What exactly do these PR People Do?

A couple weeks back I had the pleasure of talking with, as I like to call them, “the PR people I know in Austin”: Lauren Sell and Josh Dilworth, both at the Austin Porter Novelli office.

I work with PR and AR people quite a lot, as you can imagine, so it was fun talking “shop-talk” with Lauren and Josh.

The episode is in two parts (with the podtech.net descriptions cut-n-pasted in):

Part 1: Working with the Press, Clients

Last week, I talked with Lauren Sell and Josh Dilworth of Porter Novelli Austin about doing PR for tech startups. My primary interest was figuring out what the day-to-day life of a tech PR person is, and to figure out and lessons learned. In this first part, we primarily talked about establishing trust and relationships with the press, helping being the eyes and ears for clients by keeping up with relevant news, and also how flexible plans for PR campaigns work with startups whose own plans change frequently.

Part 2: New Channels, Analyst Relations

In this second part of my interview with Lauren Sell and Josh Dilworth of Porter Novelli Austin, I ask them about the changing role of PR in the face of the Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and all those other “2.0” channels. We talk about the timing of PR campaigns to avoid starting too early or late, and also touch on the role of chance and “magic” in successful PR. Being in Austin, I ask them if local media (whether in Austin or any region) gets involved much in tech PR: it seems they only care about the impact to the local economy, not so much product news, as it were. Finally, we end up talking about AR, or Analyst Relations,

Cookies!

And, bless their hearts, they sent me some cookies today! So, I’ll have to disclaim that, I suppose: these people gave me cookies. Also, one of their clients, FiveRuns is a client.

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