Does Good Tech Need PR?
Behind the scenes of many tech blogs these days, there's a rat race for attention, with PR agents struggling to overcome the noise of feeds, news sites and other agents in order to get coverage for their clients. Tiny web tech companies pay $5k, $10k or more per month for PR agents to work the media, old and new, in hopes that it will help them find wider audiences. Big companies spend far, far more on PR.
Is that really necessary? Won't great technologies find their own audiences when their undeniable value is discovered by one person and passed on to the world at large?
Whether or not a PR agency is essential is something many startups struggle with. We argue below that there are strong arguments both for and against hiring a PR firm when you're a web startup. Ultimately, we think PR agents have their place in the industry and there are many of them we really appreciate.
Image above: PR Stereotype, by Brian Solis, who is a class act in PR.
Wine and Dine 2.0
Blogger Robert Scoble made a post this morning asserting that great technology will find its audience naturally, through word of mouth. Robert told a story about his discovery of Stack Overflow. Someone he trusted had visited the site, loved it and then passed on the word. While that particular example isn't the best one, Stack Overflow founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are two of the most well-known software developers in the world right now, the basic premise is worth considering. Does great technology need PR?
Technology gets a lot of PR in the world of new media. If the thought of bloggers put in limos, driven around big cities and drowned in champaign seems absurd to you, rest assured - it happens. More often, though, tech bloggers get drowned in standardized emails.
There are, however, some really good PR people reaching out to bloggers. What do they do for their clients?
The Good Sides of PR
Help with messaging.
Good PR agents work with companies well before a product launch and help them develop a coherent explanation of their technology. Developers are sometimes wonkish, executives long-winded and few people in the world can describe what they are doing as clearly as a trained professional bringing a fresh pair of eyes can.
Unfortunately many PR people don't act as barrier enough between CEOs and press. Some can tell almost the whole story themselves and get back to a writer with quotes or replies as needed. That's great.
If you don't need a PR agent to help you tell your story - that's fantastic. Unfortunately, many companies do.
One of our favorite PR people in terms of help with messaging is Josh Dilworth, from Porter Novelli. He understands and is interested in the technology he represents.
Good communication skills.
As a product launch approaches, dedicated PR people should be unbeatable when it comes to doing the leg work of outreach in a capable way. They should know how the media being targeted operates, they should be good person people and they should communicate like people who specialize in communication with media, new and old.
Company founders have spent their time developing other skills, and many in-house marketing people would probably be higher-paid PR people if they had the same skill-set themselves. It's hard to know whether marketing or PR people deserve more disdain - even people in the businesses will tell you that, bless their hearts. None the less, both are in some cases very good at what they do.
If there is a circle in hell for marketing and PR people it will be because they often hype businesses that they couldn't possibly genuinely believe in. If that's enough to go to hell for, though, a whole lot of us will be there.
Contacts
The primary value proposition of PR used to be getting column inches in print and for many clients that's still what's important. Getting top blog coverage is also a major coup for PR, though, and all these kinds of developed relationships are something PR people offer to leverage for clients. They know the reporters and know how they like to be communicated with.
That can be true. Good PR people can take care of the details, be choosy about what stories to pitch which journalists with, etc. The intimacy of relationships are sometimes exaggerated, though, and the best PR people will simply show off successful placement of past clients in sought-after media outlets.
Looking at PR from the outside, it appears to be a strange line of work. A good PR person can be very good to have - it's a shame they are so hard to find.
Who's Good at PR?
Who are some PR people we like working with? One of our new favorites is Josh Dilworth, from Porter Novelli. He understands and is interested in the technology he represents. Erica Lee, of Strategiclee, is great to communicate with. Jonathan Hirshon of Horizon PR knows the business as well as anyone. Michaela Wilkinson of Dig Communications pays attention to how we prefer to be communicated with and we find her quite effective as a result. Neville Hobson is a rock star and a gentleman. Jeremy Pepper is usually fantastic at cutting through the b.s. There are many examples of good PR people in the industry, so please take our criticisms with a grain of salt.
