My friend and former client, Aimee Rhodes, is vice president of Marketing at Corero Networks, an IPS vendor some might remember as Top Layer Networks. She's a brilliant Marketeer, and Corero is lucky to have her. Corero’s new blog, Security Bistro, is just one case in point.
Security Bistro is not designed to be a corporate blog where everything maps back to the primary business of the vendor. Neither is it a showcase for the vendor's resident security guru, which, even if the guru has free rein to blog about whatever they want, all blog content implicitly links back to the vendor because everyone knows that's where the guru works.
Its aspirations are more along the lines of ThreatPost, a dedicated news outlet funded by Kaspersky Labs, but Threatpost has three full time journalists on staff and is more of a traditional news outlet. Security Bistro aims to be an online salon, of sorts; it’s geared to foster conversations (which makes us PR folks salivate:-), and features analysis from three well known and respected personalities from the IT security press/blogosphere.
The only way it will work is if we support it, and the kick-off posts are varied and interesting. I won't deny that one of its launch posts, written by Network World mainstay Linda Musthaler, about the findings a recent firewall management survey conducted by my client Tufin Technologies, added extra warm fuzzies. But Tufin gets a ton of blog coverage. I’m not posting this as a public thank you, I'm writing this because I want Security Bistro to be all it’s setting out to be. As a dedicated, neutral and self-guided infosec forum, it offers the (infosec) PR community an opportunity to add a lot of value. We can pitch ideas that might not fly in anywhere else, not to mention drive the conversation via comments.
A few years back I tried an experiment with Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher. We wanted to launch a sister site called Silicon Valley Minute, featuring 60 second videos of vendor CEO's. The premise was that they had a minute to explain what their company did. Our strategy was that we would rely on PR firms to pitch their client CEO's, giving us a powerful channel and ensuring we would have a viable queue of companies to feature.
Despite our best-laid plans, Silicon Valley Minute didn't make it, and what remains online is not even close to what I had envisioned (another story for another time). But Security Bistro has the same opportunity to leverage the best of what the PR community has to offer. Any smart PR person will immediately get what an asset the site can be for their clients and for them.
So go check out the site – I particularly liked Richard Steinnon’s post of LinkedIn scammers. I’ll be interested to see how the site fares over time – if it successful, it is sure to be copied, which means that product vendors can in fact be publishers, which gives the whole notion of citizen journalism a big boost.
Nice job Aimee!
Security Bistro blogger and Corero's Director of Research, Neil Roiter, also deserves a shout out. On Neil's watch, the site is sure to stick to its editorial knitting.
You can also follow SecurityBistro on Twitter - @securitybistro
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