Modelling public relations

Having been involved with assorted PR for small and large companies, here's a model I use for thinking about how and when to do what.

First, there is a lot of background noise, and if you go to the trouble of crafting a story about something you'd like strangers as well as your friends to read, then you need enough signal to stick out of the noise.

Expand this a little to a 3D surface metaphor, over which you and your audience is travelling in time. Events are hills - some of these are predictable, like trade shows and holidays, some are not, like weather events and acquisitions. Looking back, they perturb the landscape, with the size of the hill and the slope of its sides representing the volume and trend rate of the commentary about and around the event.

bigdata

image from Matlab

Each of your audiences is starting from a different place on the surface, whether existing customers, prospects, existing employees, future candidates, existing and potential investors, or politicians. Tailoring your content, the distribution of that content, and the release timing is an effort to get your story to form a noticeable hill in the path of that audience. Each of those audiences will also look back in time (will search for relevant material); including the right terms improves your visibility from some future time looking back.

While planning for a release, remember to account for internal review time - to improve the quality, to check for legal issues, to include other parties mentioned or likely to be influenced by the release.

Lastly, proof read! People won't notice correct spelling and good grammar, but they will mark you down heavily for uncorrected mistakes.

References
Getting attention for a blog post http://socialmouths.com/blog/2011/05/12/how-to-plan-and-write-a-blog-pos...
Recipe for a blog post http://diythemes.com/thesis/perfect-blog-post/
Contact lists for tech reporters http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2012/07/tech-reporter-contact-list.html

How your data gets used
https://www.recordedfuture.com/how-people-use-recorded-future/competitiv...
https://www.recordedfuture.com/assets/Detecting-Emergent-Conflicts-throu...

Cunning Systems evaluates product and service ideas in computing and communications. If you would like to discuss an idea, contact us at info@cunningsystems.com