July 2010

Approach to VMworld v3 - Trending Topics On the Move

In this week’s installment of ‘Approach to VMworld,’ the Schwartz research team was at it again, analyzing topics covered by the tech reporters and bloggers we turn to for the latest, most comprehensive and thoughtful virtualization commentary.

Since the team conducted its last snapshot, we’ve seen a few significant shifts in topics of interest. In addition to highlighting what’s hot, we’re also looking at what’s moving. Many words, such as Security, vSphere and Microsoft, showed huge jumps – indicated by red, orange and yellow. Others, like SaaS, Management and Solutions are getting colder (though still significant) – shown in blues and purple. 

‘Security,’ which was already red hot, continues its accelerated growth and ‘Support’ got a bump too. It’s not surprising that security and support continue upward. When InformationWeek Analytics surveyed enterprises to determine cloud computing concerns, the top three were related to security, followed by application and system performance and DR/BC of the provider. Content on the blogs and websites we track is targeted to potential enterprise IT buyers – many who are considering or already in the process of virtualizing their IT environments and moving some or all of that infrastructure to a public, private or hybrid cloud. To ensure that the concerns of the enterprise are addressed, many vendors include security and support messaging in most external communication. The more news announcements, vendor interviews, case studies, trend commentary and so on that we see, the more security and support will grow.

A key take-away from the research: At the end of the day, news is still a primary driver of content and buzz. The movement of trend topics proves it. Take for instance some of the biggest movers this week:

• While VMware maintains its dominant presence, helped by the release of vSphere 4.1, other players have joined the party. Up from last week are both Citrix and Microsoft. Schwartz prepared a tip sheet that offers vendors advice on how to maximize presence at VMworld. You can get more in-depth suggestions by downloading the tip sheet here, but one tip we included was to consider timing news with the event. Making a major announcement prior to the show can increase interest among media and analysts at the show. Though it’s not surprising to see the major players competing for share of voice, I’ll be interested to see presence for other vendors as we get closer to the conference. The one or two weeks before VMworld, expect vendor names to increase in size and prevalence in the word cloud.

• Another example of news as a driver is illustrated by virtual desktop management vendor Unidesk. Though it presence last week is small compared to VMware or Microsoft, the company still made the cloud. We’d attribute this to a few announcements that the company made in late June. With none since, Unidesk’s traction dropped off the radar, though “desktop” remained steady.

• Final proof point – check out the HUGE spike for vSphere around July 14 – fewer than 50 posts to more than 400 the days following the v4.1 announcement. Virtualization vendors: hitch your wagon to significant VMware news by being able to provide commentary and see a similar spike. 

Posted by Mercedes Carrasco on July 27, 2010 at 11:14 AM
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Mobile World Congress - Making the right calls to secure your speaker slot

Mobile World Congress (MWC) is the must attend event for any wireless company.  Taking place on February 14-17 2011 in Barcelona, Spain, the show is unrivalled in showcasing the companies and latest developments of the dynamic mobile industry.

The 2010 event attracted more than 49,000 mobile professionals from 192 countries, a majority of which were C-Level executives.  Catching the attention of such an important group is crucial but with over 1,300 other companies trying to do exactly the same how can you stand out from the crowd?
One opportunity is to secure a speaker slot available at the show.  However, with the deadline for submissions seemingly getting earlier every year, companies now only have less than a week (deadline July 30th 2010) to submit their entry.

The slots are developed independently from the Congress sponsorship and exhibition and are therefore completely free.  Potential speakers do not have to be exhibiting at the event to secure a slot. Indeed, if you are successful you will be given a pass for the whole event!

What are the organisers looking for?

Speakers are chosen on a number of different criteria.

•    Topic relevance
•    Originality (of both topic and presentation format)
•    Newsworthiness of the content proposed
•    Proven ability and prominence of the speaker in the industry
•    Strength of the reference offered
 
Standing out from the crowd

With so much competition how can you make your submission stand out from the crowd? The following five tips will help you focus on what you need to include to be successful:

1)    Relevance – Remember that audiences do not want to hear a 20 minute presentation of you promoting your latest products. Focus on issues and topics that are affecting the industry and will make your audience sit up and take notice.

2)    Strong controversial angle - A key component to making your submission stand out from the crowd is including something out of the ordinary. Delegates attending the show want to hear the views challenging current thinking – they’re not going to attend a presentation to hear something they’ve heard a hundred times before.

3)    Focus on the future – Talking about future trends is another key aspect of a successful submission.  Audiences want to hear your opinions on what the industry will look like in two years time, not in two weeks time.  Make sure you have plenty of predictions to capture the imagination of delegates.

4)    Customers - Bringing a customer will always help to endorse the views you are expressing as well as making your submission stand out.  You can also suggest a panel discussion – recommending panel members (with their prior approval) to join you and a subject area to discuss really helps to boost your chances of making into the line up.

5)    Newsworthiness – With hundreds of journalists, analysts and bloggers attending the event alongside industry professionals, the need for your presentation to be newsworthy is crucial. Your topic should have the potential to deliver quotable, exciting sound bites that can easily be transferred to an article, blog or report.

