• Rapid Response PR is Dead. Long Live Rapid Response PR.

    Rapid Response PR is Dead. Long Live Rapid Response PR.

    As anyone working in the media, PR or the cybersecurity industry knows all too well, not a week – and arguably a day – goes by without a data breach, major cyber-attack or some serious security threat impacting a major corporation, not to mention thousands or potentially millions of consumers whose personal data and financial information is often exposed during these incidents.

    Underscoring this assertion are some rather ugly numbers courtesy of the Online Trust Alliance (OTA), who reported earlier this year that cyberattacks targeting businesses nearly doubled in the past year, from 82,000 in 2016 to 159,700 in 2017. As with many things in life, such as college tuition, taxes and price tags on waterfront real estate, these numbers never, ever go down.

    At the same time, 451 Research recently found the total number of cybersecurity firms worldwide as of December 2017 was more than 1,600 and growing.

    So, when the next adult (ahem) dating site, credit bureau rating agency or online retailer gets hacked – and they will – the electronic flood gates will open. The initial wave of media reports will inevitably focus on the who and the what. Very quickly however, enterprising business/finance and security reporters and bloggers will shift their focus to the why and now what?  This is the stage that usually creates a feeding frenzy for PR professionals everywhere. This has come to be commonly known as “Rapid Response” media relations.

    When this happens, should you join the fray and attempt to get your company/your client and its “expert” quoted by the business and tech media covering the next inevitable breach du jour?  If so, how do you do so effectively without wasting valuable cycles – yours, your executive’s and the media’s?

    More than likely, it is not a matter of if, but when to seek out media opportunities. Here are a few thoughts on rapid response media relations and some suggestions for doing it well:

    “Stay in Your Lane”

    This might be stating the obvious, but many times even the best PR professionals – whether because we are just a bit too busy, over-caffeinated or simply (over?) eager to produce results for a new client or boss, can fall into this trap. If you work for an application security provider and the attack du jour involved a malware attack, that’s not an ideal opportunity to provide commentary. The relevance between the incident and your client should be immediately apparent.

    “Save Your Bullets”

    And by doing so, take a rifle shot vs. a machine gun (pardon the warfare terminology).  In other words, go for the high percentage opportunity based on timing, insights you can deliver, etc. If you think your analysis is good but not great, hold off until the next incident to potentially save face with your target media.

    “Follow the Sun”

    If you work for or with an organization with operations around the globe, leverage the expertise in EMEA or Asia Pac to have a statement, response, report, set of data points, etc. ready for delivery to media as they are just waking up to their favorite mode of communication.

    “Don’t Guess or Speculate”

    Yes this is a PR 101 statement, but this tweet below suggests it still happens far too often and even more frequently in the wake of a data breach.

    “No Means No”

    If an overburdened media member gets back to you and says, “no thanks,” or lets you know that the input wasn’t a fit or was otherwise too promotional, move on. As Eminem put it, “You only get one shot.”

    “Rapid Response is NOT Newsjacking”

    I expect some pushback here, but by its very definition, rapid response is a reactive activity for dealing with issues as they happen or shortly thereafter. The best rapid response efforts require preparation/anticipation, insider knowledge, active monitoring of immediate news coverage when an event occurs, some degree of waiting/analyzing media or other third-party reaction and then determining if, and how, to contribute to the dialogue. Finally, once readiness and messaging is determined, its Go Time.

    Newsjacking (full acknowledgement to the inventor of the term, David Meerman Scott) is, in my opinion, more strategic and one that involves a proactive plan for inserting a brand, commentary, data points or pre-planned stories into the conversation about an entirely different entity. Think of this more in terms of an election campaign, ballot referendum, major sporting event or a rather controversial story scenario (Google Earth and Warby Parker/Solar Eclipse and Oreo/Super Bowl Black Out are some of the best-known examples by major consumer brands).

    Newsjacking done strategically – and hopefully successfully – again includes preparation, monitoring, waiting and then swift action, but also requires a bit more creativity and innovation on the part of the communications team. With newsjacking, the key is to evaluate each news story or trending topic to determine if there’s a good fit for your brand, executive, client, to get included in the conversation. And do so quickly!

    Tim Hurley

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  • Matter Communications Adds Clients to Extensive Technology Portfolio

    Client additions bolster lineup of B2B tech brands tapping Matter for integrated marketing and public relations

    BOSTON – July 26, 2018 – Today, Matter Communications announced that eight technology companies have selected the firm as their agency of record. Matter, a Brand Elevation Agency specializing in PR, social media, creative services and digital marketing, already represents more than fifty technology clients, including leading brands like Johnson Controls, JDA Software, PTC, and Progress, among others.

