I really love using Spotify the free service (with options to upgrade to a premium service) that lets you discover and share music.

Pay Attention to Discovering and Sharing as a PR Strategy

I am spending more and more time helping clients discovering new voice to reach out to, share their technology and insights with, and connect with new enterprise and consumer end users by relaying content through their networks.

Yes, I still do very traditional, old school PR, but if you take a moment and see what Spotify has done, and how it impact your own music selection and discovery behavior, maybe there is something you can learn in your media, analyst and blogger initiatives.

Make your content compelling so it can be discovered and of course, shared.

You're.....

• An Expert
• A Thought Leader
• A Visionary....

Who cares.

The world is full of very smart people with great ideas, amazing startups, and disruptive technologies.

If you're looking for a true differentiator in your startup's branding, try being human when you're online.

Photo of me by Jerry Hirsch.

So you've got your budget in place, lots of new initiatives under way and your company is ready to top the charts with news and buzz.

That's all fine and good, but you gotta have more than that.  

Years ago, PR was pretty much handled by a VP of Marketing or the Director of Marketing Communications.  We developed communications strategies, wrote traditional press releases, did outreach to the media and industry analysts and it all worked very well.

Have you taken a look at your positioning lately?

Before deploying a successful public relations campaign, certain groundwork must be done.  Planning must occur, but even before tactical planning, strategic planning should take place.  Essential to the strategic planning process is the positioning exercise.  Public relations programs are based on messages and those messages emerge from an understanding of one's position in the marketplace.  Solid positioning is the very foundation of the campaign.  A public relations program is an awful lot of work to go through if the underlying messages are not sound and relevant to the market.

Louis Vuitton (well positioned) shot in Paris by Alan Weinkrantz

Positioning is the act of defining your place among your peers and identifying the unique value you offer within that competitive landscape.  It is both a goal and a process.  It is ongoing and above all, it is proactive. If you don't position yourself, the competition and other market factors will do it for you.  Good positioning is the heart and soul of an effective public relations campaign.  If done properly, it begets effective messaging -- messaging that makes sense within the larger context of the marketplace, addresses important issues within that market, and demonstrates a vision for the future.  Thus, through its relevance to a given market, good positioning helps build credibility with press, analysts, investors, channel partners and customers. 

Too many people think that public relations is simply a matter of pumping out news releases and hounding the press.  Ill-prepared, they wage an uphill battle, trying to penetrate a press corps already defending itself against such tactics.  In fact, effective PR occurs through having a credible, newsworthy story to tell in the first place and convincing the press of that story's significance.  Positioning is about sorting through everything you know about yourself and unearthing that newsworthy story.  Companies who take the time to engage in the positioning process -- evaluating their competitive landscape, putting a fine point on the unique value their product offers, and thoughtfully establishing how that capability is critical for their market's future -- will reap the benefits of more coherent messaging, greater credibility with the press, and improved authority in the marketplace.

Speaking With One Voice

Completing a formal positioning exercise not only leads to effective messaging -- it also assures consistency in messaging.  A company has multiple audiences and one of the most important of these is its own employees.  Involving employees in the positioning process fuels the exercise with rich input and helps the organization to speak in unison.

This means bringing to the table a panel of key employees from across the organization and working with that group to build consensus on questions of what your place in the market really is, what it should be, and how to get there.  Enlisting the opinions of this group assures the creation of a positioning that your own people will accept and articulate, thus empowering the organization to speak with one voice.  This is essential if the organization is to successfully relay its messages to customers and the press.

The Need for Consensus

When representatives of a company sit down with an objective strategist and take up the task of defining who they are, what their product is, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and how it stacks up against the competition, they often witness a surprising array of responses.  In fact, the extent to which representatives of the same company disagree on key positioning issues is not so surprising.  In all likelihood, they have probably never been assembled for the specific purpose of discussing and evaluating the company's positioning.  For this reason, the positioning exercise is often a groundbreaking event, where participants disclose their opinions on positioning issues for the first time.  Even though companies get product out the door every day while disagreeing on big-picture issues, doing so incurs certain risks.  Without consensus, you risk deploying an ill-founded communications program.  You risk alienating an already skeptical and unapproachable media.  You risk the fragmentation of your marketing and communications efforts, as departments undermine each other with conflicting strategies.  Fortunately, a positioning exercise is a great way to build consensus and gain valuable feedback in the process.

Leveraging Feedback

One of the most valuable benefits of the formal positioning exercise is feedback, specifically incongruous feedback.  Once at the positioning table, companies often realize that their marketing and communications efforts have been hobbled for too long by internal disagreement on critical issues.  The positioning exercise creates the opportunity to examine these disagreements and the underlying issues that cause them.

The idea is not to silence these voices, but to leverage what they reveal to address problems and build better, stronger positioning.  In their direct dealings with customers and channel partners, rank and file employees are often privy to candid feedback about product performance that higher - level executives are not.  Enlisting a diverse panel of company representatives allows decision-makers to elicit this feedback in an organized setting in order to help evaluate the company's present position, establish its desired position, and chart the course to get there.

It is no mistake that the most successful public relations campaigns begin with a formal positioning exercise.   The benefits are numerous; a proactive positioning process creates the foundation for successful communications and public relations efforts; it helps establish credibility with press and analysts; it engenders constructive dialogue, and helps achieve a shared vision across the organization; it helps companies identify the unique value their products offer and communicate that message effectively to the right audience.  Good positioning also needs upkeep.  Market influencers, your competitors, and product features change over time; so too your positioning needs to be revisited and modified along with the changing market. 

