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| Connors' PR strategy for Picasa featured in article by Chris Kent in Ragan's Media Relations Report, February 2005. |
PR Case Study: Visibility in a Crowded Market
Don't tell me, show me: Online photo service wins coverage by using the product -- with reporters
When your pitch is in a "me too" market, your challenge is to find a way to make a product or company vault ahead of the competition -- especially when those rivals have established brand names. Bryan Pope, an account executive at Connors Communications in New York, met the me-too challenge by actually using a client's product to communicate with the media.
Background
In late 2003, Connors began working with Picasa, a software product that organizes users' digital photos and places them into online albums. The company had a great product, Pope says. It was simple to use and easy to understand, both important qualities for a product that was aimed at average consumers.
"The problem was that Picasa was a small fish in a big pond," explains Pope. "This market has many players in it, and Picasa was in the mid-range in that arena." Major companies like Adobe and Microsoft had recognized that the burgeoning popularity of digital cameras would bring about a demand for easy ways to store, modify and share pictures over the Web. In addition, startup companies like Ofoto and Shutterfly had crowded into the photo-sharing market.
"We found that if reporters were covering photo-organizing software, they were covering the space, not individual products," Pope says. "They were doing roundups." The team realized that their best hope for coverage was getting included in these roundups, since they probably wouldn't be able to convince a reporter to do a stand-alone piece about Picasa.
However, the challenge in even getting a mention in a roundup was that Picasa, while a well-developed product, didn't have any standout features. "It's a simple program for people who didn't want to mess around with resizing photos, or using Photoshop," says Pope. "But reporters who cover consumer technology are going to measure the product against what they know."
And since they were savvy about online digital imaging -- far savvier than the average consumer -- they might not be impressed with Picasa's simplicity: "It didn't jump out at them."
News Peg
In October 2003, Picasa launched Hello, a free utility for sharing photos through an instant messaging-style system. Users could trade photos instantly without the hassle of sending them via e-mail, and could post comments right next to the pictures.
"Just trying it out in the office totally blew us away," Pope recalls, noting that the program was fun, easy to use and unique in the market. "Hello provided us with the differentiator we needed: It was free, and no one was offering a photo-sharing service that incorporated the instant message-like chat function," he says. "But now the communications had become more complex. We had to weave two different brand names into the pitch."
Now that they had a standout product feature to pitch, the Connors PR team needed to think of some angles for a possible story.
"Our vertical targets were important to us. How would we get to the holy grail of women's magazines?" Pope says. "We had the message of simplicity, and we had to figure out how to get that message to the right audience." The team wanted to get beyond the digital camera story, and tell users how to share all the photos that are piling up on their computers.
The Pitch
With the advent of the Hello utility, Pope says his PR team realized they could use the new tool to show reporters, in real time, exactly why it was so cool. In early 2004, they assembled a large list of consumer technology reporters and editors at newspapers, magazines and Web sites, and sent them a pitch asking them if they wanted to test out Hello, as well as Picasa.
In the pitch, members of the Connors PR team offered up their own Hello screen names so that media contacts could test out the product with a PR person on the other end, and set up times to do so. "Since photo software was an evergreen topic, our strategy was to sign reporters up for Picasa, and chat with them directly about the product via Hello. This allowed us to develop key relationships with consumer tech reporters, and get a sense of when and what they were covering."
Results
The on-the-spot approach to pitching Picasa by chatting and sending photos to reporters did the trick. One of the first major placements was in the Boston Globe, which did a roundup on sharing photos online. Other key placements came from USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
The goal of raising Picasa's profile paid off big-time for the company: It was acquired by search engine Google in July 2004.
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