Aug
No more press releases!!
We have suspected for some time now, that EDA is in trouble. We has seen analyst coverage decline, VC funding decline. Profits decline. Many startup companies have disappeared. We have seen many publications disappear because of a lack of advertising dollars. We have seen many of the editors or columnists let go and some of them have started to move into the industry they once wrote about. One could be excused for thinking that the EDA industry made buggy whips!
But this industry is not about to disappear even though the number of chip starts is declining – it is just going through perhaps the biggest transition it has ever had to navigate. Business models are changing, technology advances are making tools that were once central and important decline while others are emerging. But wait – this is normal, just happening a little faster than usual perhaps.
So if you were hoping to hear doom and gloom from me, then sorry you came to the wrong place. If you wanted me to say that this is the best time ever for the industry or that the future looks the best I have ever seen, then you will not get that out of me either. What you will hear me saying is that there are enormous opportunities out there for the people or companies that can successfully see the path ahead and have the ability to capitalize upon it.
On of the areas seeing that change is the way in which news and information is reported. Right before DAC, when many bloggers received press passes for the conference, there were many articles from the old school and the new school throwing punches at each other in the editorials and blogosphere. I was so tempted to throw a few myself, but for once managed to restrain myself (Oh no – something is changing in me – I have to stop it). I am not going to start throwing punches now, but I am going to start raising a few issues regarding the role that each community plays.
Ever since being put on the press list for DAC, I started to receive copious numbers of press releases. Every one of them went in the trash can, not because I couldn’t be bothered with them, but because they contained nothing to interest me. I don’t care if so-and-so just landed a new customer, or that the latest release of the tool runs 20% faster or has an extra feature that was already available in the competitors tool offering. I don’t care that two tools that were obtained through acquisitions have just been integrated or that the company big-wig will be presenting somewhere. This is all irrelevant information to the blogosphere. Keep giving that to the tradition press – they know what to do with it!
Let’s start by looking at who puts the blogs together. Most of them are senior technologists or experienced marketing people. While many of them are tied to companies and only report about internal stuff, there are many other bloggers who are fully employed by a company and yet report on a wide range of topics. They do this because they have interests and opinions on things outside of what they encounter in their day jobs. They want to keep in touch with the broader industry – they use the blogs as a way of continuing their education and contacts within the industry. These people want real information and when they get it will feel that they have something that they want to pass on to their readers. It may be a condensation of the information, it may be putting it into a historical perspective, it may be related to other things they have observed and suggest how it could be made better.
Now let’s look at me. According to one traditional press person who had a lot to say about bloggers at DAC, I am just a consultant who only blogs to try and prove that I know my stuff and thus will be more likely to get hired. I don’t think so. If blogs were my marketing tool, then I know they are not very effective and I probably would not spend a lot of time on them. I do it because I want companies to feed me with information – relevant technical information that I can use in a number of ways. I want current information that I can use in my books or other articles, I want to be able to ensure that when I do give advice to companies, that it is based on the best information I can obtain, I want to be able to provide advice to companies on development directions, I want to be able to report on directions that I see important for the future so that I can help guide the industry. Some of these may make money for me, many of them I do as a service to the industry – especially to small start-up companies.
Let me give you a concrete example (with names and everything changed to protect the innocent and guilty). Several months ago I received a press release from a company that talked about the integration of two products. Big deal. No “news” there. I even had a couple of traditional editors call me to ask if this was significant or not. I told them – no it wasn’t. But what I did tell them was that along with the press release the company had provided an FAQ, and that hidden in that FAQ was one sentence that got my attention. A sentence that if true, would be something to talk about – something quite big. None of those editors bothered to follow up on that tip I had given them. But I did. I emailed the company and talked to several people and found out that this was real and that it was working with a few early customers, it just hadn’t been fully released yet. I believed that the ramification of that new piece of engineering would be big. I still do, and I blogged about it. I did something that the traditional press seems not to do. I could see the value in something and project the impact that it would have because I understand the technology, I understand the needs of their customers. I also included it in my latest book “ESL Models and their Application” which should be out in January 2010 (sorry for the blatant plug).
Another thing that really irks me are non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Many companies want to talk to me, but insist that I sign an NDA with them before they will share information with me. First off – this is stupid. If they are talking with me it is to share information that I can use. How can I do that if I am them bound by their NDA. Many companies have made me sign an NDA and then all they “share” with me are a few high-level marketing slides that I could have created in my sleep. They somehow think this is their crown jewel – something that will totally reveal their strategy and that if it got out then every other company would race to copy them and remove their advantage in the field. Brother!
I am currently working with another company who is providing me with a lot of internal and confidential materials. Yes – I signed an NDA with them, but the point is to use that information to turn it into something that is for public consumption. At the end of the project everything will become public. I am helping them to get information out to the community in ways that the traditional press can no longer do. I am providing in-depth, highly technical information that will help customers decide if certain tools are right for them, what to expect from them, how to adopt them, what mistakes to try and avoid etc.
