I’ve been reading devouring Predictably Irrational, in which “beehavioural” economist Dan Ariely explores the ways in which consumers behave irrationally (or emotionally) in response to economic forces. Amongst other things, he shows how and why “free” is something very different to something worth zero dollars, because it elicits powerfully irrational behaviour in even the most rational of us. To understand what this means for web businesses we need to take a step back into history.

The First Internet Age (1996 – 2001) established the practice of providing free internet services to consumers. Whether it was search results, movie reviews or dial-up internet access, the model was essentially the same: provide the consumer with a free service in return for exposing them to online advertising. Get enough consumers to view enough ads and you can make a healthy profit, as long as you keep your costs low. In the first Internet Age, however, it cost too much to build a web platform, establish a large online audience and then persuade marketers to try online advertising, and many startups failed when the venture capital funding these costs was withdrawn.

At the beginning of the Second Internet Age (2003 – present) new web development tools allowed a startup to build a new web platform with not much more than the available credit on a couple of credit cards. There still wasn’t much hope of luring big marketers to spend with them on online advertising, but it would take fewer online marketers to make a startup profitable because of the lower platform costs. That credit card wouldn’t stretch to hiring the expensive VP of Ad Sales you’d need to get advertisers onboard, so many startups decided to work on acquiring a large audience first, continue to keep costs low, and try to solve the revenue problem later.

When the venture capital industry was again ready to invest in internet startups, things got a little out-of-hand: quickly the industry moved past rewarding startups that were focused on acquiring a large audience and towards rewarding startups that neglected revenue. People were proud, cocky, even arrogant about building a product that serviced millions of consumers for free without having made any progress towards finding a way to make money from it.

That all came to a grinding, lurching halt with the GFC. No professional investor will now invest in an early-stage startup without a revenue stream. Early-stage investment money is still out there for startups that meet the new criteria, but the criteria have changed: now it’s all about making a little revenue from every new customer, right from day one. That’s OK if your startup is still on the back of an envelope, but what about all the hundreds of thousands of post-money startups in the industry, caught between funding rounds, servicing customers, paying salaries and battling competitors?

Think turning your business around 180 degrees from audience-first to revenue-first in the midst of a recession is challenging? Here’s the bad news: Dan Ariely’s research shows that for most of us, it will be impossible.

The dangerous power of “free”

In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely describes a series of experiments where a premium chocolate and a small, cheap chocolate are offered to test subjects, where the premium chocolate is offered at a higher price to the cheap chocolate. After repeating the offer hundreds of times, a clear ratio of about 70% chose the premium product and 30% chose the cheap product. Increasing the cost of both products by the same amount, or lowering the cost of both products by the same amount has no effect on that 70/30 ratio… until, that is, the two are discounted so that the cheap chocolate is now free. It shouldn’t affect the ratio of purchasing — the two chocolates still have the same relative price — but it does, dramatically so: now the free chocolate gets 70% of the orders and it is the premium chocolate only getting 30% of the buyers.

Ariely identifies what he calls “the fear of loss” as the motivating factor. Every transaction has an upside and a downside: we must balance the reward of making the right transaction (I bought a BluRay DVD player and not a HD DVD player) against the risk of making a bad transaction (I paid too much for a Windows smartphone and I only ever use it to make calls anyway, I should have just kept the phone I already had.) When we’re offered something for free, the risk of a bad transaction suddenly evaporates — no matter how inappropriate the goods or services I now have, they didn’t cost me anything — I’m still ahead.

According to Ariely, being liberated from the fear of loss elicits such an emotional reaction that we will often act irrationally when offered something for free — buying more socks than we need just because for every two pairs we get a free pair, or queueing up for 30mins just to get a free ice-cream cone, or staggering home from a conference with a showbag full of crappy pens, ugly coffee mugs and horrid t-shirts that will never see the light of day again.

Are you trapped in free?

So here’s our problem: in the Second Internet Age, we’ve all been giving services away for free because asking consumers to pay was just an unnecessary barrier to growing an audience, and because nobody expected us to focus on earning revenue until later. Now the times have changed and we need to get consumers to pay for services they’ve been using for free. We know it’s going to be hard, but Ariely tells us it’s going to be next-to-impossible. The irrational consumer response to “free” means that even if one of your competitors is still offering a similar product for free, consumers will strongly resist paying even one cent for your product. You can offer a significantly better product, perhaps as much as twice as good in the minds of the target consumer, and they will still stick with the free product.

