Short Notice, Specific Results Won't Discourage Johnson & Company

jo&co quickly books important targeted analysts and amazes client

Niehaus, Ryan, Wong (NRW's) client Vignette, gave Johnson & Company (jo&co), The Virtual Agency™, just a few hours to start booking appointments for industry analyst briefings for the Austin, Texas-based company. Vignette was announcing its Story Server 5 launch as well as a new direction for the company.

It was February 2 in the middle of the afternoon. For the East Coast, there were only a few hours until quitting time. But the hardest part of the assignment came when they told jo&co they wanted specific top-tier analyst appointments set up for Feb. 3 and 4. For the analyst world, a PR professional might as well be calling on a phone with no hook-up. Booking appointments in such a short time frame for a smaller Internet company is next to impossible.

To make matters even worse, Cami Rozanas, a jo&co account coordinator, had only been on that particular account for about a week. "I had to do a lot of research to get up to speed about the client and its new direction," she says. "I had to do a lot of reading before I could put together a pitch that would make sense and get the analysts excited to hear what Vignette had to say."

After leaving several messages the first day, Rozanas quickly picked up the phone the next day and began booking appointments. After several hours of hard-fought telephone conversations and schedule wrangling, Johnson & Company was able to book six important targeted analysts for Vignette.

Erik Josowitz, vice president of product strategy at Vignette, was particularly excited about what jo&co had done. He couldn't believe that Rozanas was able to secure so many of the top tier analysts that Vignette had specified. He was especially pleased that the main target, Gartner Group, had set up a time for a briefing.

In the end, both NRW and Vignette were amazed that jo&co could perform so well and under such tight time constraints. As it turned out, Rozanas didn't realize that not all analyst tours go so well. "I guess I didn't appreciate the difficulty of the assignment," she states. "Only once I started booking them again, did I realize that I am not always going to be as fortunate."