch—incorporating a blog entry post-launch, an international reverse press tour to HQ for an intimate media ‘workshop’ on the news with key execs and partners, and onsite access for a sneak peak review.

The PR element successfully helped build excitement and air cover worldwide about what NetApp was planning. The content we created is useful for customers, partners, and the industry at large. That’s the most positive outcome this time around—we, in lock step with integrated marketing, created useful tools for sales that customers find useful.

Q: What is the one key take-away you want your audience to get from a major company launch? How effective were you in achieving that metric?

A: The umbrella message (above all the others) that NetApp wanted to communicate to the world was that the company is now a heterogeneous disk-to-disk backup player. We’re well recognized for pioneering fantastic innovations to backup, recover and protect our own storage systems (accounting for ~9% of the open systems network market according to IDC). This launch was the company’s entrée into the remaining 91% of the market, which includes everyone else’s storage environments (EMC, HP, HDS, IBM, and Sun). The bigger message of course being that NetApp provides customers unmatched simplicity no matter what storage challenge they’re trying to solve. The messages of heterogeneity and bringing unmatched simplicity rang clear in all our launch coverage. We clearly achieved connecting the dots of our data protection solution.

Q: How are you able to measure success from your launch?



A: The larger question is ‘how did the world react to our news’. Measurements then trickle from that question. NetApp PR drills down to analyzing what media influencers we reached (channel, IT, business, vertical, etc.), which media found the news compelling enough to cover, how well–qualitatively–did the story resonate in coverage, and of those that covered the news how did they use the resources provided to them (spokespeople/photos/partners/analysts/customers–or lack thereof).

Thorough (manual) metrics analysis of ears reached (worldwide), ink results (worldwide), and the richness of that ink (meaning article length, inclusion of key messages, whether positive/neutral/negative) is how NetApp measures and reports and measures our success.

Katryn McGaughey

Product PR Manager, NetApp

It’s always funny when two worlds collide. And by two worlds I mean my favorite television show and public relations. This week’s Boston Legal (my favorite show) saw the uber-hilarious Denny Crane hire a PR agency (my other world) to win a trial.

Denny Crane, played to perfection by William Shatner, is the defense attorney losing his case in the press. He hires a PR consultant to “take back the story” and “build a brand” for his client. Of course, in true Hollywood style, the PR person comes to the mahogany-laden office with grandiose ideas including posters, b-roll and a media strategy. Denny even asked for a “blob” - but we are not sure if ever he got one! ;-)

The PR consultant is a caricature of us - way too perky — but she did say something extremely valuable when planning her campaign: keep the message simple. Hmmm, someone at ABC must have had some help with the script.

Finally, there are two great lines worth quoting and sharing. One, the PR consultant says to Denny: “I know you are tight with Larry King, but we are negotiating with Nightline, Hardball and the Daily Show. This is where most Americans get their news.”

My other favorite quote is Denny Crane addressing a co-chair who is not happy about using the media to win a case. The lawyer says: “I know this kind of manipulation goes on all the time, but I’m an attorney, not a spin doctor.”

And Denny replies: “Oh yes you are. We all are. That’s what attorneys do. Tell stories. Create characters. Catch an audience and try to make them feel what we want them to feel. That’s good lawyering. Only these days, everybody is trying to get in on our act. Government. Corporations. There are no facts anymore, Kiddo. Only good or bad fiction.”

Bass was the featured plate at the 2006 PRWeek Awards. Reactions to the succulent seafood ranged from curiosity to puzzlement. Seafood at a banquet is always a risk, particularly one in which the audience is all about perception. And sources say it may not be the most appropriate offering. According to the Etiquette Queen at party411.com “guests paying to attend a ceremony should be offered a choice between meat and fish.”

PRWeek obviously told the Etiquette Queen to take a hike and stood by its bass decision.

Funny thins was that bass wasn’t the only fish in the room that evening — the comedian was pretty ripe. Nothing against the guy at all — but he was introduced as a contributor to John Stewart’s The Daily Show and we all thought it would be Stephen Colbert. This guy either had an off night or he was overwhelmed trying to go through a comedy routine with 1000 communicators in the audience. Saying the room was a little chatter happy would be a slight understatement.

Actually, the bass reaction really set the tone for the evening. It was an evening of surprises — good surprises. APCO won agency of the year and Entergy pulled in campaign of the year. Huge kudos to both organizations. The student of the year, Tara Burnham from Penn State, and the young professional of the year, Courtney Hill of H&K, were definite highlights. Congrats to both. Fast Horse out of Minnesota won community relations campaign of the year for its work with Blue Cross/Blue Shield — beating out the large firms such as Ruder Finn and Cohn & Wolfe. Congrats to Yorg and Allison — good people who worked long hours to get the job done. More on these two later.

