We asked 150 top government executives who are involved in the decision-making process for IT purchases, both as decision makers and as individuals who have input into decisions, how they get information to help inform IT decisions.

Communicating Your Brand Position
When it comes to learning about new IT services, solutions and products, 44 percent report having previously worked with a contractor or hearing good things about that contractor from others as most important. But nearly the same number of those respondents—39 percent– find that vendor websites are important. Following closely behind are technology trade publications (38 percent). Further down the lists are trade shows (25 percent), webinars (23 Percent) and social media (21 percent).

What this means is that a marketing organization that targets the government market needs to have to a well-thought out mix of marketing activities that includes:

• Messaging to make sure that decision-makers understand your value proposition;
• A dedicated website or landing page that targets this market; and
• A thought leadership campaign that gets visibility in key trade publications.

Trade shows, webinars and social media need to play a part in that mix, proportional to their importance, leveraged strategically to reach the part of the audience that does rely on these tactics.

What Channels do Decision-Makers Use
Government IT decision makers want information on products and solutions, and they want to be able to find it easily and targeted to them. In our survey, 43 percent found most useful an information website on that solution, and 30 percent said that specific digital campaigns were effective for them. Less useful are radio spots (16 percent) and banner ads (13 percent).

Our takeaway is that this target audience is happy to go to your website and engage with your digital campaigns if they are providing the needed information to evaluate their IT challenges. What’s important is having a website, landing page or digital campaign that does speak to their mission needs and isn”t hidden behind When the blood circulates to the soles, and the skin draws the toxins from the blood to the outer layer, the Foot Pad can absorb eliminated toxins released from the acupuncture points. a larger, commercial-markets focused site.

Premium Content Has Great Value
We asked how likely these decision-makers would be to download information to learn about new IT services, solutions and products. Forty-three percent said they would download a white paper or case study, while an additional 33 percent said the same for an infographic and 31 percent for other premium content.

Good content is in demand, and when you bring these target audiences to your website or digital campaign, it is important to have more in-depth information to generate leads and create engagement. A well-designed white paper or case study that hits their mission challenges and is thoughtful and accessible is valued by this audience. So will an infographic that helps tell the story or other types of premium content, including a well-produced video or presentation via SlideShare.

The lesson from this research is not that one strategy is favored over another. Resources need to be allocated through a blend of activities that map to how these audiences prefer to get the information they need. At Bluetext, we believe that a successful marketing campaign for the government customer includes a blend of tactics that work together in context to deliver a powerful, consistent message on a consistent basis.

In an effort to rally its thousands of sales and customer facing teams at its Global Sales Conference in Dallas in April 2014, CSC turned to Bluetext to conceptualize and deliver a brand launch video and interactive experience around the key technology conversations that the company is focused on for the year ahead. The concepts of partnership and innovation, based on CSC’s decades of experience, came to life in an effort to position the company for the next wave of technology trends facing enterprises across the globe.

Bluetext built a storyboard concept around the “Road to Next-Gen IT”, and designed animated illustrations weaved throughout the video to most effectively tell the story. Now Bluetext is working on a virtual briefing center where CSC’s clients and entire ecosystem can come to learn more about these key technology conversations, set to launch in the next few months.

“Your focus, partnership and can-do attitude allowed us to deliver a complex world-class project in record time. Your ability to co-imagine and co-create with us is appreciated and valued greatly.”

Director of Global Brand & Digital Marketing
CSC

There probably isn’t a week that goes by when you don’t come across – on television or radio, in print, online or via social media – a research survey on a consumer or business topic. What factors lead a survey to pique the interest of reporters, analysts and social media influencers? Why do some surveys resonate with everyday consumers or workers, while others flounder and quickly fade into obscurity?

Surveys are conducted not just to generate external attention, but also to guide internal decision-making. To ensure your research survey is constructed, managed and communicated most effectively, below are 9 strategies to consider.

Ensure survey is not duplicative

Surveys are an effective tool to gain market intelligence and generate attention from key press outlets and influencers. As such, it is very likely that competitors and others in your space have conducted research that touches on similar themes. If you are building a survey designed for external consumption, scan competitor news sections to see surveys they have released, and conduct more expansive searches on anything that might resemble your survey.

If others have touched on your survey theme, it doesn’t mean you need to avoid it. Instead, develop angles not previously covered and, most importantly, understand when competitors put out annual surveys so you are not conflicting with that timing. If two surveys come out that are similar in theme but have different results, reporters will question the viability of both and may choose to avoid covering the data altogether.

Aim for contrarian results

Surveys that tend to be widely reported and viral are ones where the results buck conventional wisdom. The satirical publication The Onion once ran the headline, “Poll finds majority of Americans have never met William Dafoe.” The faux poll headline pokes fun at real surveys that come up with unsurprising results. And while this is headline news for The Onion, predictable survey outcomes are a death knell for generating survey coverage.

