Knowledge Leadership and Working with the Press

Today I was pleasantly surprised to see our company featured in the top headline of HPCwire, one of the biggest news outlets for our industry.

To my recollection, it had been nearly 4 years since we were featured so prominently on HPCwire. The previous time was in conjunction with v1.0 release of our first product.

Here is how this unfolded:

We keep a regular social media relationship alive with HPCwire through Twitter, broadcasting relevant HPCwire articles out to our >6,200 followers (note that HPCwire has 5,400 followers today, so the relative audiences are similar and complementary)
We look for opportunities to help educate HPCwire journalists on a regular basis, through simple Skype pings and through in-person meetups at tradeshows; the more they learn and understand about our space, the more inclined they will be to write about it
We keep our own knowledge leadership alive through active blogging, regular webinar series, and other marketing content development
We chime in on industry related matters, like this twitter response to AMD’s proclamation
The tweet above prompted HPCwire to contact us for more information
Which then led to a 20-minute call about heterogeneous computing and our work at AccelerEyes
Which then led to a follow-up email with pointers to our blog post describing heterogeneous computing trends
Which then led to a period of 2 weeks where we did not know if anything would come of our discussion
Which then led to the pleasant surprise of this morning’s top headline article

Press coverage evolves in a number of ways, but we have always simply tried to be useful, engaged, and available to help when needed. Journalists have a lot to get done and little time to do it. Each journalist covers more than is humanly possible, so they need help and have to make tradeoffs in their approach.

One outcome is that journalists often mis-interpret something or construe a conclusion that was not intended. For instance, the only input I had into the article above was a 20-minute conversation and a short email providing a link to our blog. I did not get to review any drafts of the article before it went live. I’ve found that the lack of iterations on drafts is more reflective of the journalist’s pressure on time than anything else. In this case, I requested two updates be made to the article, and those updates were incorporated swiftly into the live article.

I’ve found that many journalists in our space have a bootstrapped and startup mentality and are a pleasure to work with.

What approach do you take to working with journalists? When have you had your startup prominently featured?

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