Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
Spaceflight, an integrated space services company and client of Communiqué PR, is reinventing the model for launching satellites into space and driving a new space revolution designed to democratize space access.
Since 2010, Spaceflight has been innovating and investing in programs to foster a new era where space access is a service. A full-service launch provider, Spaceflight provides a straightforward, cost-effective, and comprehensive suite of products and services, including state-of-the-art satellite infrastructure, rideshare capabilities, and global communications networks that enable commercial and government entities to achieve their mission goals. To date, Spaceflight has launched 81 satellites and the company has contracts to deploy more than 135 satellites through 2018.
Through the contributions of Spaceflight and other commercial satellite companies, the space industry is experiencing a massive shift, where private companies can not only partake in the exploration of space, but take the lead in driving innovations across the industry. Spaceflight is helping drive access to space for commercial, scientific and non-profit entities and promises to bring new information with incredible uses for every industry, from energy to agriculture, finance, government, human rights, defense and more. This commercialization and heightened access to global big data will make satellite imaging, data, and communications less expensive and more prevalent, thereby enabling almost anyone to explore our world in ways that were previously not possible.
Spaceflight Awarded First GSA Schedule Contract for Satellite Launch Services
Earlier this year, Spaceflight became the first launch services provider to be awarded the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) Professional Services Schedule (00CORP). As a recipient of the contract, the federal government recognized Spaceflight as a preferred launch services vendor fully authorized to conduct business directly with federal government agencies. As a result, the company will provide its services to federal agencies at a pre-negotiated fixed rate, enabling them to quickly and easily secure small satellite launch contracts online and cut through red tape to receive services faster, ultimately saving a significant amount of time and tax-payer money.
Spaceflight has enjoyed a long, successful history of providing innovative launch services to federal agencies, including NASA and the U.S. Air Force. However, as U.S. government agencies such as NASA and the Department of Defense increasingly look to commercial satellite companies to support their missions, Spaceflight sought a way to streamline the vetting process and secure preferred vendor status with the GSA. In order to receive the GSA Schedule contract, Spaceflight had to undergo an extensive and rigorous approval process, including the negotiation of fair and reasonable prices, as well as ensuring its services are in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.
Deploying the News
Communiqué PR understood that securing the GSA Schedule contract was not only a significant endorsement for Spaceflight, but for the next generation of launch providers dedicated to helping more organizations increase their understanding of our world. As such, we believed there would be strong interest in the news within space industry and developed a strategy to inform the industry and drive awareness of the new contract with readers of government trade publications.
Our approach involved developing a targeted press list focused on journalists covering the space industry as well as those tracking government contracts. We also worked with Spaceflight to finalize a press release that expressed the significance of Spaceflight’s role as the first launch provider to receive the GSA Schedule contract and communicated how the contract will reduce administrative costs and enable federal agencies to quickly and easily order a CubeSat or MicroSat launch online. We then offered the news under embargo to targeted media in order to ensure accuracy and drive coverage around the news.
Coverage Lifts Off
Within two days of crossing the wire, Spaceflight’s news was covered by 16 media outlets. Here is a list of the coverage secured thus far:
- Xconomy, “Seattle Week in Review: Space, VR, Machine Intelligence”
- Financial News, “Spaceflight Awarded First GSA Schedule Contract for Satellite Launch Services”
- SpaceRef, “Spaceflight Awarded First GSA Schedule Contract for Satellite Launch Services”
- SpaceNews, “Spaceflight offers smallsat launch services on government contract schedule”
- SpaceNews, “Mold contamination delays Orbital ATK cargo flight to ISS”
- Satnews, “Spaceflight Awarded First GSA Schedule Contract For Satellite Launch Services…Easy… Order CubeSats Online”
- Law360, “Spaceflight Wins 1st GSA Contract For Easy Launch Orders”
- Space Daily, “Spaceflight Awarded First GSA Schedule Contract for Satellite Launch Services”
- Executive Biz, “Spaceflight Added to GSA’s Consolidated Professional Services Schedule”
- Northwest Innovation, “Spaceflight Industries Gets GSA Contract”
- Seattle Times, “US approves Spaceflight for simplified satellite-launch deals”
- GeekWire, “Spaceflight’s online price list makes it easier for the feds to buy a launch”
- Parabolic Arc, “Spaceflight Awarded First GSA Schedule Contract for Satellite Launch Services”
- Puget Sound Business Journal, “Spaceflight lands major contract with federal government”
- Room, “Spaceflight Awarded First GSA Schedule Contract for Satellite Launch Services”
- NewSpace Watch, “Spaceflight Industries gets GSA Schedule contract for smallsat launch services” (article behind paywall, link to RSS feed)
We congratulate Spaceflight on this significant achievement and look forward to telling its story as it continues to lead an innovative era of space exploration that fosters a better understanding of our world.