You not only have to change your own business model but that of all the players in your market segment to move from free to paid services. For those of us with both a limited free version and a full-featured paid version, your biggest, most intractable competitor (with the most loyal customers least likely to switch) is your own free version.

The good news: if you’re truly new, any price will do

Was there any good news in this book? Thankfully, yes: Ariely proves as well as anyone can with scientific method that market pricing is always arbitrary, relying much more on a consumer’s prior exposure to prices for similar services than for anything to do with supply and demand economics. In other words, if you’re building something entirely new, you can charge whatever you want for it, and consumers will “anchor” on that initial price and compare all subsequent offers to that anchored price. Set the anchor price really high, and that price quickly becomes normal, even if it’s apparent to the consumer that the cost of supply is much lower than the anchor price.

The sting in the tail? You better set it high and not low, and particularly not free, since consumers will also anchor on a low price, and almost irretrievably so on “free”. Once something is offered for free, you are much more likely to lose the customer than to persuade them to pay for it.

Go read Predictably Irrational

I’ve only scratched the surface of Ariely’s book in this blog post, you really should subscribe to his Predictably Irrational blog and buy his book for yourself. He has recommendations there for how to get yourself out of your free conundrum and how to exit gracefully from a social transaction-based relationship with customers. Though if you’d like to skip the research and get straight to work on solving the problem, you need only to talk to us at Pollenizer!

Product management consultancy Brainmates was kind enough to invite me over to lead their second “Product Talks” event next week.

Product Talks is a casual, early evening thing. I’ll be talking for about 20mins about some of the lessons I’ve learned the hard way in a product management lifecycle stretching back to the mid 1990s. I’ll keep the Keynote deck to a minimum, take questions from the room throughout, and we’ll probably take some unexpected detours. I’l have some questions for you to answer too!

Anyone working in product management is welcome (you don’t necessarily have to be working on intertube products.) There’s room for 20-30 people max and the Brainmates team will be there, so space is a bit limited. Get your RSVPs in to info@brainmates.com.au or ring +61 (2) 9232-8147.

Tip: take a moment to remember key non-product events!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Wow. Has Obama succeeded in building an online political dialogue with the US electorate that will last beyond the current economic crisis? I hope so. We should all be watching and learning from what works and what doesn’t. This could be the world’s biggest e-government taking its first baby steps.

The Republican party must realise how so much of the Obama groundswell and fund-raising came from online engagement, so how will it be planning to respond in time for the next Federal election? Will they be able to mount an online community engagement of their own sooner than that? Is there room in one democracy for two standalone online community engagements or should the Obama administration welcome the Republican party into one single e-government community?

Meanwhile it will be fascinating to observe how the Obama administration’s social media team manage with a running start, building a platform using mostly off-the-shelf social media tools, how they cope with the sheer volume of interaction with the electorate while giving each citizen the feeling that their opinion is valued and treated with respect.

42,126 questions for Obama

But first, let’s look back on the brighter, shinier future we were promised. As an impressionable adult I look back on when I was an impressionable boy and remember how deeply I had bought-in to that utopian future. At the age of 12 I had decided I’d be working as a journalist in a bustling colony on the Moon by the age of 30, flying to work, my only wardrobe choices the silver one-piece or the bronze one-piece, working late each night on a dinner pill. I’m a geek and I bought it wholesale. This was the future I wanted. Turns out, I was in the minority!

What happened to our bright utopian future? Real consumer behaviour happened. Society did not and does not really want a utopian future. Consider this: each of those emblemic utopian products kinda/sorta exists today:

Flying car: the Terrafugia Transition is more of a driveable airplane than a flyable car but it’s roadworthy, and once it has approval from the authorities you can drive it to an airport and fly it to another airport. The future we were promised included nuclear fusion-powered saucers, so where did the utopian product manager go wrong? He Underestimating the bureaucracy of the FAA, sure, but really the big mistake was an unfounded optimism that if consumer demand was high enough, the nascent nuclear industry would be able to solve the safety and disposal problems of nuclear energy. Turns out, no amount of commute time saved is enough to offset the fear of contaminating your neighbourhood with radioactive waste for the next half a million years. Almost always emotions (fear) beat logic (we’ll solve this) in the consumer mind.

