However, ReadWriteWeb posed a different question today: Does Good Tech Need PR at all? Yes, you absolutely need some level of PR.  What RWW suggests is that there’s an inverse relationship between how compelling your idea/technology is and how much PR you’re going to have to do.

The fantasy world scenario is that you release your product on Monday, get some initial coverage on a few blogs, more bloggers find it, you hit Techmeme by the weekend, and then before you know it Walt Mossberg (WSL) and David Pogue (NYT) are calling begging for exclusive interviews.  Then the press is calling non-stop.  Before you know it, you’re joking around with Leno in the Green Room.

Ahem, the more likely scenario is that your technology is great but needs some explanation.  Nobody is begging for an exclusive and getting coverage requires actual sustained effort.  So then the question turns to whether you can sustain the effort yourself, or whether you need an agency.

Here’s a quick self test of whether you should consider getting a PR agency:

1. Can your technology/solution be understood in a 3 second sound bite?
2. Do you know who should be covering your story, like which specific blogs and reporters?
3. Does your story lend itself to being told?  Does it have a “hook” such as controversy, a great solution to well understood widely felt pain, or famous founders?
4. Does one of your founders communicate well?  Do you have someone who can communicate with the press, comment on blogs, and whose email messages don’t consistently elicit cringing?  And does this founder have time to handle communicating?
5. You don’t have ready access to a cheap, skilled PR agent with many contacts in your industry?
6. Is your company’s current bank balance below $1M?

If you answer “no” to more than two of these questions, you may want to consider using a well-connected, hopefully reasonably-priced, PR agent in your industry.  Obviously for bootstrappers this may still be a non-starter, so the job (like taking out the trash and watering the plants) falls to one of the founders.  But this little test gives you an idea about whether doing your own PR presents so many obstacles that your time would be better invested in other things.

For tech-related founders, beware of your natural instinct to over-invest your time in your product and technology.  Getting the word out about your company is one of your most important jobs, so don’t neglect it regardless of whether an agency is the right path.

Lastly, Scoble argues that you shouldn’t do any outbound PR at all– you should build something so awesome that your beta testers become your evangelists and are inspired to contact their trusted press contacts on your behalf.  Steve Rubel agrees. I’m not wild about this kind of hit-or-miss approach.  Most Type-A entrepreneurs won’t be either.

What are you supposed to do when your beta is almost over and you have no coverage?  Invest more in the product?  Pray? No, it’s time to take matters into your own hands.  Fire up the outbound engine… post to your blog, Twitter, comment on relevant blogs (without plugging or pushing your company), and, ahem, send friendly, relevant email to bloggers and reporters who should be writing about you because you’ve been following them AND built some kind of relationship over time.  Techcrunch also has some great suggestions about how this actually works.  It can even be fun!  I don’t mind trying the Scoble-Rubel build-pray-discover strategy, but it might not work for you, and you can’t just sit there doing nothing or build your product forever.

Question for you.  We are announcing the winners of our contest tomorrow and we are going to try to get some press in the local markets of the winners.  So we’ve drafted a press release, prepared a story line and a list of targets.  My question is whether it is worth it to use PR Newswire or something similar to put it out on the wire, vs. just sending alone ourselves.

Here’s my response:

In my experience, it is not worth it to send a release via PRNewswire, assuming you have a robust list of target reporters and you send them each a personalized note with your press release pasted at the bottom.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a press hit from using the newswire, even when we paid the big money for US1 distribution.  We got plenty of press, but it always came from directly emailing the right reporters.

One suggestion, have the release come from someone on staff other than you, but have them offer, “If you have questions our would like to interview Widgt’s CEO, Blah Blah, you can reach him at blah@widgt.com or by phone at 512-555-1212.”

For some reason I think this comes across better– I’ve seen reporters criticize CEO’s who do their own outreach (“he must not have very much to do if he has time to email reporters”), but they also like to get direct access to the CEO  (“I hate it when a PR thinks they can be the gate keeper to the executive suite.”).

If you want to be a real bulldog, you can have your staff follow-up with a phone call.

