I’ve posted many times before about traditional PR and how it falls dismally short. This post is an opportunity to celebrate some success stories and tell a few sorry tales.

Before the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, and in an attempt to make my time as efficient as possible, I posted an invitation to PR staffers with some guidelines about how best to connect with me.

So here’s some bouquets out to some stellar performers;

Kate Hobbie – MediaBrew consulting and Aria Systems. Kate is kind of a token offering here. We were already friends from previous connections when she’d spent time talking to me about SaaS billing in her communication role with Aria so there was some context there. However Kate went out of her way, even picking me up from the airport and playing taxi service for me.

Rachel Peterson – Nectar communications. Rachel I’d also met previously when talking to Zuora and Sliderocket, two companies she works with. Despite not actually meeting up with Rachel this trip, she went out of her way to facilitate things for me, even arranging for me to meet Sliderocket CEO, Chuck Dietrich for a great run on the Presidio

Alison Mickey – Schwartz communications. Alison saw my post and REALLY went out of her way to understand what I’m about. She sent me an email that referenced my area of interest in blogging, and even showed that she’d done some research about my outside interests and hobbies. The briefings she arranged were well resourced and I had enough information before them to make the briefing time valuable.

Julia Mak – Community manager at LeapFILE. Julia also reached out to talk with me. Her company were originally going to demo at Enterprise 2.0 but for various reasons did not. We still met up and had a good chat about where her company is going, and the chat was tailored to my particular areas of interest.

Christie Denniston at Catapult PR. Christie works with ThoughtWorks studios who were demo-ing their Google Wave integration at Enterprise 2.0. Despite being remote from the conference, Christie went out of her way to ensure I had everything I needed, as an aside it was pretty disappointing that despite her staunch efforts, the team from ThoughtWorks never delivered the resource they had promised for my post – you can’t pick your clients huh?

So there you go – anyone needing some awesome PR/communications people would do well to talk to Kate, Rachel, Alison, Julia or Christie – if you’re interested just drop me a line and I’ll make the connections.

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Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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