Meals in pill form: turns out in reality meals are more easily delivered in powder form, and you can even get something better than a meal, if what you want to do is lose weight. Turns out the powdered meal replacement marketplace is quite a bit bigger than the market for flying cars but it’s not something most people choose to do. What went wrong? If asked, “Would you like to be able to save time by consuming a meal in pill form?” most consumers will say yes: sometimes they would like that. But the unasked question is, “how often?” and our utopian product manager either didn’t ask that or didn’t want to hear the answer.

Shiny one-piece suits: you only have to go to a fashion show, a car race, or buy one online to debunk the idea that these are somehow more practical and comfortable than jeans and a tee. Our utopian product manager was on happy drugs for this one.

Robot housemaid: the robot housemaid could be easily the most mainstream utopian product that exists today, yet consumers just won’t go for it. The iRobot company of Massacheusetts makes a whole range of the things. I pitch the joys of Roomba ownership to almost every visitor to our house — I’m famous for it — and I’m not too shabby at the art of the pitch. Anybody who doesn’t believe me need only check Amazon – this is a product that gets a 5 star review from nearly half the people who’ve bought one. So why have I been unable to convert even one single person yet?

Two simple reasons: almost everybody who cares about a clean floor already has a vacuum cleaner; and without exception they actually prefer to clean their floor themselves to make sure the job is done to their own high standard. They don’t want to be freed of the burden of cleaning the floor. They might tell a utopian product manager that they would love to be able to trust the cleaning to a robot, but you know what? They never will. Their housekeeping ability is closely associated with their self-esteem. You would have to pay them to allow a robot to do it, and even then they would stand there and watch it work, waiting for it to fail. That’s not increasing quality of life, it’s increasing anxiety. The only product people are prepared to buy that increases their anxiety is tobacco, apparently.

Even good startup founders make bad decisions

As startup founders designing online services, what can we learn from the mistakes of the utopian product manager? It is this: the very faith that makes you a good startup founder makes you a lousy judge of what consumers truly want to buy from you.

To even get a break as a startup founder you need an idea; more than idea, you need a dream, preferably an unshakeable one. You need to evangelise not just consumers but sceptical investors, employees, industry and media. You can walk in with a meter-high stack of convincing-looking qualitative and quantitative research meant to back you up, but at best that’ll help with the post-purchase rationalisation. People will get on-board because they believe you, and they will believe you only if you have faith. And faith does not require facts. In fact, the more you have faith, the less you need facts and the more likely you are to select the facts that reinforce your faith.

The successful startup founders I know often have the uncanny ability to go to bat — and hit a home run — for ideas they don’t have much faith in. It’s a psychological makeup that is useful in sales roles; perhaps that’s why I know many successful startup founders from a sales background. Faith can really get in the way of building products consumers want. Not having faith in your product and your strategy requires you to apply reason, it allows you to subject a business to the strictest scrutiny, to make 110% sure that consumers aren’t just being polite to the nice young man who asked them if they’d be interested in buying a nuclear-powered flying car.

If you have faith, perhaps you have the wrong product, or you are the wrong person for the job. Get yourself a CEO (stay on as founder) an equal partner or an advisory board who don’t need faith and then pay close attention to what they’re telling you about what the market is saying.

Sadly for those of us who’d still love to be flying our robot housemaids, if you don’t have faith but everybody believes you anyway, you’re well on your way to success.

(That’s a depressing note to end on, so here’s a very funny skit about flying cars and what you should — or shouldn’t — be prepared to do to get one.)

Sometimes in the startup phase of a business, you’ll wrestle with the big issues for months at a time until you think you’ve nailed them. You feel like you’ve finally solved one of the great problems of our time. You get the big issues implemented in your front-end, announce it to your users, and sit back and wait for the world to change.

And it doesn’t. Argh!

Then, one day you’ll mostly have your mind on something else, when a little tiny change will pop into your head. Seemingly of no great importance, you’ll add it to the list of a hundred things you need to implement, and one day, perhaps because you just need to do something simple for a while, you’ll push it to production. You might not even think to mention it to users, colleagues or investors. It’s no big deal.