    “For 15 years, Matter has been proud to work with some of the best names in technology, and we’re thrilled to add eight more brands to that roster,” said Scott Signore, CEO, Matter. “While each of these new clients has a unique and different market opportunity, the unifying theme among them is the desire to partner with an agency that can integrate seamlessly into all the marketing efforts they have underway. We’re so pleased to be the partner they’ve chosen to help elevate their brands, whether through a PR and social program, or a 360-degree program that also includes digital marketing and creative support.”

    Recent additions to Matter’s technology roster span multiple industries, including data, SaaS, AI, cybersecurity and cloud, and include:

    • 128 Technology: A next-generation networking company that develops Session Smart™ Routers that are simple, agile and intuitive while providing more advanced security, reliability, and performance capabilities than traditional hardware-centric networking products.
    • Auth0: A global leader in Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS), Auth0 provides a Universal Identity Platform for web, mobile, IoT and internal applications.
    • BlueSnap: A global payments technology company that provides an all-in-one Payment Platform designed to increase sales and reduce costs for B2B and B2C businesses.
    • Comodo CA: The largest TLS/SSL vendor and certificate authority with over 1 million TLS/SSL certificates issued worldwide securing transactions and creating trust online.
    • Databricks: Provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering and business.
    • Kespry: A leading Aerial Intelligence platform that uses industrial drones to transform the way data is captured in the field.
    • Moltin: An API-based commerce solution that makes it simple, flexible and fast to bring commerce experiences to life wherever the consumer interacts with a brand.
    • Omnigo Software: The leading provider of public safety, incident and security management solutions for law enforcement, education, healthcare and other enterprises, offering easy-to-use, flexible applications that provide actionable insight for making more informed decisions.

    “In a short time, Matter has proven to be an integral part of our team, making it possible for us to execute and achieve our ambitious growth goals,” said Jonathan Skinner, chief marketing officer, Comodo CA. “The Matter team has been an incredible partner, delivering expertise from all areas to provide a true integrated marketing approach.”

    With offices in Boston and Newburyport, Mass., Providence, R.I., Boulder, Colo., and Portland, Ore., Matter is one of the fastest-growing public relations, social media, creative and digital marketing firms in the country. Matter has won seven ‘Agency of the Year’ accolades in the past three years and has been recognized numerous times as a best place to work. For more information on Matter’s technology practice and service offerings, visit https://www.matternow.com.

    About Matter Communications

    Matter is a Brand Elevation Agency unifying public relations, social media, creative services, search marketing and digital marketing into strategic, content-rich communications campaigns that inspire action and build value. Founded in 2003, with five offices spanning North America, Matter works with the world’s most innovative companies across healthcare, high-technology, consumer-technology and consumer markets. For more information, please visit https://www.matternow.com.

    Contact

    Matter

    Erin Brooks, 617-391-9893

    [email protected]

    www.matternow.com

    Matter

  • Six Tips to Maximize Your Black Hat Experience

    Six Tips to Maximize Your Black Hat Experience

    Major security industry shows have become increasingly crowded and competitive in recent years, but when it comes to the deepest technical discussions, the quality of research issued here and its ability to draw the “heavy hitters,” Black Hat is the best big security show out there. If you play your cards right, Black Hat can be your most productive and successful show of the year. Here are six tips to ensure you maximize your Black Hat investment.

    1. Give Them Something to Talk About

    You don’t have to be presenting to make a splash at Black Hat (the bar for selected presentations is incredibly high). Have you fine-tuned your threat research? Are you in close touch with your researchers, product team and sales reps to make sure they’re sharing the latest intelligence from customers on threats they’re seeing in their environments? Are there any notable new tactics or approaches attackers are taking when trying to infiltrate them? Are attack patterns shifting, or are new groups on the radar?

    Understanding what your customers are facing – and how your team is advising and helping them from a technology standpoint – will go a long way in conversations with potential prospects, or your counterparts across the industry. Come with 3-5 key observations your team has been making on the state of the threatscape, and be sure to ask others in your position what key they have been seeing.

    2. Figure Out Your Schedule Early – But Give Yourself Time to Breathe

    Black Hat is always chock full of compelling, bleeding edge research, and it’s hard not to load up your schedule with sessions that will cover the latest hack of a government satellite or autonomous vehicle. Try to resist the temptation to be in every buzz-worthy session. Instead, focus on those most likely to attract potential customers or partners searching for practical knowledge. These sessions will provide value long after the event ends.

    You can catch up on the hot sessions later – there’s likely to be news or blog coverage covering those discussions. There will inevitably be a few you skip that seem like a missed opportunity in hindsight, but you can always try to connect with a colleague or counterpart who attended, or even reach out to the speaker.

