Fabiola, a political science major, has an inspiring journey of transitioning from the marketing space to the tech-savvy PR world. She believes that share of voice and volume of coverage are some key metrics to track from a PR professional’s perspective.

Introduction

0:09 Yeah so, I actually got into the industry through work. So, I started off my career, I studied political science in college. And then I went to work in marketing, I became a marketing associate for crystal Geyser water company in San Francisco.

So after college I lived in San Francisco for five years and in that role as a marketing associate, I was exposed to all areas of marketing and I was really interested and fascinated by the work that our pr agency did.

And it was kind of through that and after that role is when I transitioned into PR and I went into B2B Tech PR I don’t know if it was the nature of being in Silicon Valley or like a lot of my friends were working in tech but it was really interesting to me is really nerdy. I love kind of breaking down like the complex topics in tech and B2B tech and kind of upleveling that messaging and that storytelling.

That’s kind of what I loved about PR and 10 years later I’m still doing that. I don’t have an engineering background. So, at first it was a lot of just information absorption. Whenever I worked at PR agencies, so we handled multiple clients at a time and every time you get on boarded to a new client, they send you all of this information demos, white papers YouTube videos like anything and everything that kind of breaks down what the product does and how it helps their customers and I would just absorb all of that. I would watch it. I would read it and then the next step into really understanding the technology is like, can you write about it? Can you explain it to someone else on the team?

And so, kind of going through that exercise, I was able to grasp the concepts of whatever technology the client had. So again, like I said, I’ve always worked in B2B tech, so cybersecurity, big data, microservices, devops cops.

These are these are terms that I learned really early on and through the years as tech changes and as clients, you know, come and go, I’ve been able to kind of just build on that foundation, but it really did take work at the beginning to read through everything and still to this day, if there’s new product coming out, like talking to a product marketing team, talking to our sales team, making sure that I understand the value proposition so that I can talk about it to reporters.

First interaction with data

3:00 My first experience using data would be so when I when I made the switch over to working in pr and pr agency, I started from the bottom to really learn the ropes as I went. And so as a I think it was called an account coordinator position, you’re really in charge of kind of searching through google news alerts for any mentions of the company and when you work at a pr agency, it’s always been hard to quantify and justify your value because it is an expensive service.

And so I think that that was my first introduction to data is like okay how can we use the data and the metrics that we set to prove our value and so we did coverage volume and then we also went a step further and kind of did quality of the coverage.

So right where we just mentioned in a list with all of our competitors where we quoted was this a feature piece. And so we also that was also data that we took and quantified and sent to our clients on a monthly basis that along with share a voice which is also a very inexact science but nonetheless we try to measure in comparison to our competitors and in the industry, how much are people talking about us and is that sentiment positive or negative? Right.

Like people say any PR is good PR but in the security and tech space, you don’t want to be in the news for having, you know, any data breaches or privacy concerns. So I think that was in terms of metrics and improving your value, that was my first experience in using data also when my very first clients was Cloudera and they did Hadoop and big data. So I was also kind of exposed in that way of like how can companies leverage their own data to provide value.

Favourite campaign

5:11 My favourite campaign that I’ve worked on is at my current company at Cobalt we do an annual state of pen testing report and so we take all of our internal data from the pen tests that we conduct and we’re able to analyse and break it down into, you know, what are the most common vulnerabilities that we find? What are the most common fixes? How long does it take to re mediate that kind of data and then ever since I joined, we’ve paired it with an external survey of industry folks And so it’s just gotten that much media and interesting because we asked people who are, you know in the trenches, managing these pen tests and the security programs at different companies, you know, kind of what they value the risks they’re willing to take because not everything is, you know, gonna be able to be fixed at any given point and so this campaign, the state of pen testing report that we do from last year to this year that we did it, we were able to double the impact in terms of results on the, on the media side some really great feature pieces and great conversations that we had with reporters just about the state of where the industry is.

So that that campaign is one that I’m really proud of.

Metrics to measure

6:38 In PR & comms in my role. There are several things. We measure one of them is volume of coverage. So that’s a very straightforward data point. How many articles have we been mentioned in? How many articles have we been featured in? The other one is share of voice. What’s our share of voice against the competitors set? We get grouped against versus the competitors set that we compare that we benchmark ourselves against because we’re disrupting traditional pen testing.

So while we get grouped with crowdsourced security vendors were actually we consider our biggest competitors in this other set. So, we measure share a voice for both because we get included in both conversations. So those are the security metrics that we look to the most, and then the third one would be, how do we, how are we performing on social media. Are people, are folks’ prospects engaging with the webinars? We’re promoting our people registering for the events and then probably the last one that I take into consideration, but I don’t necessarily report, to anyone beyond me is, how are the relationships that we have with reporters? Do we have a reporter?

You know, that can give us feedback sometimes on the messaging that that we’re taking out or on like the pitches because a lot of times, you know, you reach out to a reporter, your pitch gets ignored but I really value the times when we can get feedback from the reporters that to me is a really important data point of like, okay, we’re a trusted brand enough that they are telling me the story is not for me or the story is just not a good fit at the moment. So I don’t report that anywhere.

But for me, that’s a very important metric.

Dream metric

8:37 If I had a magic wand, the one feature I think I would love is feedback. A lot of times we internally work through messaging and work with people who are very similar to us, but how is it being received by our audience and by our prospects? And if I had a feature that could tell me, oh, this, you know, I’m not buying this. This makes no sense to me. Why would you say it this way? This is too complicated.

There’s like feedback on, on our messaging that to me would be so valuable.

Role of PR & Comms in future

9:20 We are in a really interesting time right now in the tech world and I think we’re seeing a lot of layoffs, a lot of uncertainty in the economy. And sometimes coms jobs and marketing jobs are the first to go, that’s where budgets are like are cut because there’s not a straight line to revenue. I can’t say this article got us this customer, there’s no direct tie in unless the customer was like, this was my reason to believe.

So I think that’s the reason that a lot of times marketing and comms jobs are the first to go but I think they’re really important and if a business values their brand and values the longevity of that brand they will keep us around. And it’s our job to make everyone understand like a comms person can help you relay the message of layoffs internally and externally because sometimes it’s not the fact that you’re doing layoffs but it’s the why and making sure that you are being honest and transparent. As best as you can I think we’re all seeing a lot of craziness on twitter with their new their new CEO and they don’t have, you know they notoriously cut pr and comms there and the stories have been going crazy, you don’t know what to believe. That brand is really suffering right now from not having someone to make recommendations on how to best do a lot of these things. And that again is managing external communications but also internally there’s a lot that could be better.

So I think yes, our industry in the next 1-2 years will go through a recognition a reckoning but at the same time maybe being dismissed now will show our value because it’s like no we actually need these people we need these people to help us tell our story and manage the crises that we’re that we’re living through.