Except that it turns out to be a huge deal. And you’re almost trampled to death in the rush to declare you a genius. What happened?

Creating successful new web businesses means addressing a mixture of big issues and small issues in equal measure, with equal attention. Because sometimes, it’s addressing the little issues that nudge your business over the line between OK and wildly successful. I was reminded of this reading how Jared Spool changed a single button on a client’s shopping cart checkout process. In doing so, he fixed a hidden problem that was affecting users so often that the client made an additional $300 million that year.

The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password. It was the login form for the site. It’s a form users encounter all the time. How could they have problems with it?

What really strikes me about the story is not that the change of a single button can make a $300 million difference (some online retailers are vast) but that Jared’s usability testing didn’t set out to solve that problem, and nobody had any idea that a small change would make a 45% difference to sales. The form as originally designed was identical to many other online checkout processes, it wasn’t like this was bad design; it was merely “not-good-enough” design.

I have my own (vastly less valuable) experience to draw on, working on improving with an online business I co-founded. It taught me an unforgettable lesson on the importance of small things.

We had a free trial offer on our product which cost us a lot to maintain because the product was expensive to deliver and we’d charge you nothing for it for 30 days, just so you could try it out. There wasn’t much we could do to reduce the cost of the offer, since our competitors all did something similar. We’d bill you at the end of 30 days if we didn’t hear from you first but too many of our new customers were leaving, either during the trial period or immediately after they’d noticed the charge on their credit card statement.

I wanted to learn more about what was causing trial customers to abandon our product so I worked on adding a new process for deleting your account that asked you to fill in a quick exit survey on your use of the product and your reasons for leaving. I wasn’t hoping to do any more than learn a little that I could apply to a new free trial offer.

But I got a small miracle instead: the abandonment rate dropped the day we introduced the survey form. I had expected to collect some data; I hadn’t expected to make a dent in the numbers. Intrigued, we spent some time over the next few weeks tweaking the number and the kind of questions included in the exit survey. A free text field that had to be completed in order to finish the exit survey actually decreased abandonment rates by about 5% all on its own.

Here were users trying something new and big and significant, and then deciding they didn’t want to pay for it, yet I was persuading them to pay for another 30 days’ service by just asking them why they didn’t want to be a customer anymore. It was the simplest thing we implemented in six months yet it led to a big change on our business metrics.

I learned that the line between OK and wildly successful is only visible in hindsight. You can never see it as you approach it, or even as you cross over it. You must look backwards to even know it is there. “Ah yes!” You’ll say, “That was clearly the point at which we crossed the line. How could we have not seen that coming?”

You never will. Instead, focus on a mix of the big things and the little things every day. The author of ‘Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff” wasn’t writing about starting an internet business. You need both the big stuff and the small stuff working for you until you figure out what this new business of yours is really all about.

At first glance, mixin might look like another micro-blogging service. At Pollenizer we’re very familiar with a whole constellation of social media, micro-blogging and sharing services because we use them every day to keep our disparate and geographically-displaced team on the same page. So what’s the big deal about one more?

Well, until now we’ve seen nothing quite like mixin. Nothing quite as interesting, redolent with potential and abundantly useful for solving real-world consumer problems.

The Lausanne-based company describes its product as “social peripheral vision” and that’s a great three word summary. In a world where our work and social schedules change several times a week — sometimes several times a day — there’s a need for something that pulls together all our event-based information from elsewhere on the web and brings it together in the one place, accessible from almost anywhere and anything.

In a world where we want to make the best use of every day, there’s a need for quick and simple ways to propose an activity and let our friends/colleagues collaborate on when and where that should happen. And in a modern life in which we maintain rich relationships with people we sometimes never see for months at a time, we increasingly choose micro-blogging/status-updating services to keep in touch with friends and loved ones.

Roll that all up, and you’re talking about mixin. “Social peripheral vision” is a way of making all that functionality available, without maintenance becoming a chore; making it easy to scan and get a gist of what’s happening, fast to add something new, quick to share, and easy to undo or change. Think Batman (the TV series) fight sounds: “Bam!”, “Ka-pow!” and “Zowee!”

Introduced to the Mixin team through the company’s mutual investor connections, both Mixin and Pollenizer are very excited to announce that we’re embarking on helping the business and the product further develop its core functionality, customer acquisition and commercialisation.

