Hijacking for gold at the Olympics

From my relatively short time working in PR, I’ve come to realise that you can’t be reliant on a constant flow of product and customer announcements from your clients to sustain media coverage.  Often it is a case of being a lot more creative and pro-active, which in many respects can be more rewarding when the coverage comes in.

One such strategy is to jump on the national news agenda and focus on the broader industry issues clients can offer informed comment on. Such an approach has recently worked well for technology performance company Compuware.

With its expertise in helping businesses to keep their tech up and running, Compuware was ideally placed to provide some valuable insight into the recent RBS/NatWest banking disaster and the O2 network failure. Through ‘news hijacking’ and offering comment from Compuware, we were able to drive a wide spread of coverage across national business and key industry press.  Highlights included the Daily Telegraph, The Independent, ITV, the Metro, the Register, Computer Weekly and Computing.

A few weeks later, with Olympics fever growing, we were again able to tap into the national news agenda, to develop a fresh and interesting Olympic-themed technology story for the trade press. Using Compuware’s recently launched SpeedoftheWeb tool, we were able to monitor the performance of websites that would doubtless experience increased network traffic during the Games, such as TFL and the Official London 2012 website.

Rather than waiting for a tech failure to happen and joining the outraged masses (and not to mention avoiding the risk of overdoing the schadenfreude a little), Compuware provided an early warning for those organisations with websites coming under strain, giving them the chance to rectify the situation and prevent a public embarrassment.

The campaign achieved some fantastic media coverage in titles such as Information Age, Computing, ComputerWorld UK and Computer Business Review throughout the Olympics.

By the end of the three month campaign, we’d achieved 71 pieces of coverage across national, regional and trade press, online and in print. Who’d have thought application performance management could be so exciting!?