Of course, there are other ways to promote this– post the news on your blog, pitch the story to local bloggers you find on Technorati, and don’t forget to pitch TV stations (local morning news shows are always trying to fill content) and radio.  If you think your winners would agree, you should offer to make them available for tv and radio interviews.  And since you have video, consider cutting a short video of the winners’ content and offering it to the tv station.

I picked up a number of great ideas, and here’s an easy and quick one any entrepreneur can do right now: use Google date search to find your competitors’ newest links (especially on blogs and forums), then jump in and comment.  I call this jujitsu because you use your competitor’s successful marketing efforts against them. 

The key to this strategy is finding blog and forum discussion opportunities quickly and getting involved while the topics are hot.  When you comment, always include your signature with a link back to yourself.

Here’s how to do it: 

1. Go to Google, click Advanced Search, then in the field called “this exact word or phrase” enter a competitor’s domain name with quotes (e.g. “lawyers.com”)
2. In the field, “Search within a site or domain:” enter “lawyers.com”.
3. Click on the line marked “Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more” and choose “past 24 hours.” 
4. Now click the “Advanced Search” button to search. 
5. As a final step: in the search box, change the search from

   “lawyers.com” site:lawyers.com to
   “lawyers.com” -site:lawyers.com

   That tells Google to exclude any pages from your competitor’s own site and only shows other sites that link to your competitor.   You might also search for pages with include the word “Comment,” which is a good marker for pages that invite user comments, like this:

   “lawyers.com” -site:lawyers.com comments

Now you’re set to find some opportunities to participate in timely, relevant discussions.  This technique may also yield some reporters and webmasters who you can contact to pitch your site.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you should take note because what Aruni did cost her $0 got her some incredibly valuable PR visibility and link juice.  Here’s how she did it:

First, she got the idea to partner with eMailOurMilitary, to offer active service military deployed overseas free use of her product, Baby Insights.  Baby Insights is a service that allows new mothers to track virtually ever detail of a newborn’s life– eating, sleeping, pooping– all on a PDA.  Cool idea and giving it away is a great way to honor our military because the difficulty of being separated from a new baby obviously greatly compounds the sacrifice of service.

Next, she wrote up a press release, posted it on PRWeb, then posted on her blog about it.  Then she announced it on Twitter with a link to her blog post. 

Finally, she sent Fred Wilson a direct message via Twitter saying (paraphrased) “Hey, if you’re going to post on Memorial Day please consider mentioning this partnership,” with a link to her blog post. 

Indeed, Fred wrote a great Memorial Day tribute to the Armed Forces and included a mention at the end of the post, saying “And speaking of military life, here’s a neat example of two women who met on twitter who have teamed up to deliver a service to families separated by military service,” with a link to Aruni’s blog.

Here are a few reasons I think this was a great example of effective DIY PR:

• Aruni was active on Fred’s blog as a commenter prior to pitching him, so he recognized her, if not had the beginnings of a relationship by that point (this is a perfect example of the conversational PR model Brian Solis wrote about this weekend).
• Fred has written a lot about Twitter and Aruni’s post mentions that she met the other founder on Twitter, which Fred no doubt liked (and mentions in his post)
• Timing – her news was timely– she announced a partnership right before Memorial Day, and it dovetailed perfectly with the idea of honoring the military
• Soft target – it was a slow news day – it was a bit of a gamble that Fred would be posting on Monday, but it paid off because he was likely receiving very few other timely and relevant pitches.

Fred is definitely an A-List blogger, and even if getting coverage on his blog doesn’t necessarily bring lots of Aruni’s target customers to her site, she benefits in several ways:

#1 Her company earns recognition and validation from a respected influencer, #2 her blog gains the all-important link juice, which she can then redirect toward her product pages, and #3 she becomes top of mind in the online baby space for other potential partners.  I know Aruni has been doing a lot of work to raise her site’s visibility, so big congrats!

