Event Management: Synology in Utrecht & Paris

Synology is the worldwide leading NAS manufacturer. Part of the company’s strategy is to organize annual technology events in several cities around the world. During these events, they invite their fans and evangelists to attend talks on new products, features, and to interact with Synology employees and partners.

While these Synology Event meetings are scheduled for the afternoon, the morning is used to invite key press to the venue and give them a press briefing on new products. Here, the media also gets hands-on experience with the products and an opportunity to discuss them with Synology product managers.

Synology contacted technikPR to assist them in organizing the press conference at their 2017 Synology Events in Paris, France and Utrecht, Netherlands. Unsatisfied with the press attendance in previous years, they specifically chose technikPR for our strong media relationships and technical knowledge.

Strategy

To improve on attendance numbers and increase exposure, we leveraged our network of media contacts whilst finetuning the press conference to make it easier for editors to attend.

• technikPR contacted key editors personally to discuss with them the relevance of Synology products for their target audience.
• Focus was not only on IT media, but also on lifestyle media and security media, while ensuring that the Synology presentation would be suitable for these different audiences.
• The start of the conference was moved up from 09:00 to 10:00, making it more relaxed for editors to join the conference by either public transport or car, avoiding morning traffic.
• A small budget was reserved to compensate editors that had to travel a longer distance (mainly Belgium) for their travel costs.
• We scouted for the top five NAS influencers on leading IT forums and invited them to join as well.
• Due to a competing product introduction on the same day of the Utrecht event, we decided to live stream the conference on the technikPR Facebook Page, giving editors who were not able to join the option to either attend from their own office, or watch the presentation back later in the day.
• A press kit including a link to the recorded live stream was sent to all invited and attending editors (70 in total) the day after the event.

It was a delight working with technikPR on these events. Their creative ideas didn’t just attract more editors to the event, but by reaching out to forum leaders and lifestyle media they managed to generate much more coverage and brand awareness outside our regular IT channels. We couldn’t have been more satisfied with the efforts of the technikPR team; their passion for our products really showed.