By Media Team

May 22nd, 2013

Prompt Communications appointed by Integralis to drive US media relations

Prompt Communications appointed by Integralis to drive US media relations

 Prompt leads North American public relations program for a leading provider of IT security and information risk management solutions 

Boston, MA – Prompt Communications, a transatlantic public relations and digital communications agency with experience in the high-tech, sustainability and healthcare markets, has been selected by Integralis Inc. to lead its North American media outreach program.

Headquartered in Ismaning, Germany, Integralis offers IT security and information risk management solutions to clients around the world. Integralis provides a complete end-to-end security solution that incorporates initial assessments, policy planning and hands-on deployment with 24×7 management and support.

The company has a rich portfolio of managed security, business infrastructure, consulting and technology integration services, combining to reduce overall business costs and risk. Integralis solutions address the needs of customers spanning every vertical sector, focusing on multinational enterprise clients. 

Heather Antoinetti, director of marketing for Integralis said: “As a global provider of IT security services with a growing presence in North America, we wanted a communications agency that both specialized in high-tech and had a dynamic presence in the US and overseas. Prompt has a proven track record in these areas, and we look forward to expanding our brand presence and thought leadership through a US-based public relations campaign built around quality press outreach and rich customer relationships.”

Prompt’s CEO Hazel Butters said: “Prompt is thrilled to partner with Integralis to further its brand reputation in North America and beyond. Integralis delivers end-to-end offerings that provide enterprises in every sector with intelligent ways to manage risk. Inevitable trends in cloud, social, mobile and BYOD technology models are challenging all modern businesses to meet new and intricate security challenges with smarter solutions. It is our pleasure to be appointed by a company that addresses the complex risks associated with fresh trends in every market.”

About Integralis

Integralis provides IT Security and Information Risk Management solutions on a global basis. The company delivers a portfolio of managed security, business infrastructure, consulting and technology integration services. Integralis’ solutions help organizations lower IT costs and increase the depth of security protection, compliance and service availability. Integralis is headquartered in Ismaning, Germany and part of the NTT Communications Group, owned by NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation), one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. www.integralis.com

About Prompt Communications

Prompt is a communications agency that enables marketers to increase their sales and marketing effectiveness.  Specializing in innovative markets including sustainability, technology and healthcare, Prompt helps its clients communicate authentically with core audiences online and offline through PR, media relations, copywriting, market and industry analysis, social media, video content and customer reference programs. Founded in 2002, Prompt has US offices in Boston and San Francisco, and European offices in London. Prompt’s current and former clients include Adeptra, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Corizon, Dell|Compellent, Foviance,  GenSight, Grouptree, IBM, Ipswitch File Transfer, jovoto, KANA, Oracle Corporation, smartFOCUS and Webtide. www.prompt-communications.com

By PromptBoston

May 16th, 2013

Pitch it perfectly with Prompt: Come visit us at CIC’s Venture Café Office Hours

Pitch it perfectly with Prompt: Come visit us at CIC’s Venture Café Office Hours

Are you looking to spark genuine, valuable, press interest and conversation around your technology product, app or service? It’s certainly not an easy task, but we’re here to help.

On Thursday, May 23, 2013 Prompt Communications will be hosting ‘Office Hours’ at the Cambridge Innovation Center’s Venture Café event, from 5:30pm to 7:30pm. We’ll be ready to discuss what you need to do to gain the media and audience visibility that your company deserves. Come along for a 20-minute tech PR consulting session with Prompt CEO Hazel Butters and get to grips with the objectives, strategies, and tactics that work best for catching the eyes of the press.

With years of experience in the technology sector, Prompt consultants know how to perfectly tailor your PR approach to garner the best results. Are you struggling to identify your target audience? No problem. Would you like to ramp up your core messaging? We’ve got you covered. Simply don’t know where to start? We’ll help you take those first steps.

After just 20 minutes you will walk away with valuable resources from our very own tech PR toolkit, which you can then customize to fit your exact PR needs. Please come equipped with any and all questions you can think of – we can’t wait to answer them!

To put us on your calendar or to learn more information about the Prompt Communications office hours, please visit the Venture Café website.

*This event will take place at the Venture Café, located at the Cambridge Innovation Center, One Broadway, 4th Floor. Visitors must comply with Venture Cafe attendance policies (see http://bit.ly/vc-credo for more details).

By PromptBoston

May 3rd, 2013

Innovation Nation: Celebrating a proud pioneering tradition

Innovation Nation: Celebrating a proud pioneering tradition

Massachusetts, and the twin cities of Boston and Cambridge in particular, has been a thriving hotbed of innovation and pioneering spirit since its very foundation. From Harvard intellectuals to ground-breaking glass and ink industrialists, from the earliest computing visionaries to modern green tech and life science visionaries, innovation has always been second nature in this part of the world.