• Interesting business models are emerging in mobile apps, but app integration is a costly problem for startups ($60k per platform port).
• Selling display advertising to CPG advertisers requires going direct to the brand, skipping the agency.
• Link exchanges aren’t working but “strategic partnerships” are — you need a highly relationship-based approach for this path.
• Several companies have tried multiple PR firms without success – The pirate perspective: start building your media list early, do you own PR in-house, and hire a firm once you’re comfortable with it having 50/50 (and maybe a little less) odds of success.
• Videos posted on YouTube are driving traffic – there’s a new trend in people turning to YouTube searches first for information on how to do things; these don’t have to be so-called “viral video” a simple ‘How To’ instruction video will suffice.
• Recruiting – Finding Ruby and Java developers in Austin is a serious problem.
• The fundraising environment is very difficult – some attribute it to a disconnect between consumers and investors.

The last point is one that’s probably most debated.  Here’s my perspective over the last year of attending CTAN screenings and presentations: people like to invest in what they know and/or enjoy.  The number of folks in Austin who have earned their money from consumer web offerings AND who are active angels is quite small compared to angels who came from service businesses, enterprise software, systems management software, semiconductors, and Dell. 

That said, I’ve seen a number of non-B2C angels step up to consumer startups.  But when they do, they tend to be fairly cautious.  For early-stage (seed and/or Series A) Austin consumer web companies, here’s my take on the profile of successful angel raises:

Angels: A working product, a scalable model, revenue, and a willingness to exit.  It also really helps to have a serial entrepreneur as a founder.  Your raise should be between $250k and $1M.

Some smaller funds like G51 have been active B2C funders, as have a few out-of-town VC’s like True Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and DAG Ventures.  Here’s my take on the profile of successful VC raises:

VC’s: A working product, a scalable model, a compelling, innovative, and defensible take on an emerging market, and the potential for a billion dollar exit in 5-7 years.  Your raise should be $1M or more, although there was some talk that $1-$3M is no man’s land right now.  If the founders are first time entrepreneurs, it also doesn’t hurt to have some ivy on their resumes.

Agree or disagree, feel free to comment.

So you’re an entrepreneur reading the latest “pr sucks” meme to hit the Internets and thinking, “shit, we were counting on PR to drive 1,000 beta sign-ups in the first 6 months… now what?”  Or you heard that your agency is listed on the ignominious prspammer blacklist.  It’s not good, Jim, not good at all.  To recap: Gina Tripani at Lifehacker created a blacklist of agencies who spam her personal email address; Todd Defren apologized; then the conversation got ugly with PR’s on one side saying, “hey, there’s bacon and tofo besides spam,” or “blacklists = bigotry against PR’s,” and “oh, by the way, quit crying, PR spam is an occupational hazard,” and bloggers saying, “wtf… why can’t you read my ‘How to Pitch Me’ instructions?” Or worse, “It’s ALL spam.” 

So what’s actionable for the entrepreneur?

If you have an agency on the blacklist, I wouldn’t worry about it.  No serious blogger is going to use the list.  For starters, if people like Brian Solis are banned, there’s a problem with the list.  Second, if anyone can add to the list, good firms will be blacklisted for pretty weak reasons.  For a serious tech blogger, the risk of missing quality tips is too high.  Indeed, Gina isn’t proposing to apply the blacklist to tips @ lifehacker, just her personal email.  But there’s a more insidious risk: you or your PR people may already be blacklisted by bloggers and not even know it.  Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook all have easy “spam” flagging, which bloggers are undoubtedly using.

As Warren Buffet says in his ads for  Borsheim’s, “If you don’t know diamonds, know your jeweler.”  The same applies here… really know who is contacting the media on your behalf.  Find out if they’re using backchannels like Twitter, AIM, and Facebook messaging to contact the press.  Find out which feeds they’re subscribed to (and do these correspond to the top blogs in your industry?).  Are they giving bloggers an OPML file?  If they give you a wild look and a bs line like, “oh, we’re exploring and adopting new technologies all the time,” that’s a very bad sign.  It roughly translates to, “No, we are too busy spamming the crap out of the media to have actually started using any of  this new stuff.”  One more thing you should ask: do they generate media lists from Vocus or Cision and/or send bulk pitches from within there? If so, be worried.  If so, it indicates they are doing extraordinarily little research on the reporters they’re reaching out to, not personalizing their outreach, and basically spraying and praying your pitch to journalists.  There’s a very good chance they’re already ending up in the spam folder.