So it is not just the physical form of the press that is changing. Not only is print almost dead, but the Internet is only working for a small number of publications as well. It is about the type of information that is being transferred between an EDA company and their customers. This is not the kind of material that has been made available before. The content is changing. The format is changing and the way in which companies provide information to people like me has to change as well. Stop sending the press releases, stop making me sign NDA’s for useless marketing dribble, start sending me announcements about significant technical advances and the contact people that I can talk to for more information if and when I need it. Then I may blog about you, or include the information in some of my more substantial writing ventures or ensure that systems companies that seek my advice get the information they need and know who to talk to if they are interested.
EDA companies – listen up. We bloggers are part of your new information channel – it just has to be on different terms than the past.
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Brian Bailey – keeping you covered
brian_bailey at acm.org
Brian,
This is the blog post I wish I had written
I had a similar conversation with a fellow blogger earlier this week, one who is more in the sales and marketing side, about the waning value of press releases and PR people in general. I’m more new to blogging that you are, so the PR attention is new to me. But as far as DAC was concerned, PR people added little value beyond what a good admin would have done in trying to set up meetings. The ones that sat in my meetings with me said nary a word.
As for NDAs, I know they are needed in some cases, but they are certainly overused. Most companies would get more benefit from the positive coverage resulting from releasing the “family jewels” than any competitive harm.
Harry
August 7th, 2009 at 9:51 pmHey Brian,
The old joke about ‘delete’ being the first key to get worn blank on a journo’s keyboard is not actually a joke. We just take solace in the fact that fewer trees are being toppled to pay for the ‘incrementals’ these days. The old Electronics Times could receive several hundred pieces of mail a day in the run-up to an event like Electronica, and 99.9% of it was binned even then.
As for NDAs, they simply have no place in the communications industry. Embargos, yes, but NDAs that limit what you can say publicly in any way beyond when you can say it should simply be rebuffed.
And slagging PRs over a lot of this smacks somewhat of killing the messenger. The problem is not necessarily there but sited among the people who direct them and have outdated expectations and an outdated sense of how things work. It’s hard for PRs to talk about their internal and external masters publicly, but just about everyone I’ve ever met in tha business can tell you plenty of horror stories about releases they have been forced to issue after warning that they were more likely to irritate than inform or even mildly interest the community.
Welcome to the club.
Paul
August 11th, 2009 at 12:08 pmHi Paul,
August 11th, 2009 at 12:29 pmThanks for your thoughtful comments. I am not against PR agencies in any ways – so I agree with you there; they are as you say just the messenger. However, they are also the messengers back into the companies and I think it is important to try and give them some guidance about how to reach the Blogosphere. If we don’t tell them what is not working, then how are they going to change and respond. So I hope the article did not sound too negative – I just want to see some changes happening.
So just who is “traditional” press anymore? I don’t know anyone who fits into that category. While many of the editors I know may write what you consider to be “traditional” stories (who hired whom, who bought whom, faster than fast newest, coolest chip), they also are looking for the “interesting bits” and when they find it, it may appear in a traditional article (whatever that is) or a blog with a teaser tweet. I was recently in an interview with a traditional editor and he accepted the meeting based on the press release and the not so exciting topic discussed in the release. What he wrote about was something he began poking at during the interview and had little to do with the topic of the call. And then this traditional editor blogged the story. There are no traditonal editors nor skillsets exclusive to one group over another. Not if they are good at their job. While some editors may not take a story to a deeper level, some well-known bloggers write to enjoy their own writing. But you aren’t one of them Brian. You always bring something to the table to get people going!
August 11th, 2009 at 6:43 pmHi Susan. I think you have hit the nail on the head, now we just have to work out the right terms. By “traditional” press, I mean the place where press releases go – almost verbatim. They are a conduit of information between a company and the user community via some print or on-line publication. It allows the company to reach not only their existing customers but also their non-customers. There is value there and I am not saying it should stop.
In your example, you cite what I believe is the real purpose of editors and bloggers alike. To find something that they believe has value to people – a level of understanding that does not come from raw information. In your case, a press release triggered that, but I would suggest that there are better ways to encourage that form of dialog.
Most good articles (in my opinion) have an educational purpose. The reader should understand something at the end of it that was not clear or evident before. This could come from an aggregation of information from several sources, or the impact that a particular development could have on the way a technology is used etc. What I need is access to information that can allow me to do this in an efficient and effective manner. This kind of information is deeper than would be contained in a press release, so I either need a more detailed source of information that I can access (without NDA), or access to the people who can provide it (as was the case with your client).
As you can see, I don’t have all of the answers, but I do know that sending a press release to me is very unlikely to get the desired response. I have tried to write up many potential solutions to this and so far at the end of each of them I reach a conclusion that they suffer from many of the same problems. I agree that at the end of the day I may need some kind of trigger that a company has something important to say, but most of the time I just want access to information from which I can extract what I think is interesting. So I also need the ability to pull information.
August 12th, 2009 at 10:50 amHi.
Disclosure, so as not to protect the guilty: I’m the head of communications at Altium. And we’ve been tussling (struggling) with these opportunities for some time. I don’t think we’re there yet, and your blog, Brian, really brought into focus what we need to do – so thanks for that. And, to the points raised by others, the future is all about having relevant conversations with people. In communications, that means creating value in what you have to say. And, only the reader knows what ‘value’ is, so those of us on the vendor side have to get it right, and not just hope for the best.
August 13th, 2009 at 5:13 am