Landscape Archives - Augur Communications Ltd

How Augur Works

Of all disciplines, you should expect technology PR to change with the times.

Here’s a 10 facts about how we work, and most importantly, the actions we take to deliver a demonstrably different service.

1. ENGINEERED MORE EFFICIENTLY

Modern work can be a mess of information overload, sprawling spreadsheet plans and bureaucracy that slows action to a crawl.

We put everything in one place: Asana. Here, you can see all upcoming tasks, find every document and directly comment or ask questions. And we support it with intelligence channels in Slackand files in Google Drive.

2. MEASUREMENT MADE MEANINGFUL

Ad Value Equivalent, coverage, estimated reach are all pointless if your comms plan doesn’t relate to your sales funnel.

Augur’s measurement process is driven from Google Analytics (or better, if you’re using it). Choose from a measurement menu that asks questions like: “of every visitor last month that became a lead, how many saw content in their journey?”

3. WORKING FACE-TO-FACE

How can an agency accurately represent someone they don’t understand?

By spending time with your team in person every week, we get under the skin of the company faster. So when we tell the world what you think, it’s the truth.

4. OWN YOUR STORY, OR DIE TRYING

You are a newswire. And the opinions section of your vertical target media. And an industry commentator. And an advocate of your customers. And an educator of your users.

If you want to be.

If you want authority, you need to start authoring it. Shuffled press releases behind closed doors pale in comparison to publishing your story on a regular basis anyway and giving the right people an early peek because it’s relevant.

Don’t duplicate and add to the noise. Find your signal and amplify it.

5. AMPLIFY WITH CARE

Embrace the real cadence of your company story. Not every step you take is a moon shot, and that’s okay. A flash in the pan will always appear less natural than consistent, growing fission.

Proper amplification should push more out of a story engine that’s already working independently — not compensate for its absence.

And a word about paid social. If we can directly target the people that journalists used to, in an easily measurable manner and on a basic budget, we’re doing it.

6. EXPERIENCE BEYOND AGENCIES

We have written for Wired, Quartz, The Guardian, Telegraph, Tech.eu and more. We’ve led PR and Comms for a $750m global tech startup from Series A to C. We’ve managed communities of 3000+ tech journalists and PRs, with members from Apple to the Economist, TechCrunch and beyond. Variety of experience spices our advice.

7. RESOURCING ATTENTION

The ‘hours’ agencies sell don’t exist, they are just 8 units of abstract value. That works great if you want to sell a dozen hours of an office junior and moments of the MD.

Augur simplifies this by resourcing teams across 4 units of attention per week. By being less granular, our plans reflect the value we offer across Strategy, Creation and Engagement. You pay for our value, not just our time.

8. UNSEXY IS THE NEW SEXY

How do you persuade a trendy teenager to become an advocate of a fizzy drink brand? Honestly? We can’t see why they should.

But if you ask what a decision-maker or industry commentator has to gain by being aware of the coming wave of change in their sector, that’s something else. Our clients’ technologies help other companies grow. And that shows how good they are at their job.

9. RELATIONSHIPS COME FIRST

Every time a journalist simply copies and pastes a news announcement, the world becomes a worse place. We want key people to question and engage with why you matter, not just trot out easy coverage.

That’s what generates the kind of third party endorsement your team can use to reach new people and drive sales. If you can build understanding, then solid coverage and customers will come.

10. A BETTER PROPOSAL PROCESS

Agencies traditionally try and knock your socks off with grand pitches before they have even spent a day working on your account.

At Augur, we start with a one page strategic spec — our diagnosis, guiding strategy and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). If we agree this is along the right lines, we kick off a small proposal project, where we interview your leadership, your team, everyone we can get our hands on to help us write a full 6 – 12 month plan.

Makes sense, right?

Get in touch.

by Max Tatton-Brown

Search, and the commercial clash of the information age

PR, Tech

People are looking for things. You want them to find you.

But not just when looking for you, of course, that’s a given. Really, you want them to find you when they are looking for other things. Or, best of all, when they’re looking to buy other things.

And so the clash emerges. Because of how search works, if you want to be found, you have to essentially become that thing online. You have to equate yourself with what your audience is looking for as they hope to buy.

Exceptions and expectations

But what happens if there’s a dissonance between what people are currently looking for and what you think they really should be looking for? It’s a classic issue in something like tech PR. Or communications. Or whatever you want to call the big converging soup of media and marketing.

How do you join the dots between the ‘wrong’ search and the right ideas?

If you can explain the difference, that should be a relevant, shareable, memorable way to tackle the challenge. That should be a good fight in the battle, not for some mysterious search blackhattery — but because you’re genuinely moving the subject forwards.

And even better, play your cards right and it should become a relevant source for the subject you think people should be searching for too. Because you’ve actually created value.

by Max Tatton-Brown

Death to content: long live the editor

PR

In the effort to rule their industry, almost every player has ended up churning out the same old slurry by neglecting a key element of creating great stories.

It comes down to this: the world doesn’t need more content, it needs better editors.

A good editor establishes a fair, consistent point of view. They bring priorities, standards. They understand when to say no — and why.

It’s a concept that (forgive me) Steve Jobs brought to Apple, and rings through its most heartfelt advertising.

Leave it out

It’s not an instinct that everyone has. And marketers need to get a grip on this fact.

Too many marketing teams are kidding themselves that they can write, interview, or unlock the extra essence that takes the finished product to the next level.

And that word: ‘content’. It’s like calling a beautiful crafted cup of coffee a beverage. It misses what the substance is all about.

That’s not to say these teams are all awful, but look at it this way. While they trudge our generic slurry, there’s a huge crowd of talented, struggling, born creators that basically can’t manage to monetise their passion for what they love.

May contain posts

And what about form? Great editors know form and content are two sides of the same coin. In publishing, we’re seeing a grand resurgence of open-minded experimentation with how you present a story.

Forget Snow Fall, it doesn’t have to be anything so grand. Just presenting material in the way it’s going to be useful is improvement enough. And no, that doesn’t mean an infographic.

It means questions like: Why would you launch a blog with ‘tags’ or ‘archive’ in the sidebar? Why would you call it a blog, what does that mean in 2014? What could it mean?

What should it mean strategically for your business and what does it need to mean to stand out to readers and keep them coming back for more?

The real measure

Finally, good editors know how to measure progress and success. But they don’t just enslave themselves to making arbitrary numbers bigger.

They find a balance between instinct and iteration, confident enough to take chances and walk a more irrational path where their intuition dictates. But cautious enough never to lead everyone off the cliff.

Some of that comes with experience. Experience you won’t get by simply sitting your junior marketing person down in front of WordPress. The world of telling great stories that generate value for your business deserves a more dignified and confident approach. But the first step is admitting you have a problem

Forget content, find yourself a real editor.

(Originally published as a guest post for Econsultancy.)

by Max Tatton-Brown

Why Augur?

News

PR has become a much maligned industry. And perhaps there’s some fairness to the criticism. Over the last 100 years, its “two-way street” origin decayed into something designed to match broadcast media’s growth with scalable profitability.

But as a result, shifting patterns of attention have left many agencies fielding foghorns in a world now thriving in conversation. They besiege anyone with audience, trying to bully their way into the news and, even with non-stories from lifeless brands, some have become very effective at it.

This saturates the news cycle, giving over-pitched and over-worked media a hundred times more noise to digest before finding the signal that matters. But worse, it can deprive great companies and great people of a voice.

I think we can do better. I think good PR is about doing something so interesting or so much better that people can’t help but talk about it — not trying to fake it.