If you’re doing the outreach yourself or have a freelancer, internal marketing manager, or Evangelist assigned to the job, here are a few thoughts:

1. It’s about following directions.  People not reading Gina’s site and abiding by this following statement, “Please, no press releases or Lifehacker story pitches to my personal email address,” is what set off the blacklist.  So you need to get of our your feed reader occasionally and look for the “How to Pitch Me” page on the blogger’s site.  If they don’t have one, my first email would not be a pitch but rather, “I wanted to send you some PR news, is this the right way to contact you?”
2. It’s about targeting.  The prspammer wiki describes the companies listed on it as having sent, “unsolicited (and almost always irrelevant) product pitches…” As an entrepreneur, if I had significant news (funding, product announcement, private beta invites, etc.), I’d want my team spreading it as wide as reasonably possible.  If a reporter wrote about a competitor, they’re relevant to me.  If they cover my industry, they’re relevant.  If they wrote about a topic that’s relevant to my customers or end-users, they’re relevant.
3. It’s about personalization AND context.  Now, even if you’ve built a carefully targeted and relevant list, the journalists you want to pitch may not see the connection between their beat and your news, so it’s your job to provide the context (“You may recall you wrote that story about our competitor, XYZ.  I wanted to tell you about our news…”).  Maybe using Word Mail Merge to personalize greetings (e.g. “Hi Mitch…”), is your idea of a personal email.  You need to take it a step further.  I think it’s fine to send the same basic press release (and consider sending a social media release if you do), but you need that precious little personalized blurb at the top that says, “Hi Gina, I commented on your post about X, and I wanted to tell you about Y news that relates.  I know you said Z in your post, but we’d love to get your take on our product because we think it does a better job addressing A, B, C issues that you discussed.”

So you’re probably thinking, “How do we build a broad yet targeted media list?  How we ensure that we aren’t  contacting a blogger the wrong way?  How do we personally convey why we’ve targeted a particular journalist?”  There’s the rub.

Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day.  Even if you hire an agency, you can’t expect them to instantly have a list of perfectly targeted media.  So if you’re doing it yourself, the first step is to setup a bunch of Google Alerts for your keywords, subscribe to (and read) relevant blogs, and build your media list slowly over time based on the coverage you discover.  Use delicious or Diigo to bookmark the most relevant stories.  Then when you’re ready to send some news, you or your agency has a realistic starting point for doing it in a targeted, personalized, contextual way.

• 30 minutes per day. Spend 30 minutes a day reading Google Alerts, Reader, and bookmarking relevant coverage in your space.  Use this process to build your media list (keep it in Excel or Access or whatever works for you).
• 20 seconds. When you create a pitch, use this test: ask a non-tech spouse or friend to read it.  Count to 20, then take it away.  Ask them what they can remember.  Did they understand the hook?   If not, revise.
• 10 journalists per segment.  When I did PR outreach for ApartmentRatings, I often had 50+ journalists I was planning to contact.  But I would always break my lists down into interest groups of no more than 10 each, based on stated interests or coverage memes.  This kind of granularity allows you to more effectively address their interests and, if all goes well, get their attention.
• 5 days.  Brian Solis says, “Allowing journalists and bloggers adequate time to prepare advance is critical. Determine…who should be part of the initial news discussions…find the people that would be interested…as determined by their previous work and coverage.“, in a great post about relationship building in blogger outreach. I’d advise that you start reaching out to key bloggers five days before you release news on your blog.  You can’t expect them to cover your story the same day it starts hitting the general news.

