Gone are the days of user vicious technology
By David Frost, CEO, PR Deadlines In bygone days, information technology could be user vicious. Picture this: on The Australian, newspaper I spend four hours designing and editing a broadsheet-sized page. Then I press a wrong key and see screen after screen vanishing, never to return. There is no backup! In those days, newspaper tech…
196 BC to 2021and beyond: a data storage odyssey
Some would argue that cave painting was the earliest form of data storage, although the messaging was hardly transportable. A better candidate emerged when early civilisations set out their ideas on stone tablets, a write-read situation. The Rosetta Stone can be considered the planet’s first key to data decryption for allowing us to read Egyptian…
It’s time to check your PR spend
There has never been a better time for Marketing to check a company’s public relations budget. With a potential global recession predicted, it’s time to squeeze out better value. Our Sydney-based PR agency has lost long term technology clients’ business in recent years, even though we were achieving excellent results. Why? Simply because someone at head…
We think outside the box
Carbon Black’s APAC chief asked us to maximise publicity on South Korea’s Special Prosecutor’s use of CB Protection for a high profile, politically explosive trial. Aware of our deep media knowledge, he gave this project to us rather than one of his agencies closer to Korea. Objective: maximise global publicity. Strategy: we chose the Wall…
How PR Deadlines scores infotech headlines
As an executive journalist on the Fin Review two decades ago, too much of my time was spent trashing PR handouts. Eventually head-hunted by a PR agency that wanted someone who could actually write, it took me a while to reach an equilibrium. Balancing the needs of clients and journalists is key to the relationship…
Why IT vendors really need cost effective PR
In recent years our Sydney-based PR agency has lost long term technology clients’ business even though we were achieving excellent results. Why? Simply because someone at head office, 12,000km distant, chose to run with a multinational agency. Their decisions overruled the preferences of clients’ Australian executives and their regional teams. Subsequently our former contacts (still friends) told us their…
World Class! Why we rate so highly in the PR game
Last week, my deluge of overnight emails included one that looked suspicious. I came very close to deleting it. It appeared to come from the IT industry’s respected Forrester Research, proposing the ridiculous idea that our agency was among the best in the world! I took a second look, then a third. PR Deadlines had indeed been…
Man bites dog! Write news releases the right way
Our favourite headline: Man bites Dog! But it makes no sense. Or does it? Let’s think about those words – and how they might relate to information technology. The message is tantalising, thought provoking and if man really did bite dog, it’s newsworthy. As a headline it’s short, sharp and to the point – subject,…
Yes or No … The media have 10 seconds to decide
Many of today’s technology and business writers are time-poor. Recently we took an informal survey, asking key journalists how long it took them, on receiving a PR story or pitch, to decide whether to publish. The answers averaged, wait for it… between five and 10 seconds! As an executive journalist on the Australian Financial Review…
PR Deadlines in the news again
It’s been a good 10 days for PR Deadlines: First Sean Mitchell, entrepreneurial chief of the expanding Techday empire, told us: “PR Deadlines is one of the best in the business, consummate professionals and a preferred partner of ours.” Now Forrester has named us as one of the world’s top channel-focused PR firms. We always…
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