    3. Come in With a Social Media Game Plan

    Be sure your team is aligned on key messaging and has relevant content created and timed to go live throughout the show. Promote any planned announcements, directing attendees to key sessions you have a hand in, and call attention to fun activities – at your booth, with partners, or at off-site events. Have key team members tweet from the sessions they are attending (particularly the ones that speak directly to your customer base – be it actual or aspirational) to highlight key ideas covered during the talk. Include some light analysis that ties something to relevant news, where appropriate, tagging the speaker’s handle and using the event hashtag. Tweets that drive engagement typically catch the attention of the speaker and can give you a valuable “in” to create a more direct dialogue.

    4. Party Hop With a Purpose

    Give yourself an hour or so per event, and keep conversations to a 5-10-minute window – enough to make a genuine connection and swap business cards. Take notes on the back of each card with context from your chat, or download a networking app like Leadature, LeadPod or iCapture to make the job even easier.

    5. Run a Poll at the Booth

    Speaking of apps that can help you maximize networking punch, iCapture also gives you the ability to create custom surveys that can easily align with MailChimp, Constant Contact and other marketing programs you probably use already. Another option here is QuickTap Survey. As a best practice, these booth surveys should be no longer than 3-5 questions at maximum, and the objective should be to quickly get to the heart of what a prospect’s pain points are.

    6. Don’t Delay Your Post-Show Follow-up

    Yes, you’ll likely be wiped out after the event, but it will only take 15 minutes or so on the flight home to sketch out a game plan for follow up. If you wait until you’re already home, it won’t be as fresh in your mind and chances are you’ll wind up missing some key details. Split your activities into key buckets broken out by urgency, from “Right Away” to “Early Next Week” to “TBD/Later.”

    Hopefully you’ll emerge from Black Hat with a solid list of new prospects you can quickly convert to customers, some budding partnerships/integrations to start cooking on, and lots of interesting co-marketing ideas to put in motion.

    Matter

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  • Finding Your Corporate Social Voice

    Finding Your Corporate Social Voice

    I’m sure you’ve researched successful corporate social accounts, and discovered some fun ones. There are many round ups that include memorable content such as Taco Bell (@tacobell) and its sassy comebacks, clever retweets and witty banter. While the fast food chain has seen incredible success, as HuffPost says, “Whoever runs Taco Bell’s Twitter account deserves a raise,” the same approach wouldn’t work for a B2B enterprise technology company or a medical device manufacturer.

    This doesn’t mean your social accounts need to be boring. A B2B brand that immediately comes to mind when thinking of successful social voice is IBM (@IBM). The company keeps things conversational and creative with language and images, all while maintaining its serious position as a thought leader in enterprise technology. Social media has become an incredible marketing tool for every kind of business, allowing gained visibility and traction with potential clients and employees too. To implement a successful corporate social media program, first identify your social voice, from there strike the right balance in the tone of each social post, thereby elevating your brand to new levels.

     

    Finding your voice and sticking to it

    Something as simple as posting one semi-controversial tweet or using a hashtag incorrectly can damage your brand’s image. This is why it is important to determine your voice before you begin. When identifying your company’s social voice, think about what personality you’d like your brand to be remembered for. Is it professional? Or approachable, energetic, humorous? Deciding your voice can go a long way in determining how you craft your content. If you don’t decide up front and begin posting without a voice in mind, your social may seem disjointed, and in turn less human.

    To discover your company’s voice, ask the right questions. What makes your company different from your competitors? Highlight that. What is your company’s mission or values? Highlight them. What is the tone of past content your company has produced, e.g. a blog or ad? Utilize it. Who is this content for? Tailor to that audience. Are there other companies you’d like to align with? Emulate their social accounts without copying them. Your voice should be authentic and consistent with the goals of your program.

    From there, you can decide the appropriate tone to take by looking at your target audience, content and goal for each post, as well as the social channel.

     

    Who’s going to be using that hashtag you spent hours brainstorming?

    It’s important to identify your current audience, but also who you’d like to gain as followers. Strike a balance; you want your natural audience to get excited about the content that you’re sharing, but you also want to make sure you’re sharing the type of content that will attract new followers to help your brand grow and succeed. It’s important to regularly monitor any feedback, negative or positive, and adjust on a timely basis. If you’re professional and informative  thought leadership posts are receiving more engagement than your goofy, happy-hour staff pictures, adjust accordingly, all while keeping in mind that each type of post can perform significantly differently on different channels.

    As a rule of thumb, Facebook and Instagram tend to lean more toward employee engagement and lighter company culture and recruitment subjects. LinkedIn tends to be more thought leadership, professional content, and Twitter lies somewhere in between. While the content and tone may be different for all three, maintaining the same voice (personality!) across accounts is key for a cohesive brand story.

     

    Want to learn more about creating a successful social media program? Check us out here.

