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