Echelon Corporation: PR Week cover story
Atomic's collaboration with Echelon was a PR Week cover story in November, 2007, and is ongoing today. Echelon Corporation (Nasdaq: ELON) is a global provider of networking products that build intelligence into devices, and systems that allow them to be remotely monitored and controlled over the Internet. The company's solutions power the smartest buildings, homes, utilities, cities, industrial sites and transportation systems worldwide. Over the years, trade publications in these markets as well as embedded and electronic trade media had covered Echelon on a fairly regular basis.
Echelon hired Atomic to help the company gain greater visibility with mainstream press in the U.S. across consumer, energy, business and financial media and bloggers. The ComContext analysis gave the Atomic team a number of key insights into the media landscape, topical issues and coverage opportunities across a wide array of horizontal markets, and a search oriented evaluation of the company's favored descriptive language also pointed out an opportunity to update positioning and messaging. One fundamental shift was moving away from "control networking" terminology and positioning the company instead as a global leader in energy management technology.
The resulting campaign was simple and powerful, with new messaging, a balanced portfolio of new themes, announcements and stories, careful content alignment with media, blogger and government interests, engagement and orchestration across print and broadcast media, online outlets and blogs. Plus a healthy dose of photos and video to bring to life the spectacular developments, buildings, homes, power and lighting grids and transportation systems around the world managed by Echelon technology.
During this particular campaign, the company's coverage volume increased by orders of magnitude and the caliber of covering outlet and blog improved dramatically. Today, Echelon-branded stories run regularly in some of the nation's most respected business and financial publications including Associated Press, Bloomberg News, Reuters, San Jose Mercury News, theStreet.com, the Wall Street Journal and others. During the timeframe of this initial campaign, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger and U.N. Secretary General Ban Kee Moon chose to hold a press conference at Echelon's headquarters in Silicon Valley to illustrate the role technology can play in large-scale, automated energy conservation.