“Sending a Direct Message from Twitter just ends up being another email. I tell myself, “I’ll look at that later.” How about a public Tweet that says “I’ve got news about a new ad platform targeting seniors on mobile browsers! DM me if you want it under embargo.” We’ll jump on that, because that’s the kind of thing we eat up over here. “

I agree. Use Twitter for what’s it does best, public dissemination of your news. A Direct Message on Twitter isn’t much different from an email, and hey, that’s why we have email. When I wanted to actually “pitch” reporters, I would send them personalized notes via email. If you’re like me and pitch 20+ beat writers at daily papers all over the country, the number of personalized emails you have to send quickly gets big. But that’s what pitching is all about, and Twitter ain’t for pitching.

Your goal in using Twitter for PR should be three things: #1 participate in the day-to-day industry conversation (you might just get quoted), #2 announce the “small wins,” that don’t merit a press release or a full pitch (it might just get picked up as news), and #3 over time, come to be seen as a knowledgeable source in your industry (so journalists will seek you out).

Update: Wow, Twitter’s a hot topic over at RWW… great follow-up post about how they use Twitter for journalism. Indeed, they’re looking for breaking news there. But understand the difference between pitching via Twitter (which they guide against), and using it as a way to disseminate your news. If you’re breaking something really cool, you might want to reach out to RWW personally a bit before you do the big push, then put it on Twitter the minute you post it on your blog or when your, ahem, press release goes live.  Think of it as a second chance: even if journalists ignore your pitch initially, putting it on Twitter gives them an opportunity to write about it while it’s still newsworthy. Of course, this hinges on giving journalists a good reason to follow you.

Agree? disagree?  Follow me on Twitter: jeb512

1. If you have a personal Twitter account, start a new one for professional contacts.  This is marketing 101, but it’s a question of audience.  Don’t confuse your professional contacts who are following Mike-the-CEO with your friends and family who are following Mike-The-Guy-Who-Won-Last-Weekends-Drinking-Contest. That doesn’t mean your professional tweets have to be stiff and corporate, but there’s a line (think Linkedin versus Facebook).
2. Your tweets should be from you personally, so choose a Twitter id that reflects your name, not your company.  Think about it: would you rather follow “AppleCorporation” or “SteveTheAppleGuy.” People want their news from the CEO.
3. Get as many friends on Twitter as you can… put your Twitter id in your email signature, on your blog, your Linkedin profile.  Let Twitter troll your email accounts to find your existing friends who are on Twitter.  Follow them, and hopefully they’ll follow you.
4. Follow everyone who you like, respect, and matters.  As Scoble points, out, “the more people [you] follow, the smarter [you] get.” 
5. Follow journalists who cover your space (this may work better (or not) in tech).  You can find out what’s top of mind for them and add value when appropriate, or maybe react quickly with a relevant pitch, or both.
6. If you blog, announce your blog posts on Twitter.
7. Announce minor new features, upgrades, service downtime, hardware upgrades, and other helpful news about your company on Twitter.  Twitter is great for announcing the “small wins” that aren’t worthy of press releases, but are interesting and cool.
8. Twitter about things that matter to your company: new laws that suck, cool blog posts that support your vision of the future, blog posts that get it wrong.  Take a stand and give your tweets a point of view.
9. Remember, your tweets are more or less public, and cannot be undone, so exercise some basic caution about what you want “on the record.”  If you wouldn’t want it printed in tomorrow’s WSJ…
10. Billy Goat Tavern is a bar in Chicago known as a hang out for the city’s top journalists.  A barfly there could easily stay on top of the news by sitting around all day and chatting up the regulars.  But Twitter may not be that watering hole for your industry.  If Twitter isn’t a place your industry tends to hang out, decide if that’s just because you’re ahead of the curve or because your industry may never adopt Twitter.  Effective entrepreneurship is all about the right action at the right time.

PS: I know I skipped right past any explanation of Twitter, so if you’re wondering, “What is Twitter?” here’s the best video I’ve found to answer that question.   Keep in mind it’s from the perspective of the general Twitter user, so hopefully this post helps you adapt the key ideas for use in a business/public relations context.

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The next High Tech Happy Hour is Thursday 4/17 at Hi-Lo at 6th & Lavaca. 

UPDATE: New listings

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