Have you taken a look at your positioning lately? 

If not, position yourself before someone else does it for you. 

Having been self-employed for twenty eight years, I have learned quite a bit about Technology PR, the Social Internet and how to run a business through really good, really great, and not so good times.

I started off being a sole practitioner, scaled a business with staff, scaled back from staff during two downturns, scaled back up with staff and then three years ago, I made the decision to go solo again.  It was a gradual transition and my team found other paths in their lives.   I have worked at home, shared an office with friends, had a fancy office, with fancy and really nice furniture, and now I am back to working from home (when I am home) in a really cool house that is in back of my house - and with some of the fancy furniture :)

Today, I can scale as needed, bring in appropriate expertise the client may need and the budget allows for. 

I have been through various technology cycles, from the 8088, to the 286 to the 386, the 486 and even the mighty Pentium, networking, WiFi, the beginnings of VoIp, the Internet Cafe, the tablet PC and many other technology and cultural shifts which you may read about here.  

I've had the opportunity to help Jeff Pulver on his vision of the #140Conf events which have connected us to thousands of people in person and scale to have our speakers being followed by ten million (not a misprint) followers.

At Heart, I'm A Story Teller. 

Along the way, I have evolved from doing traditional technology media relations to staying true to PR and bringing the social web into the mix.  I am still a believer in message, communications strategy, goals, and aligning business objectives with communications objectives.  

I'm still a traditional PR person with a focus on story telling.  I developed my skill sets in story telling because many of the innovations that I have had a chance to work on were in markets that did not exist.  

We had to have a story to tell - and sell.  

So either here in the U.S. or in many cases, in Israel, we'd dream a future and hope that my client's technology vision would win the hearts and minds of the Asian OEM / OEMs who in turn would sell to the U.S. and European brands.  Getting a design win was, and still remains monumental achievement and personally gratifying.

Now as 2011 approaches, I am going to shift to helping clients with Branded Content.  

I am still a great believer in story telling, and selling my client's stories to the media, industry analysts, fellow thought leaders and bloggers.  

In their own right, my clients are becoming story tellers on their own platforms- be it their blogs, photo sites, YouTube videos or where they check in as they travel the world.  There is some art, some discipline and figuring out as you go through this process, but it also involves a set of beliefs, or what I call belief sets that if you write and populate great content, you'll be found by and be a great resource to the media.

No, I Am NOT an Expert.  I Just Have Certain Belief Sets.

Even though I have been at this craft for over a quarter of a century and have many successes to show for it, I really don't consider myself to be an "expert."  

I just have certain belief sets in doing things a certain way.  

And if you'll kindly give allow some time to figure out the landscape, identify and build an ecosystem of media, analysts and bloggers who should know about your story, and allow the time to do the proper evangelism, then I can help you be a better and more effective story teller in 2011.

Leave a comment or reach out to me - alan at weinkrantz dot com.

The State of NOW welcomes you to the State of Texas

Friends attending SXSW Interactive are invited to join the mini #140conf taking place the afternoon of March 16th from 2 PM to 6 PM.

Members of the media wanting to interview Jeff Pulver prior to, or during SXSW, please reach out to me - alan at weinkrantz dot com or @alanweinkrantz

The following is the latest draft of the #140conf @ SXSW 2010 Schedule

#140conf @ SXSW 2010 (draft 1.5.0)

2:00 Welcome - Jeff Pulver (@jeffpulver)
2:05 Jeff Pulver (@jeffpulver) - “The State of NOW”
2:20 The twitter Kids of Tanzinia (panel): @StaceyMonk, @AJLeon, @MelissaLeon
2:35 Marlooz (@marlooz) - Love 2.0
2:45 Digital Producers and Disruptors (panel): (Natalie Lent (@natalielent), Director, Emerging Platforms, ID PR; Sarah Ross (@sarah_ross) - Katalyst Media, Head of Digital) 
3:00 break

3:30 Jeff Sass (@sass) - Listen and Hear
3:45 Hank Wasiak (@hankwasiak) - Time To Change The Way We See Social Media.
4:00 twitter and Photography - Wm Marc Salsberry
4:10 Bowen Payson (@virginamerica) - Manager of Online and Digital Marketing, Virgin America - "twitter and an Airline. Our story" 
4:20 Andy Dixon (@AndyDixn) - twitter and Integrity
4:30 break 
5:00 twitter and Music: (Panel): (Steve Greenberg, (@steviegpro) CEO, S-Curve Records, +TBA)
5:30 Adam Wallace (@adwal), New Media Manager, The Roger Smith Hotel, "It's All About The People."
5:40 The effects of twitter on News Gathering (panel): Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox); James Imajes (@Imajes); Brian Stelter (@brianstelter, New York Times.
6:00 End

(schedule is subject to change without notice)

I use Wordle to help me shape the editorial fabric of my writing.

It's a great tool to use once in a while to see what words are more pronounced than others, where I emphasize certain subject matters, people and how often I suggest certain subjects, strategies and ideas.

You can pick different fonts, colors, and the way your words are arranged. The site also has a galleries where you can view other people's works, and of course, post your own.