Innovation occurs daily in the technology sector. To tackle complex social challenges, global foundations look to the tech sector to help deliver as many powerful tools in their arsenal as possible to design novel and useful solutions. Identifying innovations, nurturing innovative capacity, and supporting innovators are mechanisms to support ideas for the public good.
Guided by these principles, Siemens Stiftung created the “empowering people. Award” as a way to not only recognize and reward innovations, but provide the resources necessary to help organizations further the development of solutions to help solve global challenges.
A sampling of previous award winners include:
- A prosthetic knee designed specifically for conditions in the developing world and costing at least 90 percent less than similar alternatives
- Clean drinking water right at the tap so residents of poor, rural communities can cook, clean, bathe, and wash dishes with clean water, minimizing contamination pathways and preventing fatal diseases and frequent illnesses
- A low-cost, energy-efficient infant warmer that can help prevent hypothermia for infants with low birth weight in developing countries.
CPR was honored to have assisted Siemens Stiftung in promoting the “empowering people. Award 2015″ to U.S. companies and organizations. Our goal was to publicize the award to solicit entries through media coverage in various publications. Among the highlights of this project included:
- Media outreach and coverage in various trade and business publications ranging from Yahoo! Finance and The Street, to Today’s Medical Developments
- Development of a contributed article on previous award winner D-REV and the ReMotion Knee, which received prominent coverage in “Today’s Medical Developments,” a medical device trade publication, as a way to garner interest in entries among the medical device industry
- Interviews with award jurors to create blogs and additional content
Award entries have been submitted and are currently in review by the jurors, and we eagerly await the announcement to see what innovations are in the works to help improve global conditions.
“Deliver a message or an offer with a call to action; you can also insert a link and a hashtag so your target audience will see this #Twitter”
The above statement is exactly 140-characters long, which meets Twitter’s legendary length restriction for a tweet. I love Twitter because it’s a simple, intuitive tool and timely news source, especially for media professionals. Adhering to the 140-character limit is what made Twitter unique from other social platforms. Users had to be concise and to the point with their messages – but (as most things change) Twitter is said to be changing that rule.
According to an article in Re/code, Twitter is rumored to be building a new feature that will allow users the option to tweet a message with up to 10,000-characters. As someone who works to increase brand awareness, I see this as a great opportunity for messaging – and in PR, it’s crucial to craft the right message and deliver it to the right audience.
With 10,000 (or more) ways to potentially tweet a message, brands will have new opportunities to add value to their audience. Here are three reasons why Twitter’s character limit expansion will be beneficial for brands:
1.) More opportunity for thought leadership, audience building, and brand awareness. It can be extremely difficult to deliver a thorough message in 140 characters – I’m sure every tweeter has struggled with this at some point. The opportunity to provide a deeper, more in-depth perspective will establish users’ thought leadership on a topic or industry. In essence, tweets will soon be a type of long-form content where users will craft a snazzy headline in 140 characters, and viewers decide to expand and read the content. Users won’t be forced to leave Twitter to read your entire message, which can significantly increase the number of people who actually see it.
2.) An improved content marketing platform. Brands will have the opportunity to engage with their audience in new ways. With a more detailed message, brands will have more opportunity to educate, inform, and add value within the content/tweet itself. Furthermore, the tweet will still appear in 140 characters on the timeline – so tweets will still look the same as users scroll through tweets via their timeline. The silver lining is that users will not be forced to click a link and leave Twitter to get more information, which is less disruptive for your audience. Instead, the viewer will choose to either expand the tweet or click the link to learn more, which can still generate organic website traffic.
3.) More analytical data. Brands will be able to get even deeper insights into what messages are sticking. Currently, Twitter analytics show the impressions and engagements with a tweet, including detail expands, likes, retweets, profile clicks, follows, replies, and email shares. The possibilities with a character-limit expansion are sweeping, such as the number of expanded tweets, how long the tweet was expanded for, how far viewers scrolled down the expanded tweet, whether users clicked the link provided in the expanded tweet, or in the 140-character timeline view. Data is incredibly valuable to measure success.