So far, the experience of working with the mixin team has been like a high-speed train flashing through the alps — it’s all happening so fast, so smooth! The mixin blog reads like any product geek’s dream of weekly new features. Jon from the Pollenizer team is already in Lausanne working on the backend while I begin contributing to the front-end, and we’ve just learned that our entry for mixin is a winner in the annual startup competition held by international Top 10 MBA school, IMD. [gasp!]

As with a few other key clients, Pollenizer has taken up an equity stake in mixin to make sure we’ll be applying everything we have to make this product the biggest thing in daily planning since the Gregorian calendar. We’re delighted to add a Swiss company to our European client list (ski slopes, chocolate, cheese… what’s not to like?) and we’re certain that mixin is going to make all the early/late Skype calls worthwhile soon!

Enough from us, here’s mixin’s Nicolas Dengler presenting the product and the business at LIFT08:

The phones are running hot at Pollenizer this week, not because we’re flogging Christmas specials, but because our latest clients are the team who’ve built messmo, an Australian mobile application. messmo is an interesting product because it lets users send free SMS messages to each other, send picture messages, send/receive email, update their Facebook status and more. It runs as a J2ME app, meaning it’ll run on a big cross-section of Java-enabled handsets, not just the latest and greatest. messmo seems like a lightweight, fast and practical way to stay in touch with friends and share media from a mobile.

At Pollenizer we like mobile products so much because there is so much potential growth in this space. There are plenty of best practices still to be agreed on in product development, customer acquisition and retention, distribution and data portability. All we know for sure is that the next generation of grownups will look at desktops like we look at mainframes — mobile devices are as essential to them as credit cards are to us. If you want to still be an online business in 10 years’ time, better get your mobile strategy right, or better still, begin the migration from desktop product company to mobile product company.

So we try to always keep one or more clients in this space, and with messmo, Bluepulse, mig33, Storyz and others all hailing from our golden soil girt by sea, it’s not too hard. Australia seems like an upcoming powerhouse in mobile application development. Download messmo today and let us know what you think about the product.

We met with a startup CEO recently to take a brief on marketing. The conversation turned to which marketing tools they were currently using and which they had plans to use. As a PR person and journalist in two previous careers, I had to try hard not to fall off my chair when the CEO outlined how 100% their marketing efforts were in social media so far, with no time or money spent on ‘traditional’ marketing and none on media relations.

I had to ask why. “Well,” he began, almost sheepishly, “I’m pretty sure we don’t have the budget to do effective media relations, and none of us really understands how to do it. If Techcrunch gives us a write-up, we’ll take it but we’re not trying to pitch anything.”

Well, at least he wasn’t alone, it’s very common: internet startups pedalling as fast as they can on all fronts when it comes to product development, capital-raising, recruitment and alliances, but needlessly limiting their marketing to search engine advertising, social media and viral advertising.

For a decade, people (including me) advocating the use of online marketing have talked trash at traditional marketing, criticising it as too expensive, not measurable enough, and too often ineffective. Well, yes and no. Yes, when it’s done poorly. Less so when it’s done creatively and well. Maybe we argued our point too hard, made it all seem a little to black-and-white, either/or, us or them. Because it shouldn’t be.

If you’ve been paying attention, online advertising, viral memes and social media can each be wildly expensive, sadly ineffective, and impossibly difficult to measure too. That’s partly because there are poor practitioners of any craft, but largely because these are such new marketing disciplines there is very little known about how to do them well. At Pollenizer we’ve begun reviewing the ways of measuring the effectiveness of social media campaigns, and, well… picture a dusty, deserted road and a tumbleweed blowing in the wind.

At least people have been doing traditional marketing for a long time. Yes, they can still lie to you. The circulation figures of almost any newspaper or magazine will be an outright lie. The audience numbers for any TV show will be a witty pun that you shouldn’t take too seriously. A media relations person who says they know just how to get your message across perfectly is just checking to see if you’re paying attention. But this maze is known and negotiable. The facts can be discerned. And there are libraries full of the history of traditional marketing. Hell, in Australia, television advertising even has its own TV show, on the ABC, no less!

You can’t afford offline advertising, no matter how effective, but you can get results with media relations. While it’s sometimes considered the ugly stepsister of traditional marketing, for an internet startup it’s often an effective option on a small budget. It hits your customer, partner and investor audiences, and it has a very long tail. If you’d like to wage your awareness war in the news as well as on Google, here’s some tips that can help get you started.

