Technology Apocrypha. Or What The Hell Does This Even Mean.

“With the proliferation of Twitter, blogs and other assorted social media armaments, the relationship between PR and the media has changed dramatically.”

That’s the distillation from the 40,000 plus blog posts and articles written in a post-social media world describing the ever-evolving love/hate tryst between public relations pros and the media (define that as you will). This isn’t a blog post about what’s changed. Good Lord it’s not about what has changed – there’s been enough ink, digital and otherwise, written on that subject to wallpaper my house. (Clarification: The pre-existing viewpoints devoted to the changes in PR aren't bad or wrong, and the above two links are both excellent, well-done examples.)

I want to talk about what hasn’t changed: the words. This isn’t a good thing, especially in technology. For an industry that prides itself on wordsmithing, too many PR professionals take the lazy route with technical data – they simply repeat what their clients tell them, no matter the clarity of said message. You can push a message out a thousand different ways – Facebook, email, Twitter, blogs, social news aggregators, and so on – but if it is nothing more than gibberish, why even bother?

Fact: We aren’t hired to regurgitate technical messages word-for-word. Public relations is a value-add service, meaning that it should add value to whatever it touches. By mimicking existing information verbatim, that value disappears like a snowball in an oven. Most PR pros aren’t technical, or at least not in the same manner as our clients – so what turns hardcore techie information into usable, media-friendly messages?

1. If you don’t know, ask. There’s a difference between looking bright in a meeting and completely failing behind the scenes. Pretending that you know more than you do is a surefire recipe to tank, whether to a client-side expert or, even worse, to a tech-savvy member of the media. When it comes to fully understanding a client technology before undertaking a campaign, very few questions are dumb.
   
   
2. Learn, dummy. Wikipedia. You should use it. Don’t take granular details from the resource as fact, but getting more information on general trends is extremely useful, especially if you’re faced with a screen full of esoteric acronyms.
   
   
3. Analogies are your friend. Trying to explain extremely back-end/high-tech/emerging technologies to a wider audience can be daunting, so it’s far easier to compare and contrast it to a piece of technology already in existence. That’s not to say you should compare a SOA platform to a toaster…but if you’re doing that, you need a different blog post.
   
   
4. Jargon must die. Buzzwords and “popular” technology phrases should be avoided at all costs – why are you filling your message with something that’s already been said? Find a unique way to describe the product or at least prove differentiation to competitors – unique and different make news; the crowd just watches the news.
   

This is not an indictment for technical news items – every industry and field has watchers that will understand each buzzword or jargon-laden phrase in a release. But once you go beyond that handful of publications, you need to adapt your message or risk being ignored. Or worse, mocked.

-John Terrill

(Photo Courtesy of David Reeves)