Generate questions that you believe might lead to unexpected answers, because results that counter expectations will prove most interesting to the market because you are telling them something they don’t know, not simply reinforcing their previously held assumptions.

Ensure data will have external and internal value

From time to time, I’m brought into a survey process near completion, and find that many of the questions have been designed for the company to gain useful intelligence for internal purposes. This could be research for a pending product launch or a company pushing into a new market. Often, the questions are suitable for internal intelligence, but rather useless for externalizing the data. This is due to the fact that the questions don’t follow a cohesive theme and are too scattered to assemble into a strong media story, lack the necessary filtering to break up results in a meaningful way, or lead to answers that are just plain boring. This is a wasted opportunity; research surveys are not cheap, and that means you want to squeeze every possible ounce of internal and external value out of it. You can’t go back and add something after the survey is complete, so take the time to think about questions and answers that can serve multiple objectives from day one.

Use surveys to support product/service launches

Contrarian and compelling results are great, but if they undermine business objectives the survey is rendered useless. For example, let’s say your company is in the process of developing or launching a new Cloud-based mobile videoconferencing solution for small businesses and want to conduct a survey showing that the small business market is demanding this type of product. Be sure to have enough knowledge of the market to surmise whether it is ready for the solution, because if survey results come back and are underwhelming, you will likely not want to externalize that data.

A better way to approach this scenario is to flip the questions and focus on what this market is looking for in a mobile videoconferencing solution from a price, features, and functionality perspective. This strategy not only generates less threatening results, but also provides valuable intelligence to ensure your product matches what the market is looking for.

For survey questions, KISS (Keep it simple, stupid)

A key objective of a survey is to generate deep, meaningful results. That said, the more complex the Q&A, the more difficult it can be to communicate survey results to the media. For example, let’s say you ask the following question: “One-third of executives who have been in their position more than five years have strong compliance measures in place.” These results are a tough sell because they introduce multiple data points and filtering into a single response, and it is unclear if this filtering even has any added significance. Develop questions that will generate clean, easy to consume data points that a reporter, analyst, business decision maker or the lay consumer can relate to.

Make data more ‘consumable’ with infographics

While there will always be an audience receptive to deep, granular survey data, most individuals do not have the time or wherewithal to sift through pages of text and numbers – no matter how compelling the results are. Instead, marketers are seeing better traction when the data is presented through engaging, visual infographics. Images and videos are used ‘tell a story’ through the data that can be consumed quickly and easily. Infographics also allow organizations to imprint their brand look and feel with the data, and direct audiences visually to data points that you feel are most significant or beneficial to broader story.

Go one step further with ‘snackable’ graphics

In the era of social media, even some larger visuals are not optimal for the condensed content formats of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Vine. To ensure that survey data can be easily communicated via social channels, create ‘snackable’ or ‘bite-sized’ graphics that are scaled down to a more shareable format. These graphics are sized to remove the extra step for consumers of the graphic to have to click on a lick or navigate to the full-sized graphic.

Use survey results to anchor thought leadership

Sure, many organizations conducting a survey might build a white paper or report around the date and put out a press release, but this leaves several other opportunities on the table. Don’t be the organization that spends $50,000 on a survey, has the results come in, and only then asks what they are going to do with the data.

If the results tell a strong story, extend the life of the results by building content around the data, such as byline articles that can be placed in target publications, webinars, conference speaker entries, and slideshare.

Create a home for your survey

Depending on budget and ultimate objectives, there is value in creating a digital home for your survey to live at for an indefinite period of time. If the survey is unique enough in nature, it is not uncommon for the data to be cited by press, analysts, and even other companies for weeks and months after the survey is released. If organic search leads individuals to a landing page that is dynamically updated with complementary and current information – rather than routing searchers to a dated, static press release – the benefits of the survey can have a long shelf life.

This digital home can include other types of content referenced in this column, such as infographics, white papers, byline articles and videos that support the data or relate to it.

– See more at: http://www.agencypost.com/9-pr-and-digital-marketing-strategies-to-promote-a-marketing-survey/#sthash.E4HMxGxi.dpuf

The federal, state and local government markets are large and attractive targets of opportunity for technology companies. Because of our location and experience in the public sector supporting the most recognized brands in global technology, Bluetext is frequently asked to develop innovative marketing campaigns to help companies throughout Silicon Valley drive visibility for their brand and demand for their products and services across the public sector market. This can range from a dedicated microsite to traditional public relations and everything in between – including content marketing, social media and, of course, advertising – all integrated to help our clients succeed in an increasingly digital environment.