It’s as though the 140-character “rule” became Twitter’s core essence. Since people fear change and a tweet is considered a small chirp, not a long birdsong, it is understandable why people are hesitant about the reported character limit expansion. It’ll be interesting to see if and when this goes into effect, how users react and how brands take advantage of this new opportunity.
A new client of Communiqué PR is spearheading the introduction of consumer drone services in the U.S. and the media are taking notice.
Cape Productions (Cape) is a drone video service for ordinary people who love to engage in action sports, with a current focus on capturing amazing footage of friends and family shredding the slopes at ski resorts across the country. Consumers at these locations are able to use Cape’s service to have their experiences filmed automatically via drone and edited by Cape’s professional video team. Shortly thereafter, customers receive personalized, professionally edited videos of themselves to watch and share with friends and family. Essentially, it’s like hiring a personal film crew – all you do is ski and wait for the video to be delivered.
The FAA and Regulating Drones
One of the major obstacles for many businesses to overcome (depending on their specific area of focus) is navigating and adhering to all federal regulations relating to their product. This is particularly true in the areas of healthcare or car manufacturing or heavy industry when there are genuine concerns about consumer safety and/or how the service can impact the environment. For the drone consumer industry specifically, which is still in its infancy, regulations are much less established and business and consumers alike who want to utilize drones anxiously wait for guidance from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as they pursue their drone ambitions.
There are obvious safety considerations when dealing with drone technology. As with any piece of advanced tech, sometimes the mechanics simply don’t work or fail at the wrong time. Cape not only understood this fact when creating the business, but welcomed the challenge of ensuring that its service is safe for anyone who wished to use it. It knew from the onset how important working with the FAA would be in creating a scalable business model for its drone video service and wanted to go above and beyond any regulations set forth to manage its operation.
To that end, Cape has worked closely with the FAA since its founding to ensure that it was compliant with all regulatory requirements and that their service was legal and safe. In fact, Cape has conducted thousands of flights across the globe in places with extremely harsh conditions and still has a 100-percent safety record.
Cape Granted Unique FAA Exemption
At the end of 2015, Cape received word from the FAA that they had been granted an amendment to the company’s existing Section 333 exemption for commercial drone operations. In a nutshell, the exemption is tailored specifically to Cape’s operations and makes them the first drone operator in the U.S. legally allowed to fly drones within 500 feet of customers and in an area wider than a closed set.
What does that mean exactly? In this precedent-setting exemption, the FAA is now allowing Cape to fly its drones much closer to people and outside of a closed movie set – the first time this has ever been allowed for a consumer drone service. The previous restrictions on where and how close a drone could fly hampered many potential consumer and commercial uses for drones, and this amendment is groundbreaking for the industry as it lays the foundation for different drone operations in the future. But more importantly, the exemption now allows Cape the ability to create even more stunning videos of people engaged in action sports and opens the possibility for them to expand its model into different areas where people would want to hire a drone for filming purposes. (Some of the world’s greatest athletes, including the U.S. Ski Team, have also started using Cape to enhance their training).
Communiqué PR understood that the media would be interested in this regulatory news and immediately helped Cape build a strategy to maximize coverage for when it made the announcement to the public. The process was straight forward, but had to be executed with precision: First, identify the heavy hitters and beat reporters covering drone news and regulatory updates. Second, draft a release which incorporates key messages and talking points centered on the importance of the news and which ultimately ties back to Cape and its service. Lastly, share the news under embargo with prioritized media to help seed stories and shape the media coverage when the news breaks.
As a result, media interest in the announcement has been expansive, in-depth, and inclusive of the core messaging Cape wanted highlighted. Here are a few examples of the coverage:
- Fast Company: You Can’t Use a Drone to Film Yourself Skiing but these Ex-Googlers Will do it for You
- USA Today: FAA Approves Ski-video Drones
- BuzzFeed: Drone Photography Company Wins FAA Exemption Ahead Of New Regulations
- MarketWatch: This is the First Business to (Legally) Fly Drones Around Americans’ Heads
- Forbes: Ex-Google Employees’ Drones Turn Weekend Warriors Into Ski Movie Stars
- Drone 360: Cape Productions Granted First-of-a-Kind Permission from the FAA for Drone Video Service
Communiqué PR congratulates Cape on its recent achievement and the wonderful media coverage it has received to date. This is only the beginning for a company that has ambitions to be the largest, most trusted drone video operator in the world, and we here at Communiqué PR are dedicated to making that happen.
