Chameleon PR

I’m always rather proud when Bletchley Park gets a mention; a weird hybrid pride drawn from wartime endeavour and pioneering computing.

With that in mind, that Bletchley Park is to receive lottery funding to help preserve it for future generations should make me happy but, instead, it made me rather sad. Wouldn’t it be more in the spirit of Bletchley and early computing to invest the funding (the overall target is £10 million) in new research and development, or a bursary for technology learning? It could even be based on the park, which is surely more apt than it being a wedding venue?

Somehow Bletchley being a museum smacks of already having had our moment of computing and preserving it for fear of never having another.

Perhaps the best thing about social media, from a tech PR point of view, is the way it enables an organisation to reach a niche audience. A point solution is usually purchased by a specific job role. More often than not, there are not enough of these job roles to trigger the economies of scale to support a magazine serving their interest. Yet online, where audiences are international, costs are minimal, and enthusiasts abound, there are thriving communities dedicated to the niche.

If this all sounds a little conceptual, here’s an example. A client of ours, Clearpace, produces software and services that enable structured data (the type in databases) to be compressed by 40x of its original size, yet keeps the data searchable and retrievable. It offers massive costs savings as a result, but none the less ‘compressed structured data management and storage’ is a rare topic to venture into Computer Weekly.

Yet online there are multiple forums dedicated to it and a thriving debate. While traditional PR is still part of Clearpace’s PR mix, by participating in the online debate around compressed storage (in this case Clearpace’s Rainstor service), Clearpace is building its profile directly with its target market without having to wait for Compressed Structured Data Archiving and Storage Magazine to be launched.

Which is just as well, as a publication with a title that long would be a bugger to read on the Tube.

Judging by the presence of technology PR people on LinkedIn and our penchant for social networks we are one community that is clearly ahead of the social networking curve. This I affirmed today while attending the Director’s Networking Breakfast in Manchester and found that some fellow delegates hadn’t (yet) exploited their LinkedIn profiles to the full.

In hi-tech PR we’ve grown up with these tools around us so they are second nature, but I would recommend anyone who values their network, whether in LinkedIn or in a little black book, to spend some time building their online profile. Not only does inclusion on social networking sites help to give you or your company a favourable presence in Google searches and the like, it’s a great way of helping you engage specific communities who have an interest in you.

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