Hi folks, For those following our Webby campaign for SciTechDaily.com, some PR lessons we've learned from it are below. But first a quick bulletin:
On Thursday May 23 at Cave Rock, Sumner Beach from 5:30pm, Malcolm McNeill will be presenting the premiere performance of the SciTechDaily.com Webby Campaign Song, to a background of a 1,000-rocket launch. We're taking our push for a Webby right to NASA's turf! At http://SciTechDaily.com/kiwivote you can see more details of the planned spectacular, and also enter a prize draw for the right to be Mission Controller and launch the rockets... We'd greatly appreciate it if you could pass the above message to your colleagues, friends and relations. == PR lessons: Some of these will be obvious to a few of you. Hopefully they are helpful to others heading along the same track one day. Our campaign to get Kiwis voting for us had great initial success, and more than doubled our vote. It got good press coverage countrywide (in the "IT" or "Business" sections of the paper) and a really strong push from various online news sites such as aardvark and scoop. Plus, of course, some organisations and individuals (especially in the science community) got right behind it and spread the message far and wide. It has helped that we knew some names already and had had occasional contacts with people in the press -- being able to pick up a phone or get past the editor@ screen is very useful. The greatest interest has, perhaps not surprisingly, come from those personal contacts. (So don't rely on huge impersonal email lists :-) But we found the initial push from this tapering off last week -- enough to hold our own against NASA as the voting continued, but we stopped making net gains. And the reason for this was twofold: a) It wasn't making the front part of the newspapers, just the specialist sections. The Oscars can, of course, as can anything to do with rugby, but the Webbys aren't yet of sufficient international/national interest, even with the backing for our campaign from a good few "names" b) importantly (because it has a knock-on effect on (a)), the broadcast media had seemingly ignored the story. Software in general, and the Web in particular, is not a very television- friendly subject (even less so for radio). You have to work hard to try and find an angle that will appeal to their foibles. (We figure if a campaign song and 1,000 rockets doesn't do it, nothing will :-) The other hard point to overcome is that being in Christchurch means that studio/interview time or other resources are VERY limited for the major networks. So no matter how significant the story may seem to those involved, they weren't going to find the resources to cover it (we did get an offer of a brief early-morning interview if we flew Vicki to Auckland -- broken leg and all...) We did ask the technology guy at TVNZ how he expected to cover this important region given he had no ability to set up a video link or local coverage...but didn't get a reply. SO we decided we needed to do something televisual which had a chance of capturing network interest, provoking more front-of-paper commentary and also getting some radio airplay. Hence the above-mentioned launch event at Sumner. It pays to bear in mind the pictorial aspects of press coverage, particularly if you are trying to interest the broadcast media! (And if any of you know any TV, radio or newspaper journalists, please be sure to whisper in their ear about the event, and the entire campaign, and ask them how they'll are covering it <g>) See you in Sumner! Cheers, peter ========================================================= SPIS Ltd, Box 19-760, Christchurch, NZ http://www.spis.co.nz * FREE TurboNote memo: http://TurboPress.com/tbnote.htm Vote for our site at the 2002 Webby Awards: http://SciTechDaily.com/webby.htm --> via Canterbury Software email forum: Success through Connections Email your messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Searchable list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] Leave or rejoin the list: http://canterburysoftware.org.nz/forum.htm