The turnout was great — I would guess more than 1000 attended the ceremony at Tavern on the Green in Central Park, NY. If you haven’t been to Tavern on the Green — my colleague Stacy Libby summed it up quite nicely as we walked through the maze of mirrors and stained glass making our way to the reception area.

“I feel like we are walking into one of the those parties in the movie Eyes Wide Shut. We’re just missing the nudity and the masks.”

Yes indeed.

I sat at table 93 next to Bite Communication’s Burghardt Tenderich along with Andrew Gordon (king of Silicon Valley PR reporting), Matthew Allington (I think everyone in tech PR has met Matthew at least once) and Keith O’Brien (this guy gets the social media movement in PR like no one else). Burghardt heads up North Americas for Bite. It was a good pairing. He shares my belief that PR, great PR, is not infinitely scalable. Just because you can apply an advertising model to PR doesn’t necessarily mean you should. I could ramble on and on about this — but PR is absolutely about people period. Our key assets go home every night. The ideas and the chemistry between our people and our clients is the essence of our differentiation. That means that we need to nurture our assets and help them grow and provide them a place where they can take the magic to our customers. You can’t do that if you scale into 80 people offices or 100s of offices worldwide. You just can’t manage the talent and if you can’t manage them, they will leave. And once those people leave, they don’t leave a product that someone else can step into and keep developing. They leave and they take their ideas and that chemistry with them.

OK, enough of the stump speech.

PRWeek’s panel of judges, while still made up of mostly the large conglomerates, found a way to get it right. I was a judge (with Michael Kempner, president of MWW, Jim Finn of Ingres, Mark Hass, president of MS&L) and witnessed the process myself. It is a thorough examination and it is as fair as it can be. The tipping scale is the amount of time and money that each firm can invest into the award submissions. A smaller firm just can’t take the amount of time and money the larger firms do to wow the panels. And it was obvious because this was the year of the conglomerate, deservedly so.

The process worked. Voce did not win its category, and that is disappointing. But the judges found a way to get through what seemed like 15 award submissions from each global agency and find the hidden jewels — like Fast Horse.

Highlights of the evening:

As we walk up to the bar to get our first drink of the night, the bar tender stops and says, “hey buddy, no offense but ooh la la” as he points to Stacy. Ooh la la is such an underrated pick up line. And I obviously look weak and irrelevant to that bar tender as he picks up on the girl with me.



Stacy ran into her mentor from Porter Novelli, Gary Stockman. Gary is president of Porter-Novelli. From what I hear, one of the real good guys in PR. When asked if he runs the world now as president of Porter Novelli his response, “the world runs me.” It never changes.



Ray’s pizza in Times Square at 3:00am. Surreal but wonderful.



We closed two different bars with Yorg and Allison from Fast Horse. Allison was mobbed by her fans when they saw the award. She signed all the autographs, staying true to her roots. Allison and Stacy posed for a Midwestern girl shot.



Yorg showed us a photo of his boat. Mostly a sunset shot with like a small corner of his boat. But it was a nice corner shot of his boat. And let me be the first to say that I would hang over that corner and shout out “I am king of the world!” I do that for you, Yorg.



Allison was offered some form of sex for a cigarette by one of the bar patrons.

Thanks to Julia and the team for a very nice event. PRWeek is to be commended for its industry leadership.

– Richard Cline

Technorati Tags: Events, PR, PRWeek

After months of pitching, coaxing, begging, and pleading, the efforts of our own Matthew Podboy finally paid off when the field marketing team for Red Bull energy drinks agreed to stop by our offices late yesterday afternoon to fire up the Voce Nation.

Matt recounts what gave him this idea and what it took to make this happen (read: “Red Bull Gives You PR Wings“), an excerpt:

“While stranded in an airport returning home from a business trip, it occurred to me that over the week I’d spent a lot of money on Red Bull energy drinks. Red Bulls are about $2/each and that can add up. In my sleep deprived state of mind I thought that if Red Bull would sponsor our PR firm then I’d save a lot of money. So I wrote a pitch outlining why Red Bull should sponsor Voce. We travel all over the country on business trips that include the biggest name is media, we are the largest conferences, and clients, journalists, and influencers are in and out of our office. We are a hub of visibility. We’ll slap a few Red Bull patches on our Voce laptop bags and they can fill up the fridge with their magic potion. Sounds like a fair trade to me.”

Matt’s pursuit of Red Bull will not stop here folks, make no mistake, the goal is nothing short of full corporate sponsorship. That’s right, Matt will not rest (literally) until Voce becomes the first communications firm sponsored by Red Bull. Thanks and good luck with this endeavor Matt, you may need a few more Red Bulls;-)