The challenge for companies seeking to expand from the commercial sector to government market is that agencies speak a different language, have an entirely unique buying cycle and process, and are motivated by different needs and priorities than private sector enterprise companies. For those who don’t recognize this and fail to develop their campaigns with that in mind, their efforts will feel as if they fell on deaf ears when the reality is that you are just speaking the wrong language. Here are some of the rules to keep in mind for the public sector audiences:

1) Think mission goals over ROI. Agencies are driven by legislative mandates and regulatory requirements, and that’s how officials get promoted and move up the chain.

2) Budget savings are important, but don’t talk about how your solution can reduce headcount. No one wants to put their jobs at risk. Talk about how agencies can cut costs and reallocate resources to where they are needed most.

3) Dedicated Government messaging that is clear and easy to find is essential. Agency decision-makers will not sort through corporate messaging to discern what might be important to them. If they can’t find it quickly, they will stop looking.

4) Easy-to-find government specific landing pages are a must. If decision makers don’t quickly find information that is directly relevant to them, they will move on to a competitor’s website. We all too often find government subpages buried deep into a site, and masked with an all too obvious government façade that will only serve to completely negate the hard work of your sales and field marketing teams dedicated to this market.

5) Social media should not be an afterthought in terms of dedicated content. We always recommend government-specific social media handles. Decision makers won’t sort through a dozen tweets about issues unrelated to the government to find the one that is. It is better to have low volume but a dedicated channel.

6) Customer case studies are important. No government official wants to be the beta tester of a new solution. They want to know how it’s been successfully used by other agencies – and there is no better way to tell that story than through the lens of their peers.

7) Highlight your government success stories. Government officials don’t get much recognition for a job well done, and they have strict rules about promoting themselves. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t tell their story, making them look good in the process.

8) The government audience cuts across all demographics. Personas are hard to create because they can be so different in age, how they get their information, what they read and their comfort level with new technologies. While the existing demos trend to the older side and rely on trade publications, agencies are aggressively recruiting in the younger demos who digest most of their content through social media. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all.”

9) Get involved in the community. If you are just getting started and don’t have case studies, getting involved in the community is important. Carpet baggers don’t succeed selling to the Federal government. It takes a dedicated, focused effort and commitment to the community.

10) It is not just Washington. Federal procurement teams and decision-makers are across the country – from U.S Central Command at MacDill AFB in Florida to San Diego to military bases in between, customers are everywhere and need to be messaged to appropriately. Knowing where the influencers are is often half the battle.

11) And a free bonus for listening – while so many brands are focused on the government buyer themselves – they ignore the contracting community around them. The mammoth defense contractors and systems integrators that surround the beltway can walk you down the red carpet into every agency in Washington – if only you spoke their language…

The Bluetext team is in the thick of industry conference season for clients, recently concluding support for Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and the RSA Conference in San Francisco, with ISC West in Las Vegas and Enterprise Connect in Orlando on tap in the next few weeks.

Support we provide for key industry conferences often begins months before the event itself, and can be expansive in nature – ranging from message development and creating dedicated landing pages to booking and providing on-site support for press and analyst briefings.

Generating press and analyst attention and briefings at Conferences – especially large ones such as Mobile World Congress, RSA and CES – is no easy feat.  Reporters and analysts are bombarded with hundreds of briefing requests, often reserving premium 1×1 slots for familiar names with significant announcements to make. That said, success is possible and there are strategies that do work. Here are 10 tips for generating buzz and briefings at your key industry conferences:

