I chuckled to myself when I saw this tech PR survey coverage on the Techworld IT news site today. If you’ve been exposed to the technology media over the last decade, you’ll have seen numerous variations on its theme of ‘XX per cent of businesses not backing up their data’.
It’s one of a number of PR research stories that gets churned out in different guises again and again – like the one about ‘IT end users still using amazingly obvious security passwords’ or the one about ’employees are the biggest IT security risk’.
Most top tier IT publications tend to avoid these hackneyed stories unless they add a fresh new insight. I think this particular backup story from Acronis was covered partly because it highlighted international differences and played up to some cultural stereotypes – Brits are much less likely to backup then the Germans and French. And the Germans are much more worried about compliance (now there’s a surprise) than everyone else.
The fact that the survey sample was a sizeable 600 businesses must also have helped convince editors that the results were reliable.
Getting PR research right is a tricky task. But we managed to successfully include research about ‘green storage’ in to this campaign. And if you want some handy hints on this area, check out our PR research advice article.