Napier - B2B PR and Marketing

New sales contact at Elektroniktidningen

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:47:44 +0000

Fredrik Soderberg has been a popular figure amongst the European media. He has spend 10 years selling advertising in Elektroniktidningen, and was a co-owner of the publication (together with the editors) for more that half of this time. Today, however, he is moving to be Event Manager at the newly built football stadium in Stockholm, Swedbank Arena. We’d like to wish him the best of luck in his new role, and welcome his replacement, Anne-Charlotte Sparrvik, who has been working at Elektroniktidningen with Fredrik, so she will be completely up-to-speed from day one.

Napier named in Top 40 B2B Marketing Agencies

admin — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:55:01 +0000

Thanks to B2B Marketing, who named Napier as one of the top 40 B2B marcomms agencies in the UK. Whilst we often focus on PR, we’re an integrated agency that also offers design, website development, advertising, direct marketing, social media and other marketing services. Thanks for the recognition!

How to recruit on LinkedIn

admin — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:10:42 +0000

We’re working with many clients on social media projects, and so it’s not surprising that many of them ask about social recruitment. To help out our clients, we’ve written a tip sheet, which we are making freely available, that describes how to make most effective use of LinkedIn for recruitment.

Good luck Siegfried!

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:35:35 +0000

One of the best known and most well-respected editors in the industry, Siegfried Best, retires today. He has spent 31 years of his career in electronics journalism, and has made many friends through his knowledge, professionalism and friendly, good-humoured nature. As most people reading this post will know Siefried well, here are a few facts that you might not know:

He started his career in the German Army (Bundeswehr), working for 7 years repairing shortwave transceivers
He left the army to study Communication Electronics at the University Regensburg Study, graduating in 1974
Siegfried worked on the development of Shortwave Receivers and transceivers for Tornado Fighter after university
His first book “DX-Vademecum” (a book about shortwave communication) was published in 1979
In 1980 he joined Hüthig-Publishing as editor of elektronik industrie, a role that he held for 13 years
In 2003 he returned to elektronik industrie as editor-in-chief, a position he has held until his retirement today.

The great news is that Siegfried will not be lost to the electronics industry, as he plans to continue working as a freelance.

Call for papers – MAE 2012

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:41:11 +0000

The organisers of the 5th annual Military, Defence and Aerospace Electronics Conference (MAE2012) have issued a call for papers. The one-day event, featuring a technical forum and exhibition invites submissions that focus on the design, development and procurement of electronic components and embedded systems covering both hardware and software technologies.
The deadline for abstracts is Wednesday 22 February 2012, and they should be submitted by email to jfoster@mae-show.com.

Guest blog post – Per Henricsson

admin — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:04:01 +0000

When it comes to effective PR, editors are the real experts. I was delighted that Per Henricsson, editor at Elektroniktidningen sent me the following thoughts about the importance of dates on press releases:

Does the date really matter?

Recently I got a press release about a new ground-breaking product from well known company. Well, actually it was sent by their PR agency, but that’s business as usual. I get tons of press releases and when the daily one from a big US semiconductor company appears in my e-mail at 5 pm, I know it’s time to start heading home.

Normally, I just read the headlines of the press releases before clicking on the delete button, but this one caught my attention despite the fact that it was fairly long. ”…. world’s thinnest waterproof …” product of its kind. “This is something that my readers would be interested in and something I can easily turn into a story for our website”, I thought.

Of course I had to translate it into Swedish first, I couldn’t just copy and paste like my English colleagues. In Sweden we have a saying that goes “never check a good story”. The thin and waterproof component sounded familiar, so I did a search on our website.

Bingo! I remembered correctly. One and a half years ago, the company issued a press release saying that the they had developed the world’s thinnest and waterproof product of that kind. I had written the piece and I was beginning to feel stupid. The new press release didn’t offer that many details, so I still couldn’t be sure that it was the same ”product” I already had written about. I gave the part number to Google and my fast and cheap research department rewarded me with a hit. It turned out to be the original English press release issued by the company on December 12 last year. Today was January 25, 2012. Fooled again!

Normally I would just say the f-word, ditch the story and begin with another one, but this time I sent a short e-mail to PR-agency asking them why they had changed the date on the press release? The original was dated December 12 and the one they sent was a more vague “January 2012”. It’s hard to express oneself in a foreign language and maybe I wasn’t clear enough when I wrote the question. The answer I got simply stated “Did you mean compared to product availability in Japan?”

A similar thing happened with one of the high profile semiconductor companies last spring. Their PR agency changed the date on the press release regarding a soft core from May 2 to May 4, the day they sent me the press release.

The reason? A public holiday in Europe prevented them from sending the press release on the correct date, hence the date had to be altered. We didn’t have that day off in Sweden so I had picked up the story from my US colleagues and published it the day before I got the press release.

That’s just two examples. I’m sure most of them just slip trough unnoticed. And does it really matter? Probably not. A product is interesting to my readers a long time after it is released. A news story is still “new” if my readers haven’t seen it before. But, the world is shrinking all the time. And If I get caught, my readers regard me as lazy and ignorant. And they lose confidence in me in the same way I lose confidence in the PR agencies.

So does the date really matter? I’d love to hear what other agencies and journalists think about this issue.

Bodo’s Power launches Chinese edition

admin — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:48:03 +0000

It’s great to see European publications reaching beyond our borders, and so I was excited to hear about the planned launch of Bodo’s Power China. The title will be published by i2i Group, and promises a print circulation of 10,000, an electronic version of the print magazine, bi-monthly email newsletters and a local website – www.bodospowerchina.com.
The magazine will draw on the content generated for the European title, enhanced with local content, and will be published in Manderin. Five issues are planned for this year, launching with the March/April edition.

New editor at elektronikJOURNAL

admin — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:09:58 +0000

Ina Susanne Rao (email ina.rao@huethig.de) has joined elektronikJOURNAL to cover power electronics, power supplies, electromechanics, optoelectronics, passive devices and renewable energy. Ina has a variety of experience in both journalism and the electronics industry. After gaining a diploma in Technical Writing at the university in Karlsruhe, she worked in the PR department for a distributor, then gained experience overseas (mainly Far East and South America), and most recently was the editor for an optical technologies publication.

Elektronik Informationen updates online presence

admin — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:36:26 +0000

Elektronik Informationen has updated the layout of the website and the design of their email newsletter, which is now sent twice a week. The focus on development of their online presence isn’t a surprise, but their decision to continue to require registration to view any technical article is interesting. This decision might reduce the number of page views achived slightly, but has huge potential to benefit both the publisher and electronics companies.
In other industries, online publications focus more on lead generation than publishers in the European electronics market. I believe that, despite the challenges in the electronics sector, lead generation should be a bigger part of electronics publishers’ business models. I really hope that by putting a value on high-quality content Elektronik Informationen will help companies get more from the content they generate.

All About Test adds Product Focus to site

admin — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:06:19 +0000

One of the downsides of online publications is that they tend to focus on a stream of news, failing to provide the context you might get in an in-depth print article. Electronics Weekly is a good example of a site that has produced some excellent overview pages – such as their guide to LEDs, and I was delighted to see that All About Test has begun to do something similar for the test market. The first product focus looks at power analysers, and is also available on the German site.