There are a many free backlink checkers out there, but some of them apply restrictions such as only allowing you to check X number of sites per hour.  This one doesn’t do this and is quite comprehensive, listing links that are visible to a variety of search engines.  And if you click through you can explore the individual links.  Very useful. 

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The current thrust of comment in the blogosphere is that Microsoft has misfired badly by using the girl band to push the new operating system.  How many adult tech buyers are into the Sugababes? And what messaging does the campaign really seek to get across?  Is it that  tech companies feel they have to use glamorous female celebs to get interest from women (or maybe middle aged men)?

Maybe it’s just that a senior marketer at MS is a huge fan (I’ve known some business sponsorships to be no more strategic than that – although you’d expect a bit more from a global corporation that has come to expect its every move to be meticulously scrutinised). 

All good fun.  I love Windows 7 marketing!

I expect that pretty soon it will be a surprise to find any sites that aren’t bowing to the authority of the engines. If you’re in PR or copywriting I expect that checking your copy for the correct placement and frequency of keywords (don’t overdo it or the search engines will put you down as a spammer) will be a task akin to checking punctation and spelling.  And we know that all PRs are meticulous about that!

ZL’s ‘main beef’ seems to be that it was wrongly rated on Gartner’s magic quadrant ranking of vendors, which it alleges meant a significant loss of sales.  The company indicates that many purchasers refused to even consider its products because of the ranking.  And it cites an investigation into one large organisation which made a large purchase based ‘solely on the leadership rankings in the relevant Gartner MQ report’.

ZL says its problems are down to the fact that it was placed in the lower left quadrant of  Gartner’s report (ie a ‘Niche player’) because its sales and marketing are not as strong as its larger competitors.  And while I’m unfamiliar with the details of this particular case, I can say from experience that there is general confusion in the way people read MQs. 

The sought after ranking, and the ‘holy grail’ of analyst relations planners (as every good tech marketer knows) is getting a position on the top right quadrant – a ‘Leader’ positioning.  Many IT purchasers (and even some vendors) mistake a top right position as ‘short hand’ for the ‘you should definitely go out and buy this product or service’ position.  When in fact if you read Gartner’s own advice about how to use the MQ, it doesn’t mean this at all.

Here’s what Gartner says on its web site:

To evaluate vendors in the Leaders quadrant only and ignore those in other quadrants is risky and thus discouraged. For example, a vendor in the Niche Players quadrant could offer functions that are ideally suited to your needs. Similarly, a leader may not offer functions that meet your requirements — for example, its offerings may cost more than competitors’, or it may not support your region or industry. Use a Magic Quadrant to narrow your list of choices, but don’t base your decision only on the model.  

So you can sympathise with companies who lose sales if they aren’t positioned as a Leader.  But maybe the real problem is lazy IT purchasers not going through a proper evaluation when making buying decisions.

• Share your PR content on social networking sites – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook (this works all the better if you can provide links to actual PR coverage on high profile news sites or blogs).
• Adapt the content for email campaigns (prospects might be more likely to open a sales email if they’ve just read you news story about the same issue on a news site, industry blog or print publication)
• Make sure your telemarketing/sales  team knows about new PR content – they can mention it in sales conversations and send it in follow up emails
• Adapt case studies and customer quotes created by PRs so they can be used within sales presentations and customer pitch documents or proposals
• Post white papers produced by PR on technology news sites (most sites charge, but some specialist sites will let you post for free) 
• Encourage your company executives to use the content of PR articles and case studies as material for  industry speaking engagements
• Use the copy from PR case studies as part of submissions to industry Awards  
• Add links to PR content or positive coverage to staff email signatures
• Create a round-up of PR content and send it to customers as an email e-zine
• If your PRs are visiting a customer to get a briefing for a case study – consider getting a short video or audio clip to put on your web site

This incisive video I spotted on tech journalist Gordon Kelly’s blog is hilarious.  If you work in PR and marketing, you’ve probably already met the self proclaimed social media guru. Enjoy!

Speaking at the party conference, Brown called on Labour to adopt Obama style new media campaign tac tics. He wants to ramp up on online and web 2.0 marketing saying: 

“We have to use e-mail, Twitter and other social networking. We have to use all these new media to get through, because sometimes we don’t get fair treatment from some newspapers in this country.” 

Meanwhile, David Cameron, is still being mocked for insulting social networking users on a radio show earlier this year.  Even though Ofcom has pronounced that he did not break broadcasting rules when he described politicians who use the twitter as ’twats’, he’s unlikely to have made too many friends among the middle class ’twitterati’.

Bus Found On Moon!, Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster, Elton Takes David Up The Aisle….Everyone loves a quirky or cheeky headline.  And everyone just knows they can write them best.  So clients sometimes ask why PRs aren’t more creative with their press release headlines. 

Well it’s not just that we’re dull.  I’ve always been told that press release headlines need to be functional, not entertaining.  A good headline must do the job of letting  journalists know as quickly and as clearly as possible what the story is about.  So clever puns or cryptic press release headlines – no matter how witty – are in fact a big no no!

And of course the best journalists will seldom want to take your headline straight off the same press release that all their competitors are receiving.  They’ll want to develop their own hook and angle and  come up with a headline to match that’ll make the story theirs.   

So rather than ask whether the headlines written by your PRs are creative.   Ask if they convey the key point of the story as clearly and succinctly as possible.  Job done.

(NB Of course the above only applies to press releases ie aimed at quickly grabbing the attention of journalists  – who spend their time wading through hundreds of PR headlines a day.  If you’re writing social media releases targeted directly at your key audiences, then I think there’s probably more room for entertainment in your headlines.  Although if they’re too cryptic or clever you can still get ignored).

Like most of us, I hate to fail at anything. If a campaign or project doesn’t deliver, it hurts in my gut.  And trying to explain why to a client who was expecting big results that didn’t quite come through is pretty hard. 

But failure can often be part of the territory in marketing - even more so in PR where there are so many things you can’t control.   The earliest PR failure I was involved was a Valentine’s Day music survey for a hi-fi company that I had  ‘pre-sold’ to The Sun newspaper.  This was in the mid 90s and the story got squeezed out, because pretty much the whole paper was devoted to ‘Take That’ announcing their break up that day.

There wasn’t much we could have done about this scenario.  But more often than not I find that PR is about having the flexibility to respond and adapt to failure.  An idea for an interview or an article doesn’t quite come off, you tweak it or build on it and try again.  When a journalist says ‘no thanks’ to a story, you use the interaction to learn what else is on their agenda and what else might work.

So I urge clients to judge their PR agencies on their ability to react to failure.  When an idea they’ve been discussing with you doesn’t come off, do they hide? Or are they open about why it didn’t work and how they’re developing it in other ways?