To celebrate the vibrancy, optimism and can-do determination of business and individuals that still thrives in the area today, Prompt Communications has decided to produce a series of short videos showcasing the rich talents of start-ups operating out of the Cambridge Innovation Center.

We’re interviewing truly inspiring, innovative businesses at CIC, and can’t wait to share the passion and enthusiasm they have for their products and markets with you. We’ll reveal what makes the people behind these organizations tick, what fuels their ideas, and how they became so ambitious and driven to succeed.

Join us as we showcase our nation’s greatest innovations, and celebrate the proud pioneering spirit of some of the most exciting businesses in operation today.

By Jessica Branco, Prompt PR Boston

May 2nd, 2013

Prompt interviews….

Prompt interviews….

Peter Ryder, co-author of Crowdstorm: The Future of Innovation, Ideas, and Problem Solving

Here at Prompt we’re all committed PR and comms advocates, so we relish any innovative ideas designed to shake up markets, capture the attention of investors and prospects, and make a company stand out from even the toughest competitors.

While many companies still look inwardly for ideas and feedback from their own colleagues, growing numbers of successful innovations are now being driven by crowdsourcing; turning to the public for contributions in the form of thoughts, funding or critique.

This week, we caught up with Peter Ryder, a friend of Prompt and co-author of Crowdstorm: The Future of Innovation, Ideas, and Problem Solving. In this ‘Prompt interviews’ session, Jessica Branco of the Prompt Boston team caught up with Peter to discuss the opportunities, benefits and challenges of crowdsourcing, and to hear further details about his new book. It was also a chance to discuss why so many organizations from startups to Fortune 500 firms are now turning to crowdsourcing to share the wisdom of thousands of outsiders in uncovering new ideas and innovations.

Prompt Boston: Can you please tell us more about your background, and how you became interested in crowdsourcing?

Peter Ryder: I worked for many years as a consultant at Accenture, Computer Sciences Corporation and Deloitte Consulting helping clients improve their operations and their relationships with their customers by rethinking their processes and enabling these process changes through technology.  I saw how organizations often sub-optimized their business by relying on assumptions that were no longer completely valid.  Testing underlying assumptions was a first step to rethinking approaches to unlocking value. In 2010 I became President of jovoto, Inc., a start-up that connects companies who are looking for ideas with creative talent anywhere who have ideas.  At that time, a number of companies were beginning to look seriously at crowdsourcing.  With Web 2.0 really kicking in the mid to late 2000s massively reduced transaction costs tested why an organization needed to hire full time employees for all tasks — some jobs might be done by multiple people with expertise and perspective not found in the organization.  Organizations like P&G, GE and LEGO were exploring how to access talent anywhere to help them work on some of their pressing challenges more rapidly.  And new start-up companies like Quirky were building crowds into the very fabric of their business models. At jovoto, we worked on what processes, community management and technology needed to be in place for our customers to find innovative ideas using external talent.   But we were also seeing a morphing of crowdsourcing from a simple focus on getting ideas from external talent to organizations developing more complex interactions with crowds asking them to do multiple tasks, not only selecting ideas but engaging with communities to get feedback on ideas and helping them select ideas.  And, it was this interesting dynamic that led to writing the book.

What are the key benefits of crowdsourcing an idea, service or product?

What has been the most eye opening for companies with regards to benefits is that getting good ideas for a service or product is just the beginning.  Of course outcomes are key: If your Super Bowl ad is ranked in the top 10 ads, by multiple metrics, many years in a row, your ad has succeeded; If your product is selling successfully and winning design awards, your design has succeeded. And if you find new partners that result in value-creating partnerships, you have succeeded in your business development efforts. In each of these cases, we found examples resulting from crowdstorming. These outcomes come from Pepsi, Quirky (a consumer electronics startup) and GE Ecomagination. But an additional benefit comes from providing a mechanism for evaluating ideas.  Balanced with expert evaluation, you can ask crowds to help you vet the most promising ideas.  LEGO gets lots of ideas from the crowd for new products.  But it requires 10,000 votes from the LEGO community before the internal LEGO team will consider it for production. Finally, by posting a challenge to a crowd an organization can start a broad conversation that helps it pre-market a new product or service by turning idea creation into a conversation and a media event.

What is your advice to marketers who haven’t crowdsourced yet?

