Connect Public Relations®

New media? Old media? When the world needs to hear, understand and act on your strategic messages, Connectsm doesn’t think in those terms, even though we have all of today’s media channels covered.

Instead we think about our relationships. With your industry’s influencers. They may be journalists, editors, bloggers, consultants or customer champions. Most often, they’re all of the above.

Who we know. We’ve carefully built our relationships with key influencers across a number of industries, especially high technology. We’ve done so over years if not decades, going back to our founding in 1989. They know us not as spin doctors but as hard-working, reliable sources of timely, quality information about our clients’ products and services.

In short, we help them do their jobs of keeping their constituencies abreast of the latest industry news, with our clients as credible and noteworthy sources.

What we know. To help us understand what media channels are most effective, we regularly survey high-level executives across both private and public sectors to learn how they stay informed. For all their awareness of social media today, our 2011 Media Affinity Study revealed that their top two information sources are technology and trade magazines. “Old” media, in fact, has as much drawing power as ever.

Whether its media relations, analyst relations or speaker placements, Connectsm has the capabilities, experience and relationships to execute effective public relations strategies that can deliver tangible results to your business.

If you want to play a more direct role in your marketing process, you will need to utilize traditional media channels. While Internet marketing has become indispensible, the most influential people in the high technology field still communicate through long-standing industry practices. In order to reach your target market, you should use every tool at your disposal. To assist you in this phase of your marketing plan, Connectsm has utilized its business-to-business media relations experience to create a series of reference documents.

The first thing you will need to do is identify which media will be most beneficial for you, by creating a media target list. You will also need to understand how to write a press release. For additional resources, we have created a series of templates you can use to create your own marketing materials and improve your media coverage.

In 2010 Symantec became aware of a serious emerging threat called Stuxnet. The Symantec team realized that they could help solve the problem while simultaneously improving their share of voice in the security industry. They worked with Connectsm to create and implement a comprehensive public relations campaign.

The goals of the campaign were to establish Symantec’s leadership on the issue, and to help prevent the propagation of misinformation. To accomplish this, Connectsm used a variety of media, both traditional and social.

The campaign included 20 Stuxnet-related posts written for the Symantec Response blog, which is followed by a large number of IT administrator, business owners, reporters and Internet security experts. It also included a series of tweets regarding progress on the research, as well as a presentation at the Virus Bulletin 2010 conference. The presentation was a unique opportunity that involved a demonstration of Stuxnet’s ability to affect industrial machinery, and a dossier of research results distributed to professionals of various industries in order to foster collaborative security efforts.

The results of the campaign exceeded expectations. To date, Symantec spokespeople have fielded more than 60 related media interviews. Symantec has been included in more than 780 print/online stories, 28 broadcast/radio segments, more than 400 blog posts and more than 2,000 tweets all on the topic of Stuxnet. Overall, Symantec received more than a 50 percent of voice regarding Stuxnet, while no single competitor registered even 10 percent. The campaign was instrumental in cementing Symantec’s reputation as a leader in cyber security.