The Down Sides
There is probably more skepticism about the necessity of PR people than there is about any other players in the tech startup food chain, except perhaps for Venture Capitalists.
Founders should make connections themselves.
Some people argue that company founders should be mixing it up with bloggers and journalists directly. They should be making those connections, taking the temperature of the market and media.
If company executives or marketing people have the time and the skills to do this kind of work themselves, the rewards would be substantial, no doubt. In many cases that's just not the case though.
It's expensive.
Paying the equivalent of a full time employee's salary, much less a high one, for PR work being done 1/4 time or less each week can really sting. Meeting an agency's heavy hitters, then getting matched with very junior agency members once the check clears can really bite.
In many cases, though, that's not how it goes. Horror stories can be told about almost any job title. All media related work is hard and wins are few and far between. For more than a few companies, good PR is money well spent.
Should Tech Be Able to Stand and Thrive on Its Own?
Ultimately, the biggest reason many people argue that PR agencies are unneeded is that great technology shouldn't need them. In some cases that's true. Steve Rubel writes today that tech bloggers love to discover things for themselves and that's one reason why we often don't like PR. There's some truth to that too. Rubel, who works for one of the biggest PR firms in the world, also says the lack of enthusiasm is attributable to the fact that the vast majority of PR pitches aren't worth a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe. That's a relatively humble PR guy saying that.
Jeremy Toeman, a PR person himself, goes as crazy as a responsible PR guy can in a post today about this question. He mocks people who think their technology will market itself. To be fair, a number of his clients are confusing or insipid enough that we wish even his brilliant and charming self the best of luck in promoting them. We talk to quite a few PR companies representing companies that are either boring or that insist on having their PR reps pitch non-announcements that are boring.
One example worth considering is Balsamiq, a plucky little mock-up creator we wrote about after it became profitable only 3 weeks after launching. It's an awesome little technology that fills a clear need and has taken off. Balsamiq caught fire without even getting any press before we covered it, much less without PR. Will it become a multi-million dollar acquisition that puts a team of people on the beach with cocktails for life? No, it won't. Will millions of people use it? Probably not millions.
The point is that great technologies probably do sell themselves. The web is mostly filled with bad technologies, though, and it's the job of the technology press to find the good ones, with occasional discoveries of greatness. Can PR people help us do that? They can. Is it worth the expense and loss of direct experience for many startups to hire PR people? It probably is.
That won't stop people from rolling their eyes at the mention of the profession, but we appreciate consistently being proven wrong by valuable, skilled PR professionals who assist in our hunt to find and write about good tech.
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How does one become a PR "rockstar"????
Great post and well said. I love that you addressed key points on both sides of the fence and I couldn't agree more. With so much PR bashing and blacklisting (which is old and tired IMO)these days, it's nice to see an intelligent look at the pros and cons of tech PR for startups. Thanks Marshall. You're a class act!!
Side note, you're right, Erica Lee, of Strategiclee, is one of the best!!! Way to go Erica!
:)
You can make the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, or if it is not sold right, nobody is going to buy it (or use it). You definitely need good PR for your product.
I want to believe it, but I don't. There have been too many great products who either suffer from a) non celebrity behind them or b) not reaching the cool kids.
We can argue that un-PR is the new PR, but ultimately, it's outreach and it could be called 'community manager' = the new PR.
PR is probably just fine for dealing with non-tech obsessed crowds.
I think the pro's/cons approach is good. I will assure you that EVERY blogger and reporter will have their own "list of value add PR professionals" who they trust to bring to their attention the right, useful stories.
The PR is dead meme is the most useless annual rite of passage in blogosphere IMO.
Good point! We just had a similar discussion with a start-up while thinking about their launch & PR plan. It just seems to me that it is smarter to concentrate on technology and making sure it has a viral growth component than getting to Techcrunch...
So far, we haven't yet used any PR and have done all our marketing/outreach ourselves. Mainly due to costs more than anything else (although we do enjoy talking directly to bloggers/journalists).