Do a little homework; look at some of the work that the organizations above have done.  It is not necessary to start at Super Bowl scale.  Choose a small project to test how your organization reacts to leveraging external talent.  In the book we talk about the processes and some of the best approaches for doing crowdstorm projects; it is important to become familiar with these and see how they apply to your organization.  If you feel like your organization would benefit from leveraging the skills of one of the many providers who are supporting crowdstorming, engage with them and tap into their experience, approaches and technology. Like any new approach, this requires that there is commitment from someone in the organization who can directly benefit from the outcome – make sure that sponsorship is in place.  Finally, marketing departments who have existing relationships with traditional creative providers can weave them into the project if they choose.  There are a number of different points where their expertise can help – from designing the brief to evaluating results.

How should marketers initially approach crowdsourcing?

As I said, education and sponsorship are critical to success.  Determine the scope of the project you initially want to work on.  Something well defined where the outcome can be measured or compared to a traditional approach can be helpful.  For example, when Victorinox designed a new limited edition of Swiss Army knives using crowdstorming, they benchmarked sales of the new product against previous launches. They fixed as many variables as they could and found that the crowdstormed limited edition knife resulted in a 20% increase in sales.  Marketers can also source a new campaign from a traditional provider and evaluate it against the same campaign sourced through crowdstorming as a test – the evaluation can come from experts and crowds in order to benchmark.  There are many ways to get going.

Crowdstorm: The Future of Innovation, Ideas, and Problem Solving is now available at all major bookstores and Amazon.com. The book covers all topics of crowdsourcing, including patterns (search pattern, collaborative pattern), processes, recruitment, creative problem solving techniques, management of crowds, social media, analytics, evaluation and much more.

By Hazel Butters

April 26th, 2013

Read all about it! Are print newspapers fated to fold? (Part 1)

Read all about it! Are print newspapers fated to fold? (Part 1)

As PR and comms consultants we have a keen interest in the spoken and printed word.  So, it’s no surprise that at Prompt Boston’s office there’s been a great deal of discussion about the potential sale of The Boston Globe. Current owners, The New York Times Company, are looking for bids for the New England Media Group, which includes the Globe as well as the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

If you have a spare $100 million or so, these great papers could be yours. The most likely interested parties, Heberden Ryan and Richard Daniels, certainly have a difficult decision to make. Should they even be entertaining this investment when the future of paper-based newspapers has never been so uncertain? In a statement, Ryan and Daniels couldn’t hide their love for traditional professional journalism, (“Our intention is to give these news organizations the economic viability they need to bring great journalism to their consumers and their communities.”) but only while underlining the importance of a strong complementary online presence (“the best and most important newspapers and digital media sources in New England.”)

What futures do newspapers as we know them really have? No-one would argue that print publications are suffering from declining fortunes. When the New York Times Company bought The Boston Globe back in 1993 it paid $1.1 billion. Since then, our news reading habits have changed dramatically, as we casually graze a far broader range of sources including websites, social media, pushed news feeds, mobile apps, and ever slicker and more competitive electronic versions of our habitual daily newspapers. Perhaps understandably in the face of such fierce competition, the readerships and advertising revenues of traditional papers have declined steeply.

Towards the end of 2012, Pew Research Center discovered that just 23% of Americans read a daily print newspaper, compared to 41% just a decade earlier. The same research revealed that 55% of regular New York Times readers now prefer to read it on a computer or mobile device, as do 48% of USA Today and 44% of Wall Street Journal readers. Britain’s much-loved broadsheets have fared no better, with the Telegraph’s daily readership dropping from over a million each day in 2000 to 555,000 today, the Independent falling from 222,000 to 71,000 over the same period, and the Guardian from 409,000 to 209,000. Tabloids have gone the same way, with the Sun going from 3.5 to 2.4 million, and the Mirror from 2.07 to 1.06 million.

In the US there are already clear signs that revenues lost in print sales and corresponding display advertising must and can be reeled back by various forms of paid digital channels. According to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), print advertising remains the largest source of revenue for newspapers at 46%, but its value actually fell a further 6% year-on-year in 2012. Newspaper circulation revenues were actually up by 5% in 2012 at $10.4 billion – the first gain since 2003. This is all down to growing subscriptions to digital editions. Industry-wide, advertising spend was $18.9billion last year, supplemented by a growing $3.4 in digital ads.

NAA president Caroline Little said: “America’s newspaper media are transforming themselves… …they are finding new ways to serve audiences and local businesses.”

How do you see the future of the printed newspaper? Will it continue to thrive in niches, serve traditionalists, dominate regional and specialist markets? Will printed papers complement digital editions? Or are all printed newspapers fated to fold?   

Take the Prompt poll: