More companies being certified by Accredit UK

Netlink IT and 4Mation IT are a couple of Birmingham companies that have recently been certified with the UK’s IT Quality Standard.

We secured this article in the Birmingham Post to promote Accredit and the two companys’ achievements:

Certification of quality for brothers’ IT businesses

May 1 2009 by Jon Griffin, Birmingham Post

Brothers Richard and Paul Tubb have notched up twin successes – after achieving the Accredit UK certification for their IT businesses Netlink IT and 4mation IT.

Both brothers say they started their technology businesses out of a desire to change the perception that IT providers are ‘cheap and cheerful’ and not necessarily highly professional.

Being certified by the independent Accredit UK body further underlines their commitment to quality, they say.

Richard, 32, started his business as he wanted to provide independent IT support and consultancy to small businesses in Birmingham and beyond, and Paul, 29, launched 4mation IT out of a desire to provide businesses with professional bespoke software solutions.

Richard is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and Paul heads up a team of qualified IT professionals.

A growing business, Netlink IT recently won a major project to upgrade a client’s infrastructure to Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2008, and successfully implemented a CRM package to a multi-national client in the manufacturing sector.

Richard Tubb, managing director of Netlink IT and author of Tubblog, ‘the Ramblings of an ICT Consultant,’ said: “The Accredit certification provided us with a framework to achieve efficiency and systematically incorporate best practices, which we’d previously been struggling to implement, into our business.”

Paul said there were “two main reasons” why 4mation IT decided to take part in the Accredit UK certification.

“The first reason was by working through the certification, it made us think about the way we operate and interact with our customers. It enabled us to identify our strengths and weaknesses and reinforced that our current procedures were largely correct.

“The second reason was so we could prove to ourselves and to other businesses out there, that a small company like 4mation IT can offer a high level of service and professionalism despite our size.”

Six reasons your press release gets binned

As a UK PR agency, part of the work we do for clients is to send out press releases. Here is a great article from Peter Bartram on how to make it into print.

E-mailing out press releases to newspapers and magazines may sound like a great way to get “free” publicity.

The trouble is that thousands of other companies have had the same idea.

I recently asked 89 editors and other journalists what happens to the releases which swamp their e-mail inboxes. The answer was simple: the
delete key goes into over-drive.

First, the numbers. The 89 receive around 19,100 releases a week. That’s nearly a million a year, a weekly average of 215 for each editor.
Leading business magazines are heavily targeted. Many get more than 500 a week. I spoke to one editor who employs an assistant just to wade through the 1,500 he gets each week.

The editors told me there are six main reasons why most releases get binned, often without being read.

1 Irrelevant to their interests
Every day, editors receive releases which have no conceivable relevance to the subjects they cover. It’s clear the PR people sending them have made no attempt to target.

They probably haven’t even looked at the publications. They adopt a scatter-gun approach of sending releases to every e-mail address they can
find.

In the good old days when releases arrived by snail mail, at least PRs had to pay for the postage and take the trouble of stuffing the releases into
envelopes. Now those cost and work constraints have disappeared.

Because those PRs who do take care to target carefully are rare, editors tend to look much more closely at what they send.

2 No story or weak story
A release ought to contain some intrinsically interesting information that an editor would want to pass on to readers. PRs who do understand the kind of material a publication uses score because they look for relevant ideas, then tailor their release in a way which makes an editor sit up and take notice.

Editors apply the so-what? test to press releases – so what would happen if we didn’t run this story? If the answer is “not much”, the release goes in the bin. If a PR believes a release wouldn’t pass the test, it shouldn’t be send – or the story should be strengthened so that it will pass muster.

3 Self-promotion of puffery
Too many people who send out press releases don’t seem to understand the difference between news and advertising. Editors hate having to wade through pages of boastful hype extolling an organisation and all its works. Even releases which do contain the germ of a story sometimes get killed off because they’re wrapped up in exuberant puffery.

I wasn’t surprised that some editors told me they pass press releases straight to their advertising departments as sales leads.

4 Poor English
A significant proportion of releases contain spelling, grammar or punctuation errors. Most editors told me errors are a certain turn-off but a few forgiving souls said they didn’t mind correcting the English.

Even so, howlers such as wrong use (or non-use) of the possessive apostrophe and failure to make the verb agree with the subject – two of the
most common mistakes – undermine a release’s (correct use of possessive apostrophe) credibility.

5 Confusing jargon
Some press releases seem to have been written by computer. They start with the latest management-speak (“pushing the envelope” is a current favourite), add a layer of baffling jargon (“coppock curve”, but it varies by subject matter) and sprinkle in plenty of impenetrable acronyms (“CDMA 2000 1x EV-DO”).

The finished result reads like a secret code. The most skilled PRs know that stories are best told in simple English which can be read and understood quickly. Editors haven’t got time to decode jargon or play guessing games with unknown acronyms.

6 Too long
Many press releases combine the twin faults of being too long – but not providing enough information. That’s because the information they do provide tends to be irrelevant background about the company, while key facts about the story – the value of the contract, the date of the product launch, the job title of the newly appointed individual – are left out. Skilled PRs judge the “weight” of a story

Most stories can be told in a page. Some may need two. A story has to be pretty close in importance to the Second Coming to warrant three.
A final word of good news. Of the 89 editors and journalists, 38 told me they had got a “really good” story from a press release at some time.

• How to Write the Perfect Press Release by Peter Bartram is published by New Venture Publishing. You can read the first chapter online at
www.writeapressrelease.co.uk