    Matter

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  • Matter VP, Maria Brown, on the Boulder Tech Podcast

    Matter VP, Maria Brown, on the Boulder Tech Podcast

    Matter Vice President, Maria Brown, guest starred on Episode #13 of the Boulder Tech Podcast.

    In the podcast Maria gives her take on a number of matters, such as:

    • How Google levels the playing field for PR
    • The maturing of Boulder’s startup scene
    • How to cut through the noise
    • A potential new project for Boulder Startup Week founder Andrew Hyde

    Click the play button below to listen!

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    This podcast originally appeared on Boulder Tech Podcast. 

    Matter

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  • A Quick Guide to Getting Involved in the Political Landscape

    A Quick Guide to Getting Involved in the Political Landscape

    It’s been about a year since my colleague Claire Papanastasiou broached the topic of politics and PR – and what a year it’s been. We’ve watched as companies and thought leaders took on the current administration to varying degrees of success and peril, and we’ve seen the relationship between PR and politics shift in a myriad of ways.

    The question of whether or not to get involved is as complicated as it’s ever been. Some companies have knocked it out of the park – like Cards Against Humanity’s crowdfunding campaign to buy plots of land in front of the intended border wall; and Patagonia’s lawsuit to block reductions to national monuments.

    On the flip side, more recently, we’ve seen businesses take stances with larger risks. Dick’s Sporting Goods and Walmart released statements on gun control that included actual policy changes – a move that incited public praise, but also upset a good chunk of paying customers. And, to the protests of many consumers, a number of corporations recently chose to cut business ties with the NRA.

    Splashy initiatives aside, there remains great opportunity for thought leaders to enter important conversations with helpful expertise and unique perspectives. People are seeking reason and explanations, and educated third-parties with a solid point of view are a welcome source.  

    When to Jump In

    If the leaders of your organization are passionate, confident and pushing to weigh in on the topic of the day, the first question you need to ask them is: Do you actually have anything valuable to add to the conversation? There is a very thin line between ambulance chasing and newsjacking, so it’s important that your input be worthwhile and helpful.

    Some questions to ask as you weigh the options include:

      • How emotionally heated is the conversation surrounding the topic right now?
      • Are you taking a personal political stance, or providing welcome, unbiased background?
      • Will your input help anybody?
      • Will your input hurt anybody?
      • Will it affect sales? If yes, do you care?
      • Are you ready?

    That last one is a little loaded. What we mean is, have you taken time to craft careful and purposeful messaging that has been internally routed and approved? Have you researched relevant and responsible members of the media you want to share the news with? Have your social media and customer service teams prepared to respond to a potential onslaught of backlash?

    While it’s true what they say – that it’s important to strike while the iron is hot – it’s far more important to be ready.

    Need more advice on getting involved? Let us help.

    Jackie Fraser

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  • Marketing Mojo: Insights from A to Z Wineworks’ Director of Marketing, Keith Scott

    Marketing Mojo: Insights from A to Z Wineworks’ Director of Marketing, Keith Scott

    Matter VP Lydia Fakhouri recently sat down with A to Z Wineworks’ Director of Marketing, Keith Scott, to discuss marketing trends, the media landscape and how he serves as the brand steward. Check out the video from the interview and read below for more of the conversation.

    Lydia Fakhouri (LF): Where do you think the marketing and advertising industry is heading in the next few years?

    Keith Scott (KS): As we observe where advertising and marketing are headed in the next couple of years, I think it’s inextricably linked to what is happening in media, which has been one of the most disruptive and dynamic categories over the last 10 to 15 years. It’s gone from a traditional category to one that’s dynamic. There was a lot of technology, and now we are having that existential crisis of: what is true? What is factual? What can be trusted that is served to me either digitally, or in print, or on TV?

    LF: What marketing technology investments is A to Z making in the next year?

    KS: We are certainly keen students of the media landscape. So, what new technologies might we want to invest in? But also keeping in mind that we don’t want to invest in shiny objects. And, just because you can yell in someone’s ear as a marketer, doesn’t mean that you should. We’re very mindful of our audience. How do they want to be reached? When do they want to be reached?

    LF: Where do think marketing is going in the next 5 years, and how does that affect your role as Director of Marketing?

    KS: Marketing and advertising is embedded and linked to media. So, as a marketer, if you are not hyper vigilant about media trends, you’re not doing your job. That is tied to the agency model as well. As more creative work is brought in-house by clients for better or worse, what’s an agency model that’s going to be successful and sustainable in the long-term? How do agencies service their clients in a way that’s profitable for both parties, and where everyone’s incentives are correctly aligned? So, I view my job to be very much a steward of the brand. How do we promote the brand of A to Z Wineworks? And then, again, keenly vigilant on how our brand is placed in culture and in media.

     

    Looking for more Marketing Mojo? Check out Insights from Evergage CMO, Andy Zimmerman

    Matter