I don't set myself up as the PR authority, but as a person who has been sitting myself down in front of the computer and the telephone for over two decades, helping companies figure out how to get themselves some positive attention from the marketplace, preferably without breaking the bank. The big differences now are that my desk faces Harvey Mountain, instead of the Cambridgeside Galleria, traffic consists of being stuck behind a tractor, and I never shop, unless it's online.

Remember those truckloads of money?

At Lotus, I was director of product PR, arriving in 1987, at a time when people used to say our biggest problem was where to put the truckloads of money. That anyone could get as jazzed about spreadsheets as we all did still astounds me - does anybody remember when we used Willie Nelson as a customer reference? Spreadsheets were hip, we said, even Willie uses 1-2-3. (Of course, he was later indicted for tax evasion, but no one ever connected that to us.) At Lotus, just about every product had a bigger PR budget than almost every company I've worked with since. I distinctly remember the moment when our world moved from excess to big trouble from such excess in the form of a crisis. I was in London with Carrie Snyder and Frank Ingari, promoting the next round of products based on the doomed OS/2 Presentation Manager, when the phone rang and Richard Eckel informed us that 1-2-3 Release 3 had slipped for the third time. It was now going to be 18 months before customer ship. Carrie and I were actually conducting a mini-press conference from the swank Hyde Park Hotel, happily eating cold lobster on the bed, this during a time when almost no sales rep or PR person went anywhere without a limo. "Come home," Richard said. "It's over." He was right -- after that, you couldn't expense a blow dryer without a reprimand from accounting.

I've done PR for companies in good times and bad, with big budgets and next to nothing. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that if you have an interesting story to tell it will get positive attention from the marketplace if you tell it well, consistently, and long enough. If it isn't interesting, don't bug the media or you will teach them to ignore you.

At Lotus, we promoted many products -- Measure, Improv, Lotus DBMS!?-- before Ray Ozzie and Jim Manzi gave us something really worth talking about. A lot of people claim ownership for Notes' tremendous success, and I certainly hang my hat on being at least partially responsible for the success of that PR campaign. With Notes, we learned the value of creating a category, of how to fashion a story out of a competitive rivalry, and how "secret sauce" like replicated databases could feed the trade press for months. We had a $2 million product publicity budget for Notes Release 3 when I left Lotus in 1992, and thanks to Bob Weiler, I was allowed to manage the launch event and the PR effort for Notes for another year or so as my "starter client" when I launched my own PR consultancy.

Consulting Fantasies

I'd long wanted to be an independent consultant, fantasizing that I would travel on an expense account to glamorous places -- giving brilliant advice to clients who would follow it without question -- and raking in enormous fees for a minimum of work. As I said, this was a fantasy. In reality, I beat a daily path to the school bus, there are Legos under my desk, and I've learned that the best way to sell yourself as a PR consultant is to understate your qualifications, deliver way more than is expected of you, and charge roughly half the price of an agency. As long as I'm being totally honest, my departure from Lotus was not entirely predicated on the entrepreneurial instinct, but on my marriage to David Capeless, with whom Jim Manzi and his wife Glenda had set me up on a blind date. Jim never would take no for an answer -- secretly, I think he wanted to get rid of me by banishing me to the Berkshires, where David lived. Most Bostonians have never visited this place, preferring to drive themselves crazy in Cape Cod traffic. I am quite sure I am the single tech person in the tiny town of West Stockbridge, the very last exit on the Massachusetts Turnpike before you get to upstate New York. I am the archetypal telecommuter, working from home and in some cases, never even meeting some of my clients face to face. It's better that way for some companies, which can quickly suck you into the void of meetingitis, when what they really need is someone perpetually focused on outbound communications. Anyway, travel is highly overrated.

Lots of Loti

I've been lucky because among my clients have been many ex-Loti. I helped Leon Navickas launch Centra through its IPO, establishing a first-mover story around e-learning, which still sounds really promising to me. I worked with Cliff Conneighton to promote Internet Commerce Services Corp, hanging our story on the benefits of e-commerce from New Hampshire, where there is no sales tax. John Landry pulled a rabbit out of a hat selling Anyday.com to Palm and I helped a bit there early on. Jane Eisenberg found work for me at Genuity. For quite a long time, I worked with the great folks at Iris, helping launch what was one of the first truly content- rich, totally interactive web sites for developers. Jeanette Medlin and I created a storm of press around privacy and television -- far beyond what we probably deserved at Predictive Networks. Jim Wilson (the bearded Notes one, there were two) rang up last fall and we launched the Brightline Server for Domino at LotuSphere, which sure was a trip in the wayback machine, Mr. Peabody. This summer, I worked with Tim Dempsey at Sonic Software, implementing some of the "controlling the debate" stuff we learned at Lotus about how to compete with big gorillas like Microsoft and IBM. All of these PR efforts have been done, I believe, with great effectiveness, and at a price at which I'm happy to work and the client seemed happy to pay. I guess, for a consultant, that's fantasy realized.

"Diplomacy --- the art of saying ‘Nice doggie' 'til you can find a stick." Wynn Catlin

Also this summer, I learned a bit about the difference between the lucrative but fairly impersonal world of tech PR and the harsh world of politics when I helped my husband in his successful campaign for election to District Attorney here in Berkshire County. At the face of it, it's a lot of the same things - speeches, articles, direct mail, positioning the "client" against the competition and acting nicely to skeptical reporters, who would rather be elsewhere. On the flip side, it's surprisingly hard work, endlessly harsh criticism, and obviously, no pay. Yet, I find the work my husband does chasing down murderers and drug dealers fascinating and meaningful well beyond what most people get from their careers, as well as an inspiration to our two sons, Charlie (9) and Sam (6). So far, our boys have remained on the right side of the law, although some days, we think of reporting them to the FBI as enemy combatants.

I love hearing what ex-Loti are doing, and if you think you have a story to tell, please ring me up here in the Berkshires. We do have phones, though no DSL yet. Contrary to popular belief, we also have roads, and it is truly beautiful all seasons of the year. Many threaten to come visit, but few do. Please call me if you would like recommendations of things to see and place to go. On a final note, I've noticed that some of you have begun to retire. This can't be good for my business, so please cut it out.

Best,
Betsy

Betsy Kosheff
38 West Center Road
West Stockbridge, MA 01266
413-232-7057
kosheffb@vgernet.net

October 24, 2004