1. Better to be early than late – For conferences where press and analysts attend, a pre-registered media list is available for sponsors and exhibitors in advance of the show. This is a valuable tool and one that should be fully leveraged; however, waiting until it is available can be risky. Most shows make the list available roughly 4-5 weeks in advance of the conference, and it is not uncommon to reach out to in-demand press and analysts upon receiving the list to find that their schedules are already fully or mostly booked. The fact is that there is no penalty for reaching a reporter before they start working on their schedule, but irreparable consequences for getting to a reporter after their schedule is already booked. Research which reporters and analysts attended the prior year’s show, use your domain expertise to make educated guesses on others who might attend the show, and float an email to them before the pre-registered media list comes out to see if they are attending and taking meetings. Worst-case scenario is that they are not yet working on their schedule, and you can follow up at a later time.
2. Don’t rely too heavily on pre-registered media list – Yes, most reporters and analysts will be captured on this list, but some prefer to remain off of it precisely because they do not want to be bombarded with briefing requests. For that reason, follow the previously referenced strategy of researching who attended the prior year so that no key contacts fall through the cracks. This strategy is also valuable and far more necessary for clients that are not sponsoring or exhibiting, thus do not have ready access to the pre-registered media list.
3. Expand timetable for briefings – One of the more ironic aspects of conference briefings is this desire to try and communicate a critical piece of company news in a horribly sub-optimal environment. Reporters are racing from one briefing to the next, must digest multiple announcements and often have a fraction of the time they would allot for a typical briefing. Increasingly, we are seeing more value in working with clients to arrange briefings immediately prior to or after the conference, when the media contact has more time and can give the client announcement full attention. Phone briefings cannot match the benefits of a face-to-face interaction, but how valuable is 15 minutes in a noisy, chaotic environment? There is a balance to strike.
4. Yes, announcements matter – For every PR practitioner who extols the virtues of making a tangible announcement at key industry conferences, you will find another arguing that it is mission impossible to expect a client’s announcement to rise above 200 others. There is no cut-and-dry answer here, as it depends on the conference, the news, and the client. The fact is that many reporters and analysts will reserve their 1×1 time for clients with significant news, and if your pitch is simply to “catch up” or “brief the reporter on recent activities,” it is very likely that the pitch will be de-prioritized. If the client does not have a major product or news announcement, consider other means to provide media and analysts with value, such as a first look at results from an industry survey you have conducted.
5. Team up – Another option for clients that don’t arrive at conferences with name cache or big announcements is to team up with a Partner, or better yet a customer. Strategically aligning with influential partners and customers allow reporters to kill two birds with one, while adding more perceived weight to the briefing request itself.
6. Research Conference Product/Company Awards – Many conferences will hold award programs for “Best in Show” or “Most Innovative Product or Solution.” These award deadlines are often several weeks in advance of the conference and require the client to have sufficient advanced knowledge it will be announcing a new product at the show. That said, by entering it is another way to get on the radar of reporters who view these awards as a way to identify companies and products held in high regard.
7. Don’t ‘wing it’ when it comes to meeting locations – Conference floors are huge, and reporters book briefings back-to-back with little margin for error. If you have a reporter meet at a spot not conducive to the meeting, and then spend 10-15 minutes searching out a better spot, you will draw the ire of the reporter and waste what precious time he/she has. If budget allows, book a dedicated meeting room, or virtually scout out the conference layout in advance to understand spaces available near the client booth. Conferences often have a “Media Center’ for briefings, but you can’t just walk in and expect a table and chairs for hours at a time.
8. Go outside the traditional 1×1 briefing structure – Beyond budget and planning, there is no restriction on creativity when it comes to engaging reporters and analysts. From non-conventional demos to cocktail hours, think about ways to reach influencers outside of the traditional briefing format.
9. Engage on social if not in-person – For reporters and analysts you are not able to connect with in person at conferences, follow them on Twitter to gauge what is capturing their interest and what they are doing. Finding a key reporter at a large conference is akin to the proverbial needle in the haystack. You can increase your chances by following these influencers on Twitter, and perhaps one might post that they are headed into a particular panel session – thus shrinking that haystack considerably.
10. Be wary of going against the grain – Standing out among the crowd can be a good thing at conferences, but refrain from going too far askew of the hot trends at the conferences. Look in advance at what the meat of the agenda is and the types of companies speaking for a hint of what direction reporters will sway in coverage. The fact is that reporters’ daily roundups bucket company activity around prevailing show themes, and if you are part of those themes it is more likely you can be in the conversation. If your announcements focus on areas that are peripheral, they become harder for reporters to bucket into coverage.

Sometimes, familiarity does not breed contempt. To the contrary, according to a new survey from Bluetext, the more familiar government IT managers and influencers are with cloud computing, the more they support cloud initiatives.

The survey found that 7 in 10 of those most familiar with the cloud have considered using it. The vast majority of those in the know understand that the cloud is not only a solution to IT hurdles, it’s also a means to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and save taxpayers money.

In state and local government agencies across the country, to know the cloud is to embrace it.

At the same time, those polled believe that their political leaders are under-informed about cloud computing. The vast majority of IT influencers believe their bosses would support cloud initiatives if they knew more about its benefits.

The survey’s highlights:

•         Seven in 10 of those very familiar with the cloud believe that cloud data centers would bring immediate cost savings to their agency.

•         Nearly all polled (91%) would be interested in cloud data centers if they knew immediate costs savings could be had.

•         Among those less familiar with the cloud, many are struggling to understand the benefits (35%) or how to get started (46%).

•         Just 43% of those less familiar with the cloud say they have considered using it to save money and improve efficiencies.

•         A majority of IT influencers (57%) say the political leadership of their government has the cloud on their radar to some degree, but just 17% say they are getting a lot of support from agency executives for IT cost-cutting initiatives.

The survey, conducted online by Fabrizio, Ward & Associates, interviewed 150 state and local government IT influencers nationally from August 15-16, 2011.

Complete survey results are available at http://www.thecloudplaybook.com.