Engage PR Wins a Silver Star

Remember how great it was to receive a shiny paper star for good work when you were in grade school? Well, it still feels great to get a shiny star. Engage PR recently received a Silver Star Award™ in the "Wireless & Mobile Technology PR Firm" category from MobileVillage. The Mobile Star Awards recognize the top mobile products, success stories, and visionaries as chosen by thousands of readers of MobileVillage's twice-monthly newsletter Go Mobile®. This marks the second Mobile Star Award EPR has won.

Winning a Silver Star Award is especially sweet because it represents the opinion of people with whom EPR has worked over the years and who took the time to vote for us. Thank you all!

How to Enhance Press Releases on a Budget

In tough economic times, clients are looking to get the most out of their PR program. Issuing press releases isn't cheap - $10,000-plus for global distribution of 1,000 words. Enhanced features such as SEO and graphics, which increases a client's chance for getting coverage, escalate costs even further. But you can get the benefits of enhanced features at a bargain rate. For one client, Engage PR was able to lower the price for global distribution of an SEO-enhanced release to under $4,000. Here's how:

1. Wire services charge per word after the first 400 words. Cut the release to 600 words, create a "landing page" on your web site for the full-length release, and you'll drive traffic to your web site for a lower cost.
2. For about $200 you can use the wire service's SEO tool to extend the time a release will appear on page one in search engines from 28 days to up to three months.
3. Using wire service optimization tools to determine what key words to include in your release increases the chance that potential customers will find your site, rather than your competitors'.
4. Reporters are more likely to cover your news - and readers are more likely to read it - if you include graphics. The price is right: about $400 for the first graphic and $200 for each additional graphic.

Award Finalist

The Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) has named the online forum www.UMAToday.com a finalist in its 2008 Excellence in New Communications Awards program. These awards honor the innovative use of social media, mobile media, online communications, and other new media and technologies.

UMA Today was a perfect candidate for the award, since it is a new-media-driven program. Developed by EPR client Kineto Wireless, the key innovator and leading supplier of UMA technology, the UMA Today web site and associated blogs, podcasts, live webinars, and more bring UMA to a global audience. And the program has helped gain industry support for UMA as the leading long-term solution for fixed-mobile convergence.

UMA Today's new-media components also help Engage PR promote UMA to the media, analysts, Kineto's partners, and the partners' prospective customers. EPR not only publicizes the web site but also recommends blog topics, helps promote Kineto and UMA thought leadership by promoting new webinars to press and analysts, and more.

Being named an SNCR award finalist confirms that UMA Today is making highly effective use of new media to spread the UMA message globally. And it shows that EPR's ongoing efforts to understand and use the latest new-media techniques are paying off for our clients.

EPR Is Now on Facebook

Engage PR now has its own site on Facebook. We encourgage all readers to visit our site and become a fan; you'll find links to our blog, photos, and more.

Media Says Talking with Customers Is a Must

To better understand the new needs of tech reporting, Engage PR recently surveyed 60 top technology media and bloggers. Our questions focused on best practices and the constraints and pressures reporters and publications face in today's publishing industry and economy.

The results depict an industry that though hampered by fewer ad dollars and an expanding breadth of coverage is incredibly adaptive and resourceful. About 94.7 percent of respondents write over two stories a week, and 42.1 percent write six or more. About 68.2 percent cover multiple beats for publications with multiple audiences in different areas of technology.

These results show the need for and value of well-executed and creative PR, especially in a down economy. Editors and bloggers said the top two sources of their story ideas are PR-driven content such as PR/vendor pitches and product news/vendor announcements. In addition, 78.9 percent leverage technical experts or vendor executives for their stories-and 63.2 percent said talking with customers is a must.

Survey statistics are valuable PR tools, providing insight that helps us gear PR to the needs and preferences of the media and bloggers. Engage PR learned so much from the survey that we now intend to assess the landscape of tech reporting on an annual basis.

One Great Opportunity, Three Happy Clients

A few months ago, Engage PR found that the Financial Times would devote its September "Personal View" feature in its Digital Media section to IT security. Several of Engage PR's clients have expertise in this market, and the feature provided an ideal opportunity for telling their stories. ArcSight provides security and compliance management solutions for enterprises, MSSPs, and government agencies; ConSentry offers intelligent control for comprehensive LAN security; and Nominum is a global provider of network naming and addressing, DNS, and DHCP solutions.

Many companies vie to place "Personal View" articles, so EPR's first step was to contact the editor to find out what we could do to make sure that opinion pieces submitted by our clients would have the greatest chance of being accepted. EPR found that articles should focus on the business benefits of the technology being discussed. Plus, the pieces had to be vendor-neutral-this was not the place for blowing your own horn. Another key criterion was to include industry statistics to show third-party validation for the clients' positioning.

Once EPR obtained this information, it worked with ArcSight, ConSentry, and Nominum to recommend topical IT security topics that were interesting to Financial Times' audience.

