Knowing how and when to win the media’s attention

A nerd for every occasion

Jamie Warner and his business eNerds is a relative newcomer to public relations. Indeed, the North Sydney reseller has been going for nine years but only put a PR strategy in place at the end of 2008. 

The trigger point was eNerds getting selected in the BRW Fast100 list at the end of that year.

"I suddenly had all these people trying to chase me down. Basically, they were trying to sell me stuff but on the flip side, I started going to events that BRW was holding and I started twigging," Warner says. "I started to realise the benefit of getting out and about. It gives you one word which I never realised before and that is, credibility.

"If you have achieved a few things, and you get into the CRN Fast50 or BRW Fast 100, it gives you credibility and that in my mind is tremendously important. In a very cluttered market place of IT services, it's important to stand out from the crowd.

"If we are lined up with 50 other IT companies, how would you distinguish one from the next? I started realising that getting a bit of PR and being out in the market place and being seen as achieving things and also being seen as an expert in your space is also tremendously important for giving that credibility."

eNerds provides managed IT services. These include support maintenance, consulting procurement and online services.

Over the past year, the company has been everywhere. What started out as a mention in a national business magazine like BRW turned into coverage in magazines including CRN, Dynamic Business, Australian Manufacturing Technology and Smart Company. It made the CRN Fast50 list and the Smart Company Smart 50 list. It has participated in round table discussions about the industry and has picked up industry awards. It's also sponsored Sydney Joomla Day. And all that was just 2009.

Still, he admits that PR is not about generating sales, at least not directly. It's about getting noticed and building the kind of credibility that can convert to sales. Businesses looking for a cost benefit analysis need to think laterally.

"I can't see it per se [as driving sales] but I know that by being more credible, it will enable us to have a better conversion rate," he says.

"I haven't got statistics about the sales pipeline being more successful by having PR but I can guarantee you that if I am sitting there as a BRW Fast 100 company that has also got IT industry awards and my services stack up, compared to another company that hasn't done anything else, you might feel more comfortable with the one that has a bit more credibility.

"It's tremendously valuable but I couldn't measure it."

Warner says the first time the company got written up in the media had a massive impact. Not the kind one could measure but priceless in terms of how it set the company up to forge ahead.

"I don't know if it translated into new business opportunities specifically but it was more the fact that we were getting out there," he says. "It was a motivational thing for our staff, just seeing their photos. It was the first time we had anything like that."

Warner says the company, which he started when he was 22 years old and just out of university, needed to spend the first few years feeling its way and developing. There was no point being like a dotcom start-up and getting lots of PR before the company had even achieved anything.

"You have to have done something, you have to have a story to tell," he says. "It's hard to grow a business straight up from marketing and spending all those wads of money if you don't know what PR is about," he says.

"Once we started getting that momentum, if you do have things to say that are reasonably coherent, it seems the magazines want to keep talking to you because they know they're going to get something out of you."

He says the public relations campaign was strategically focused. ENerds targeted a niche, manufacturing, and built it from there. "At the start of 2009, we added PR to our distribution strategy.

Distribution is part of our vision and distribution is about how you are going to get your clients, how are you going to be getting your name out there.

"We engaged a PR company, which was one of our clients, and we told them we wanted to be seen as experts.

"They helped us target manufacturing. We have had a few articles in the manufacturing space and been to a few talks and we are going to continue to build our reputation in that industry."

Warner attracts interest because he is a keen advocate and speaker on where the industry is headed and what the big trends are. That is his main selling point for PR.

"People like having a chat to me because I don't mind having a chat and I have some things to say and the business is growing and we are achieving results," he says.