One thing is clear though, as NewsCred grows up, we'll most certainly be tapping one of your recommended PR folks. There's a time and situation thats ripe for PR at every startup - I just think early stage ventures without funding should wait for that time and concentrate ruthlessly on the product until then.
What should be important for all the PR crew out there is to evaluate the value of the company they may be working with. Knowing which influent blogger/ journaliast can be interested in their clients is what I assume PR companies job is. As well as knowing what kind of company they should not work with, which is part of their own marketing plan (we do hire PR regarding their portfolio after all). And that's what I expect from them:
1. Telling me if it's worth working on PR right now, or if I have to work again to get some traction
2. Working with me to create a great pitch, without any b.s. inside to get clearly noticed by key influencers (journalists and word of mouth facilitators) and build a smart PR plan to spread the word.
3. Be the first entry barrier to PR and helping me get connections to enhance my product to make it worth PR.
Tech PR should be the first gate to pass before going further. But their business model doesn't make the decision to decline business opportunities from crap companies. Though I think it's part of their job, I understand they do PR for companies without any real value added.
But guys (I mean you the great bloggers with a "kicking a**" influence) don't you have PR people you just listened to with pleasure because you know it's time well spend?
I sort of agree with the blog. Yes good technology does market itself but there are several cases where competing technologies (in a similar sector) exist. All looking for more visibility and grab as much of the pie as possible.
Marketing and PR can help with getting people on board quickly.
Another advantage of PR is trust, generally speaking if the Guardian/Telegraph covers a technology a user might feel more comfortable in trying it.
Obviously all that comes at a cost ($5K/$10K). Although I'm a firm believer of founders marketing their own brand/technology. They can explain the technology like no one else + they are highly motivated/passionate.
PR is just a wasting of time. They come and try to advise you on things that there is no need to be advised on. Example, I have seen a web PR advice on the web of how to align the top left hand corner of the index page with about 1 inch exactly from the text on the page. I agree with Mr. Scoble that asserting that great technology will find its audience naturally.
"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Naive comment from a great man - there are numerous examples of "better" technology coming second - Betamax vs VHS to cite a battle that is no longer relevant - because a new technology came along - and generated a similar battle - Blueray etc.
In response to Romain's comment above: We are a PR agency and occasionally have to tell companies in the nicest and most constructive way possible that their technology isn't ready for PR. It is a really hard thing to do, not because we are turning down money, but because you can see the hurt in their faces as you tell them!
@Sarah Baldry: Understand your point. Can your PR business turn then into a more consultancy side and help companies connect with people who can advise those companies you can't work with?
It is a total fallacy to think that good tech will market itself. Yes, Scoble could stumble upon it and then it would get loved by the blogosphere yadda, yadda. I can just see company founders telling investors "Yeah, numbers aren't great but we are just waiting for Scoble to stumble on it. Any day now...".
Most early stage tech is neither brilliant or terrible, it is somewhere in the middle. PR agencies help connecting the product with its potential customers. In some situations founders can do that themselves, in others you need to add a specialist. Even then I believe that start-up CEO's need to keep closely plugged into their PR, starting conversations, listening to what people are saying about your product, selling etc.
BTW I would add to the comment above that Erica Lee is excellent. So are Brian Solis and Miiko Mentz at Future Works.
don't
Sorry, hit submit too quickly...
Marshall, do you believe paid posts require disclosure?
Nice article Marshall. Really good subject to talk about.
Great PR skills is fantastic, and rare. As with most things it comes down to definition. If you want someone in PR to 'build awareness' then that's crap. If you want someone who understands the media, knows how to position you, knows when to put you out there and works in with your over all strategy - then that's a good start.
At Kazaa, Kelly Larabee was amazing. She was my first call every morning and she was a significant asset to the team.
Sussanah and Chris from ICON Media were great. Very understanding and wonderfully responsive yet patient.
And I +1 for Erica Lee and the Strategic Lee team. Solid work load, balanced, frank (and fun to boot).
Of course Brian Solis is hot too, but I haven't had the chance to work with him yet.