Articles from all three clients were accepted and published in the Financial Times in September:
ArcSight: Businesses can spot cybercrime - if they look for it
ConSentry: Budget constraints can drive IT innovation
Nominum: 'Cache poisoning' is new threat to Internet services

By doing our homework with the Financial Times, picking timely industry topics, and guiding our clients on content, EPR was able to secure three exclusive articles from one opportunity in a top global business publication. In addition, these articles were picked up by other news outlets online, and our clients are leveraging the coverage for sales-lead generation.

EPR introduces its "Ask the Expert" column with a Q&A with Matt Davis of IDC, who gives his insights on the challenges for ISPs in today's market. Each quarter, an industry expert will provide opinions on trends in technology, markets, or new media.

Q&A on Challenges Facing ISPs Today, with Matt Davis, Director, Consumer and Business Multiplay Services, IDC

1. What is the key challenge for Internet Service Providers in today's market?
Unquestionably, the need to develop new revenues using the broadband pipe. We track traditional revenue generators and monthly broadband subscription fees, and in the voice arena, access lines are really starting to recede and so are revenues. We're seeing hundreds of thousands if not millions of primary-retail-line losses per quarter and a two percent decrease in access revenue. We're also seeing an increase in wireless displacement; it just isn't true that every local voice subscriber that drops a telco goes to cable.

Often people cut the cord for economic reasons, which doesn't play well for ISPs, given what we're facing in the next year or two. So ISPs need to capitalize on video download, online gaming, or other services made possible by the infrastructure they are now laying in place. It's absolutely essential that ISPs capitalize and monetize that investment.

2. Will these challenges be the same for all providers, or do you see differences among different tiers?
I do see differences. The biggest service providers, with strong wireless divisions and well-diversified wholesale and enterprise businesses, are finding that consumer telecom is not as integral to their business as it once was. Those with facilities-based video capabilities are seeing strong growth. These companies can continue to generate revenues from services such as standard subscription-based voice, video, wireless voice and data, and of course broadband.

Telcos such as Quest and Windstream have significant challenges and must be innovative with new services. Facilities-based providers should experiment with targeted advertising. To me, the position of companies at this level is more urgent. They really do have to lead in innovation.

AT&T will continue to innovate with FMC, together with wireless and wireline services, television, and voice. AT&T is in a better position short term, so other revenue streams aren't as essential. I would say the same is true with Verizon; its investment in FIOS has really helped as far as television growth, although it could do a better job of tying wireless into FIOS.

We expected that the heat of broadband competition would have an impact on cable operators' ARPU and potentially on net adds. Instead, cable operators have had a couple of strong quarters and turned the tide in their favor on broadband deployment.

It is critical for telcos to refocus on broadband, the linchpin to all of these value-added services, and in particular on further investment in upgrades for ADSL2+, VDSL2, and fiber, where it makes sense. In sum, I think we need a renewed emphasis on Capex spending for faster broadband.

Zeugma Survey Generates Outstanding Coverage

Bandwidth capping - limiting the amount of bandwidth a subscriber can use over a certain period of time to keep the network from getting clogged-has been a hot topic with service providers. But EPR client Zeugma Systems, which makes a service delivery router for broadband networks, wanted to get the subscribers' point of view. The company thus asked global industry analyst firm IDC to conduct a survey on the topic.

The survey findings were of substantial interest to Zeugma's broadband service provider customers, as they showed that consumers simply hate bandwidth caps and will likely switch to another carrier to avoid them, if they have the option. That's a wake-up call for service providers contemplating bandwidth caps! The findings also validated that service providers need a product like Zeugma's so they won't be forced to implement strict bandwidth caps-and as a result, abandon customers.

Generating the data was only the first step, however. The next step was getting the message out. In September, Engage PR worked with Zeugma to pitch the survey results. By targeting specific publications and offering solid data from a third-party source, we were able to generate coverage that hit home with broadband service providers and elevated Zeugma as an expert on what consumers want from their broadband providers. Providing graphics to illustrate the findings made the coverage even more effective.

The results of the media push were outstanding. In all, EPR was able to generate more than 15 unique pieces of coverage from the survey results, including the following:

• GigaOm: No Surprise: Survey Shows U.S. Consumers Hate Broadband Caps
• Telephony Online: Consumers prefer premium broadband to caps, metering
• Contentinople: Survey: Users Reject Bandwidth Caps

Thinking about conducting and pitching your own survey? Consider the following:

• Choose a third-party analyst firm that is willing to discuss results with the press.
• Make sure the survey topic is timely and controversial.
• When developing the survey, make sure the findings can speak to your customers. What will help customers realize they can't live without your product or service?
• Use visuals to illustrate the findings; they can often be more powerful than numbers.

Engage PR 1301 Marina Village Parkway Suite 215 Alameda, CA 94501 510.748.8200 510.748.8201 (fax) www.engagepr.com blog.engagepr.com