AboveNet

AboveNet

Sometimes a changing of the guard presents the opportunity to clean house. Last year, AboveNet, a provider of “high bandwidth connectivity solutions,” lost their veteran PR manager to retirement. Rather than hire an immediate replacement, they brought in Crawford on an interim basis first, to make their PR department ship-shape. We spotted and fixed a number of basic issues to improve the effectiveness of their traditional media relations approach, and – we believe – set this highly profitable company on the path to continued success via social public relations.

• Press Distribution. We thought it odd that a $300 million publicly traded company that issued 50+ announcements per year rarely turned up in a Factiva search, let alone a Google search. The culprit: using a low-cost, fly-by-night Web press release distribution system that had no affiliation with dominant news engines. We quickly switched AboveNet to a name brand press release wire service that got their name out and was still economical.
• Press Lists. A previous manager had plugged 22,000 media contacts into a single press list – so large it was completely useless. We tore up this legacy document and created targeted lists for telecom and vertical press and bloggers, paring distribution back to a few hundred key contacts.
• Collaterals. Marketing literature posted online had been composed over an extended period and as a result changed in tone and message overtime. We revamped the entire marketing collateral canon, simplifying the text and making the message consistent.
• Press Outreach. Previously, AboveNet had never worked proactively with media, wrongly thinking that contacting press directly would alienate them. AboveNet’s PR began and ended with putting a news release on the wire (and recall that their service hit no news engines, meaning the releases went nowhere). Crawford undertook AboveNet’s first proactive media outreach, concentrating on trade press and on local markets to support sales.
• Online Presence. AboveNet’s Wikipedia entry read like a sales brochure – we rewrote it from scratch, creating a more objective, fact-based entry designed to boost credibility and trust. On another front, we corrected a number of errors in online databases describing AboveNet as a “long distance company” and even an ISP.
• Strategic Counsel on Social PR. Having fixed the basics, Crawford went one step further, recommending a broader program of social public relations:
  1. Re-tooling the web site with a crisper design and more frequently updated content;
  2. Optimization of content to improve search ranking and traffic volume;
  3. Creation of a CEO blog to give the company a recognizable voice and face.

Several of these recommendations were adopted, and given AboveNet’s forward-looking management we are confident that the company will make effective use of the online PR tools we set in place, to further elevate its profile.