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If the stock market has got you down, consider this: The conceptualization and launch of new companies, as well as the contraction and consolidation of existing businesses, are tenets of “economic dynamism,” a concept that illustrates the ebb and flow of financial progress needed for economic stability and progress. In a nutshell, fluctuations are necessary for growth.
Yet with the number of new businesses introduced to the market each day, why do 92 percent of startups fail within the first three years? Many say scaling too quickly is the culprit, while others say it’s entering a crowded marketplace. While this varies across industries, company success typically boils down to three things: company innovation (IP), category leadership (positioning), and expected growth in revenue and customer base (valuation). Companies should consider these factors as they look to differentiate themselves from established competitors, not only to steal market share, but to carve out niche markets that properly position them for growth.
Differentiate & Position Your Company for Category Growth
Before a company considers whether or not to develop products or innovate within an established category, it is important to consider the current competitive landscape and the nuances of each player. Will the company be going up against large, established companies with several lines of business and a diversified product portfolio? If so, one option is to introduce technologies or innovations that capture a relevant yet parallel market need, one that will make the new company so valuable that people will be willing to pay a premium for that additional functionality and make the company an attractive acquisition target in the years ahead.
While we associate innovation with major companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, large multi-national corporations typically don’t have the luxury of innovating from within since they are publicly traded, under shareholder scrutiny, and focused heavily on operating efficiently to meet the current market need. Innovation takes creativity and time, and that’s why corporations partner with or develop their own think tanks or incubators to develop and explore new ideas and products. As a way to quickly differentiate, many corporations often take the approach of innovating through acquisition, to purchase smaller companies in the hopes of bringing in fresh ideas and IP into their existing service lines for further development and implementation. For this, they look to the nimble startup world.
For example, take the company Relate IQ (acquired by Salesforce), a company that launched in 2011 as an intelligence layer on top of CRM database and campaign technologies. The company focused on extending the functionality of traditional CRM platforms by providing additional data insights around how often people from within organizations collaborate with each another both internally and externally with sales prospects. Relate IQ aimed to solve the problem of tracking communications from one domain to another so that sales professionals could better understand who last contacted a potential customer, keeping all team members informed about the sales process. This technology was novel, relevant, and complimentary to Salesforce.com, which acquired Relate IQ for $390 million in July of 2014. Now the technology is being offered as Salesforce IQ to help teams manage their business development activities.
Now take former Communiqué PR client VoloMetrix (acquired by Microsoft), a company founded by Bain executives who based their technology on established time-and-motion studies utilized in the consulting world. By understanding people’s roles within a company and how they spend their time, consultants could be armed with valuable information to present strategies for organizational alignment and process improvements. In creating VoloMetrix, the company utilized the backbone communication channels for today’s businesses (email trends to inform business decisions), and helped create the category known as “People Analytics.”
By attaching itself to the Exchange email servers within corporations, VoloMetrix’s technology could anonymously extract the metadata associated with email and calendar items to reveal, in aggregate, who communicated and met most frequently with others internally and externally around parameters like time of day, geography, and within departments and divisions. This new dataset could then be used by consultants to identify correlations about qualities that defined a successful sales person, like the size of internal networks and the frequency at which these individuals contacted prospects. This approach caught the attention of Microsoft, which acquired VoloMetrix last year in September of 2015.
So what does this mean and how can it inform your business decisions?
Well, we know that Microsoft has been moving toward cloud-based technologies with Office365 to compete with Google and desired a way to create a communications intelligence layer, most likely to arm its consulting and data insights practice. Salesforce is investing heavily in data intelligence technologies and clearly has a competitor in Microsoft Dynamics for sales analytics, since their People Analytics technology (acquired through VoloMetrix) can extend both within and outside an organization. Traditional consulting firms like McKinsey and Bain will also be looking to partner closely with Microsoft lest they miss out on this very valuable data set already being used by companies around the world.
When examining this mini case study, key takeaways for companies are to anticipate the market shifts within a particular category – in this case, toward analytics and insights for sales and CRM, and innovate in this domain. As companies work to enter a new category or market, they must first understand how third-party analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester are defining the space. Next, they must pinpoint larger companies within the space, understand their offerings inside and out, and then position their companies well for future growth through differentiated products and services that could easily snap into existing services but are necessitated by proprietary algorithms and datasets.
In many cases, when and where these companies enter the market will ultimately determine their success.