I have to think about this one!
In the meanwhile read my tech blog, door prizes today!
If you are referring to at blog post on Scoble's blog,as you saw from our reply, there is no guarantee that a person with contacts will expose your product or service to someone else out of the goodness of his heart.
PR teams INCREASE the likelihood and the speed at which exposure occurs.
We have hundreds of examples dealing with clients with good services that had little exposure and slow word of mouth viral marketing. We accelerated their fortunes.
What would have taken months or years, was trimmed down to days or weeks :-)
I think it depends on the CEO's previous business-running experience and network.
If a PR professional is needed, it better come from day one of the development. Thinking up a product, dreaming about a market and then trying to impose it on reality is not a very good idea.
Amir
Great post. Since we're continually learning, unlearning and relearning what does and doesn't work within the evolution of all the new media, this is a valuable discussion. It is apparent that opposing points of view on this can be valid. You can do whatever you want now. There was a time when options were much more limited. I'm not arguing that doing whatever you want to do will be the best and most strategic direction, but we do have those choices. Depending on who you hope to reach you find good ways to employ a PR firm, go with the non-PR approach, use PR and say it's not PR, claim to be PR gone good, whatever you like. I admire really good PR professionals like the ones you mentioned and Todd Defren, for example, and get really irritated with the bad ones. That's not new. What is new is that I can now choose to work with or without either if I can afford to do so.
This is an old issue that just gets pulled out of the grave every few months due to the amount of PR people that are active on blogs. The fact is that the "if you build it, they will come" experiment has already been tested during the dot-com boom and has been proven to be false. Good technology needs good marketing and PR should be a part of that mix. This doesn't mean that every tech company should hire a PR agency but some companies just lack the marketing minds within their organization and PR agencies make sense for them.
Case and point: FriendFeed. Here is a company with great technology that blew it with the greatest marketing opportunity they will ever have (Twitter outages). They kept their focus on technology and stability while Twitter was working out their problems and, apart from a handful of early adopters, failed to get any meangingful traction (yes, I know that is hard to see for readers of this blog but FF is not a runaway success).
That said, the greatest successes of this new generation of PR have come from companies that have taken it in-house and adopted a strict policy of transparency. In that sense I think you can say that the most efficient way to do PR for a start-up or an emerging tech company is to have someone internally who engages with bloggers and builds relationships over time. Dell is a good example of this, although they certainly took their lumps getting to this point.
Many thanks for this article
OK, doing PR in France is "different" but everywhere in the world it seems that PR peoples (like me) are doing logical things like knowing what their clients are doing and trying to understand what are doing editors to create matches... :)
Startups or not, new medias or not, good PR need time, knowledge of editors needs and ability to give real advices to clients that means sometime to say "NO, you cannot do this" and explain why...
a personnal thought: a startup CEO having time to do PR by itself is a lucky guy...
Seems there has been a rash of posts about tech PR in the last 24 hours. Is this a coordinated effort by some secret cabal? .
From a quick read, this seems to be the most sensible post of the several I have noticed pop up. You really capture a lot of the daily contradictions we face (your "going to hell" bit in particular). Also, I love your take on relationships. I have railed against "Rolodex PR" in the past. It is not these exaggerated intimate relationships, as you so rightly put it, that makes PR people valuable, it is what we do with them. I'll take effectiveness over intimacy every day.
One last broad point. Targeting, relationships, and generally being smart are not new concepts that sprung up with blog PR (or PR 2.0, or whatever-- sigh, labels). But, the nature and growth of blogs has put a spotlight on highlighting some of these lost skills.
My hope is that we as PR folks get better at what we do-- for our clients and for you-- thanks to this new spotlight on old skills. The very public vetting process is pretty painful to watch sometimes though, isn't it?
Obviously it does.
This is a great well thought out and balanced post.
There are always a lot of angles to consider, word of mouth is always the strongest way to gain visibility, but then you also need continued support with reputation management and another pair of eyes to take your vision and put into a well thought out and concise press release and even conversation with those who would not only be interested in your technology, but can benefit from it.
I think there is definitely room for both--of course if done correctly.
A very balanced look, great post Marshall. You make an astute point about messaging - this is definitely a value that PR should provide, especially with early stage companies. PR can be quite influential in the growth and prospects for the company if they understand the market and help shape a message that will resonate. PR gets pigeonholed as nothing more than writing and blasting press releases. I guess that still happens, but for the life of me can't figure out where...or why.
PR is expensive - my lifestyle depends on it! but clients should always demand value for the $$$ their spending. All in all, as much as bad PR taints an industry, it helps thoughtful PR professionals with a common sense approach stand out that much more.
Help from a PR pro, agency or otherwise, can be invaluable to a start-up.
Great technologies may or may not find their own way. And even if they do find their own way, how quickly do they do so? And what about managing messages and trying to get accurate info out when there are failures or other issues? Sometimes even average technologies just get some kind of magic tailwind and take off virally.
For example, Twitter. It's fun and maybe even useful. And there's a few anecdotes of where it's been used for important purposes. But it's basically a souped up chat service that leaves a persistent trail. Twitter is fine and I like and use it, but is it really so cool and important as to generate the buzz it has? Bioplastics are boring as hell, get little press, but are quite possibly more important in our collective future. Same with IPv6 is most decidely not sexy. But important? Yeah. Meetup.com seems to be doing well, but here's a company that can help deeply affect the quality of people's lives in the real world. I'd argue they're more important that Twitter, but don't get nearly the press. The point? Great ideas or technologies might diffuse into the marketplace at whatever rate they can all on their own. But PR can accelerate this.
And what about average technologies or products? There's plenty of stuff that may not be The Most Fantastic Thing EVER that's still quite useful to a lot of people. The old cliche, "Invent a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" is 'mostly' false.
A good PR person will help find appropriate venues for messages. They have various lists and contacts and such and can help accelerate awareness of something new. The obvious key here is APPROPRIATE venues. Bad PR folks and bad clients obviously give the industry a bad name and annoy bloggers and mainstream press alike. In spite of an increasingly crowded marketplace, in the end, things are the same as they ever were. There's multiple channels for messages. PR is just one of them.
Build a great product and they will come.
Wait for it...here it comes...
MindTouch is the perfect case in point.
Without PR and advertising MindTouch saw a groundswell of adoption that eclipsed all competitors with their large marketing/advertising/pr budgets. Our customers and users spread the word because we built a fantastic product. However, we added PR at the beginning of 2008 and it's been very helpful. Specifically, our PR team (Future-Works - Miiko is a rockstar) has helped MindTouch convey the depth of our product and our medium and long term strategy. Previously, the media was fixated on comparing MindTouch to pure wiki players.
Perhaps the most important benefit MindTouch has realized from our PR team is that they've helped smooth my rough edges (some). :-) After all, not everyone is MarshallK.
As a former PR that turned into an entrepreneur I can say that PR works like an amplificator.
If you have a bad product, PR won't help you, you'll find them dummies, etc. If you've got a real distinctive offer to present to your market I can assure you that PR will help you to grow quickly, will avoid you competitors and reach your natural market share quickly.
S.
OK, so you start up a tech company. After a while, if you've managed to cross the chasm and are out of the jaws of finance capitalists and into profitability, you start to notice that you're attracting a bit of attention - maybe newspaper articles, TV interviews etc. You try to keep up with things but end up assigning this to someone else.
That someone else has just become your PR person and you've just done yourself the favour of being smart enough actually to listen to what people are saying about you when you walk out of the room.
And this will all go swimmingly - the PR can help feed back to the marketing person, even maybe strike up relationships with journalists and bloggers - until something goes wrong. If your PR person has been canny, he/she will have put contingencies in place and can, as far as possible, execute a plan that puts all the caps in all the right places.
In other words, you've got crisis management. That's the often unrecognised value of PR - not so much what do you do when things go wrong, as what do you say.
So, if you didn't have PR, you'd have to invent it. And even the best technology goes wrong. A smattering of Gmail, anyone? A slice of fail whale maybe?
There are a lot of bad PR pros out there. Most of them just don't know any better. Large firms dont seem to be training their young guns well enough yet.
The bigger problem may be that there's are a lot of bad journalists. Many can be brought and paid for (I know it sounds harsh, but I see it happen). Some are just looking to write controversy and will slam a company for no reason. Others write in only 8 word sound bites. So until Journalists improve, all companies need a PR firm to protect their interests.
That's why we have PR, not to be media hounds, but strategic communicators.
Interesting perspectives on PR. I don't see this as a black and white issue. If you can find the right PR person good at strategy and execution, it might be worth the investment. The problem I've seen with many PR professionals is a tendency to focus almost completely on strategy and "relationship marketing." I get the need for strategy, but when you are a one person marketing team almost the last thing you need is advice on what to do if you had a five person team -- this has happened to me a few times now.
IMHO, for most tech start-ups you've got to include a significant social media component in the mix. The question is: Can you get the right focus with an external firm? The notion of bringing in house a social media marketing pro sounds much more appealing to me for early stage companies vs. investing heavily in a PR firm. In fact, social media as a primary outbound marketing channel seems to offer more promise than other "broadcast" channels such as PPC if you are early stage. It's a difference between engaging in a conversation and screaming messages at the market. It's just very hard to scream loud enough these days to get your message across.
From my perspective, combining community outreach with an affordable community application seems to offer significant advantages over engaging an external PR firm.
As a founder of a startup I agree that PR can be helpful but is not always the best investment, especially for a strapped company. (After weighing the pros and cons I decided to hire a PR consultant for our own recent launch.)
But I don't believe that every great idea will find its audience.
The world would be a better place if talent and genius were always enough but sadly there's overwhelming evidence to the contrary. As an author lucky enough to be backed by a major publisher I can think of countless great books that are never discovered. Same goes for just about every other medium I can think of. Somehow, word of mouth often fails to reach critical mass amidst all the noise.
And unfortunately I disagree with those who say that no amount of PR can save a bad idea. Just look at some of the mindless dribble on the front tables of your local bookstore. And is wide adoption really proof of great technology, rather than PR/marketing muscle? Surely not.
So, certainly PR is not always needed, nor effective, but even great ideas can use a push now and then.
Hey Marshall, check out my SXSW panel:
"Non-traditional Marketing For Startups"
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1695
"Your engineering team are rockstars. The feedback from your beta users is phenomenal. It's time to market your product, so the first thing you do is...go hire a PR firm to get you covered in BusinessWeek? Pray that Arrington sees your email? Your marketing strategy needs to be as forward thinking as your product...let's discuss how to achieve that."
Schoble isn't entirely wrong, but he is mistaken. Sure, great products sell on word of mouth, but word of mouth IS PR!
I'd have to side with the argument that a PR AGENCY is not necessarily the best way to go. What any business must recognize is that communication is the lifeblood of every organization. It's far more cost effective and business savy to hire a communicator as part of the team. Brand building, marketing, employee communications, media relations, new media-- we do it all.
We tried a few PR agencies at www.blogtalkradio.com with limited success. We have a unique technology, one which you Marshall so graciously profiled on TC in the fall of 2006.
Our current agency, Middleberg Communications has been terrific. They are very experienced, savvy PR guys who I consider to be business partners vs hired guns. They care deeply about our service and my suggestion to any company seeking outside PR agency services, is to insure that the Agency believes in your product and isn't simply looking for a fee.
Alan Levy
CEO
I think this is the most comprehensive article out of the buzz on this topic today.
This subject has been a big debate at HubSpot. When I think about it, there are five ways a PR firm can provide value in today's world:
1) Research – find good blogs, awards, conferences, dig up info
2) Training – teach people about PR in a social media world
3) Create Content – story ideas, writing, video, audio
4) Pitching / Relationship – maybe more relevant to old media, but it does still work
5) Monitoring – make sure you comment on the right blogs and don't miss any news
Read the full article about the Value of a PR Firm in a Social Media World.
This is a great post and topic. I work at beYOU.tv an online fitness and wellness video community. We've just started a PR/marketing outreach effort.
Some technologies that are great will find an audience naturally. Twitter, Google, etc. are examples, but they are the exceptions. Think of how much effort Microsoft and Apple put into PR, and both have great technologies.
I love the comment about new PR = community manager. Well said.
Startup people, how is the PR outreach going at your startup?
Greg
beYOU.tv
Great post and well said. I think Quality work finds its own Audience. PRing should be is done for something Totally Disruptive.
@Aaron Fulkerson @Nigel Eccles Thanks for the kudos. You guys rock!
Whether you launch with the help of a PR (agency/consultant/in-house) or implement it post-launch, as MindTouch did, there is great value in PR.
After reading Aaron's comment, I want to add the importance of community evangelism. He's right, if you make a great product the community will become your evangelists and do PR for you.
And another key component (IMO) is having your clients (if you're working in a PR agency or are a consultant) become savvy with social media (if they're not already), and work in concert with them. Aaron is truly a master at this and together we do some pretty kick-@ss work in spreading the word about MindTouch Deki across multiple mediums and audiences.
Equally important is that we've developed real relationships with bloggers/journos and customers that go beyond pimping our stuff (but our stuff aka MindTouch Deki Rocks!!). Real relationships are about helping others out on stuff where we get nothing in return, and having conversations that are not all about you, but real stuff and real people. We do this because we genuinely like and respect these folks and that's community.
Yeah, Aaron has been known to ruffle a feather or two, but all-in-all he's a great guy who walks his talk and delivers the goods. Not to mention is wicked smart.
I think it has to do with the time factor to achieve some level of success.
I do believe that growing organically and natural are really outcomes of worthy products and services but there's also a competitive landscape to think of (aside from bleeding coffers) that put pressure on companies to make that leap and grab that PR lifeline. And let's face it, a great dev guy doesn't necessarily possess the skills to do the pitches and all the related aspects of marketing. It doesn't mean they can't learn but again it is all about the time you have allotted for it to succeed.
Best.
alain
mor.ph
It's rare to have a tech product so popular it drives adoption without some form of PR. When does hiring a PR agency make sense? The Loughlin/Michaels Group counsels dozens of tech start ups monthly on how to best leverage PR. We break a lot of rules in our PR agency approach. We are not afraid to tell prospects to wait 6-12 months before they invest in PR. We also work with them on project based campaigns until they have the capital or stability needed to make a bigger splash. We also bring them into the process so they understand PR better too. Larger agencies typically won't work with clients in this capacity because it's too time consuming. Like our clients, we are risk takers and often take equity in exchange for service. The more sweat equity we invest the more rewarding. We recently launched www.filtrbox.com on an aggressive and cost effective budget that included business, IT, media and social media outlets. We know for a fact we delivered more results for the $ compared to the average agency. The reward was priceless.
Remember: There's no one size fits all PR program, agency or formula. Be creative and think of of the box for your clients....every minute....but don't bill them every minute. It's ok to over service them.
Donna
nice post. i think lot of good products and sites affect due to PR ..peoples need to keep own their view for anything
Great post Marshall.
Think the core shift is from working through influencers to being an influencer -- creating your own content that is relevant and compelling to your target audience + has the substance to inspire and continue to fuel conversations.
In essence, every company must be a media company, and founders, community managers, etc. must be the producers / reporters.
One of the legends of the Coca-Cola Company is that one of the founders once remarked that only half of the company's advertising budget was money well spent. The problem was he didn't know which half.
The same could be said of public relations. Too often campaigns are not effectively measured and even more often, agencies like the ones you describe overcharge for spam-driven publicity efforts that actually damage their client's reputation.
I think good public relations is essential to any business. But measuring your investment is critical.
Angela Sinickas has some excellent resources on communications measurements that may be useful to your readers.
http://www.sinicom.com/