With these five areas covered you should be in a position to fill out the submission form.  If you want to increase your visibility at MWC please do not hesitate to contact us.
 

Posted by Andrew Chatterton on at 4:19 AM
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When Social Media Customer Service Fails

More companies are turning to Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels every day for customer service. When it is done well it creates engagement and a deeper bond with a dissatisfied customer. It can also help publicly turn a dissatisfied customer into an advocate. It also saves money compared to call center operations.

These are all good reasons for using social media for customer service. By the key phrase in the above paragraph is “when it is done well.” Too often companies are not following through on their promises or not creating useful feedback. Paul Gillin wrote about it recently here.

I have my own story to share. It is with the Sheraton Hotel and Marina in San Diego and Starwood Hotels. I was at the hotel last week and was grabbing breakfast before a client meeting. The dining room was less than half full. My colleague and I ordered eggs. Thirty minutes later we were still waiting. We really needed to leave then to make the client meeting on time, but we figured if we drove fast, we would still be OK.

We saw the waiter and asked “Excuse me, do you know if our breakfast will be coming soon?” The waiters helpful reply “I don’t know, if you care so much, why don’t you go in the kitchen and ask the chef.”

To say I was displeased with the response (and the service) is an understatement. I tweeted it out, and within an hour had a response from @StarwoodBuzz “@McClennan Sorry to hear about breakfast. If you DM us your stay details, we can follow up with the hotel for you.”

This was a perfect, textbook response and I was quite pleased. I shared the details with Starwood. They respond and asked  me to follow them so they can DM back – even though no sensitive information is being shared, and if they lead with @McClennan, likely only I can see it.

The next day, I get a DM response “Thank you. I'm sending off your comments to the hotel so this can be improved 4 future guests. Pls DM if you wish to include your email add.”

There are a number of things wrong with that.

First, in business communications, there is no need to use “4”. We are engaged in a professional discourse. Second, it sounded from the first message that they were going to “follow up with the hotel for me” (i.e. do something about the situation). The personal message basically says, we will let the hotel know there is a complaint. Thanks. Bye.

I don’t need them to do that. I know how to call a manager, tweet and blog myself. Starwood Hotels failed by not providing a meaningful discussion once they engaged. I provided my email as requested, it’s been a week and I have not yet received a response from the hotel.

The end result? 1) A positive social media engagement turned sour and 2) The next time I am in San Diego, I will be staying in a Hilton.

What lessons can marketers, consumer and services public relations professionals take from this?

1. It is essential to listen to all social media channels, so you can address negative situations.
2. Listening isn’t enough – If you engage, you need to provide meaningful resolutions or you can do more harm than good.
3. Use DMs appropriately. Financial institutions and other regulated industries should use DMs. Hotels should not use DMs for form responses.
4. Use proper English in your response.

Posted by Mark McClennan on July 22, 2010 at 9:40 AM
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Approach to VMworld Issue 2 - VMworld PR Tip Sheet

A cloud is approaching San Francisco, getting ready to pour down IT companies aplenty offering various management tools, platforms, servers, hosting models and so on at VMworld.

Though it might seem like a few hot summer months away, we’re now actually only six weeks out from the conference. Already there's a lot of noise. Any company involved in virtualization and cloud computing needs to develop a PR strategy to make the most of the conference, taking advantage of having nearly all virtual influencers, experts and buyers in the same place at the same time.

In a previous post, Ross Levanto, a VP in Schwartz Communications' data center practice group, noted the proliferation of virtualization and cloud coverage in tech trades, highlighting trending topics such as management, SaaS and desktops. This is an important first step in building out a VMworld PR strategy – determining the topics that will resonate with reporters at the show and thinking about news, messaging or customer deployment stories that might align with trends.

For Schwartz clients that are attending, we’re certainly talking about our plans for the show. But we’d like to help other companies prep for VMworld, too. Check out our tip sheet, “5 Tactics to Help Make VMworld a Visibility Engine,” available for free download from the Schwartz website. The tip sheet outlines PR tactics pre-event and at the conference. As we get closer to August 30, stay tuned for more analysis on trends in the virtualization space and more advice on how to maximize show presence. 

Posted by Mercedes Carrasco on July 16, 2010 at 3:28 PM
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Trending VMworld PR Topics: The Approach to VMworld

A co-worker last week put it directly, "The stage is set for VMworld." The comment was perhaps a bit hyperbolic, of course, as the approaching VMworld conference certainly did not drown out chatter about Lindsay Lohan on the news channels. Looking at the calendar in the technology PR world, however, there certainly doesn't seem much between now and the annual conference for lovers of all things hypervisor.

Virtualization is a hot topic within the data center. Each week, technology reporters write about the adoption of virtual servers and the related concept of cloud computing. With VMworld merely weeks away, technology PR pros are paying close attention to what those reporters are covering. The theory is that what's written now might provide insight into what will be hot at the conference.

Given Schwartz represents a number of virtualization and cloud computing technology providers, we're watching what's being written collectively. And in the spirit of openness, we're going to share some of what we are seeing on this blog. Along the way, you will get to meet some of the people who are leaders within our data center practice group.

So consider this issue 1 of the "Approach to VMworld." The Schwartz research team has produced a word cloud based on an aggregation of content from the top virtualization and cloud computing bloggers. In future issues, we will talk more about the methodology we used for this research. It's all part of a larger research project into identifying the top bloggers for the data center practice group (watch this space for that research, by the way).

Here's the word cloud the research team produced:

Again, remember the word cloud represents an aggregation of content from leading virtualization and cloud computing blogs. Admittedly, in some cases these exercises are a bit of a Rorschach test.

However, here's what struck me:

-- Management and security are big. Many reporters have written about security and availability as the two major roadblocks for the deployment of cloud computing. Security stands out in what bloggers are writing, and while there's not a direct correlation between management and availability, there's no question that enterprise IT is focused on virtualization management concerns. (I guess it is a bit interesting that "availability" or its derivatives does not show up in this tag cloud.)

-- The word "data" is prominent. Again, I would connect this to the general concerns IT staffs have with data availability, especially when one sees that "data" and "management" are the same size.

-- Pretty nice prevalence of "SaaS," which has for a long time been one definition of cloud computing. Of course, many would argue that the prevalence of that definition is causing confusion over what exactly cloud computing is. SaaS is a service from a cloud, while the purists might more directly relate cloud computing to what is being called PaaS (Platform as a Service) or IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).

-- Desktop. Is the virtual desktop finally arriving?

-- In the not so surprising category: "VMware" is easy to see, but where is "Microsoft" or "Citrix"?

In summary, if you are selling security for virtual environments or anything related to desktop virtualization, I hope you are planning to go to VMworld. Even if you are not exhibiting, you should send someone for media and analyst meetings (and I know many experts who can help you arrange those meetings).

Of course, I am always interested in your input. What do you see in the word cloud?

Issue 2 of "The Approach to VMworld" will be published here next week.

Posted by Ross Levanto on July 12, 2010 at 10:06 AM
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Public Relations Lessons From Gallipoli

Over the weekend, I finished reading Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead. It was an engrossing, powerful read. For those not familiar with Gallipoli, it was a major campaign in World War I involving the British, French, and ANZAC invading a Turkish peninsula. It is a defining moment in Turkish history. In total more than 130,000 people died and there were more than 500,000 casualties. It was also a campaign fraught with missed opportunities.

As I was reading it, I could not help but draw comparisons to some common public relations mistakes that are still being made today. While I know there are perils of adopting military campaigns to business, there are a few lessons that I thought would be good to share.

1. Don’t be blinded by the new way of doing things—New technology is great, but it rarely completely replaces proven systems. In the case of Gallipoli, some British Generals took the new lessons learned in France and made them the only way to do things, without adapting them to the local setting. They refused to advance without strong artillery (which they didn’t have) even though there were no trenches and few opposing forces. As a result, they gave the Turkish Army time to dig trenches and bring in more forces.

The same can be applied to communications. Social media is empowering. It is an essential component of great communications in the modern communications era. Without it, companies are missing great opportunities and their campaigns won’t be as powerful. But traditional media, influencers, mavens, messaging and listening still apply. Don’t be blinded and only pay attention to the shiny object, or you will miss opportunities. Make sure your communications campaign is designed for your specific needs, and not a cookie-cutter “Social Media Scenario #1.”

2. If you wait for every “i” to be dotted, you will lose – Careful planning and strategy is essential to any communications campaign (particularly consumer PR), but planning at the expense of decisive action is a recipe for failure. The same applies to communications. Careful research and strategy is essential. But there is always one more question that can be asked. There is the temptation to wait for the perfect opportunity (brand name customer reference, analyst data, etc.,) but those situations are few and far between. You need to find ways to communicate effectively without having everything you need.

3. Don’t be dissuaded by setbacks and changes– The British were dissuaded a number of times when they could have had decisive victory by a minor setback or something not going exactly to plan. We do not operate in a static world, and plans will change. As communications professionals, we need to adapt to those changes and continue forward. Don’t overreact to minor announcements from competitors or allow them to change your overall strategy. Focus on your goal and keep driving to it. You win by moving forward, not by retreating or moving laterally. The same applies to communications and public relations campaigns.

4. Trust your people – There were times in the invasion when the senior managers were well removed from the front and couldn’t react to a changing and fluid situation. Even more telling, the junior officers were trained not to move without command from superiors. As a result, there were numerous examples of when the British opened an unopposed new front, but did not advance, because the staff on the ground waited for orders. The opportunities were lost.

The same holds true in communications. Managers need to avoid becoming logjams. Trust your staff and encourage them to seize any opportunity they see. If you train them well, you will avoid the careless mistakes. But if every small decision must be centrally approved, you will miss many great opportunities.

Posted by Mark McClennan on July 6, 2010 at 8:16 AM
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