• Get it in house as soon as you can

Startups can’t afford all the staff they need, but the best media relations work comes from in-house, not from agencies, for the simple reason that to be effective, media relations people need to be great evangelists for your product/service and your company culture. Even the best people in PR agencies can’t be good evangelists for you because they can only be on the job for you for a fraction of each day. They have other clients. Journalists don’t believe evangelism from agency reps because a credible evangelist can only ‘believe’ in one thing/company at a time. Worse, because of the time-billing nature of the relationship, there’s unavoidable pressure not to spend face-time with your agency, which is the only way they will ever soak up your product and culture.

• Start low, stay low

You’re a little scrappy startup changing the world with little more than a bent paperclip and some gaffer tape. A flawless veteran media relations rep is going to look out of place representing your business. You’ll probably need to start with an agency before you can afford to take the work in-house, but try to find a sole operator, a new mum returning to part-time work, a young agency, an inexperienced-but-fast-learning account manager at a larger agency. Then insist you pay them a pittance, since they’re clearly not the biggest in the business. Make them work on a retainer, since that’s the best way to get a lot of unbillable work included, and if they won’t work on a retainer, make them report to you in so much detail about the billable hours that they’ll make you their first retainer client. If six months down the track you feel you’re not getting value for money from your retainer, that’s entirely your fault – you either chose the wrong person or you didn’t give them enough to do. Give them more to do – it’s really terrifying to go to a client and ask for an increased retainer.

• Know the journalist

Every press release and every interview are an opportunity to get to know your key journalists better. Do NOT leave the relationship entirely to your PR person unless you are already Steve Jobs and far too important to be known by regular people. You’re a wily CEO, you have people skills, you know how to draw out something from the people you meet – start and finish every email exchange, phone interview or meeting with a journalist that way. Don’t waste their time – always have something interesting to say, even if it is not directly on the subject of the story.  Every journalists has a beat, brief or a section – the subject area they are tasked with covering – but they also develop their own interests over time, which may or may not overlap with their beat. It’s what the journalist is interested in that counts.

Make sure your junior, underpaid and inexperienced PR person invests just as much in getting to know these key journalists, as for them to remain effective they must act as a facilitator of communication between you and the journalist, not a gatekeeper. Alfred the Butler to your Bruce Wayne. Leave them out of the loop and their only way to engage is to try and restrict and mess with the vibe, which they will try to do. Make them a third person at the coffee table, not a waiter or an appointments secretary.

• Have something interesting to say

Thanks to the intertubes, any crap press release can be ‘published’ online, but probably not someplace actual customers will read it. To get into the publications that matter, you need to have something interesting to say. I’m not sure why that should be so hard to grasp, but “Example Company releases latest version of robust, mission-critical middleware platform, announces large customer deal” never, ever qualifies as interesting. Not to a journalist who scans headlines like that all day.

Got something genuinely different and significant about your product and you know a journalist who’s interested in that? Don’t shotgun your story to every Tom, Dick and Businesswire. Take it only to that one person and take the time to make sure they fully appreciate how interesting it is. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have a significantly interesting product announcement to make. So take a leaf out of the Mark Cuban or Scott McNealy books and say something interesting about your industry, your competitive space, your customers or the government. Be controversial – journalists will always 2x your controversiality, there will be a brief flurry of pro- and anti- coverage around the issue, after which everyone will largely forget about it. You, however, will be left with a reputation as a Person Who Is Interesting. A Person Who Can Be Counted On To Be Interesting When I Have Nothing Else and I Am On Deadline.

Be aware of what you can and can’t say by law (trust in your PR person, not your lawyer, who will advise you never to speak to a journalist, not even to confirm your name) but after that, be as controversial as your company culture allows. If yours is a bold, brash, kicking/taking names outfit, be that way in the presence of the media.  And if you’re a humble, quiet, self-effacing company, you can still be controversial, you just need to know how and when to say it so that you won’t be quoted on it.

For instance, when I worked there, Yahoo! was (and still is, even as it sinks slowly on the horizon) a deeply humble and self-effacing company. You’d never hear Jerry and Filo say anything remotely negative about anyone or anything. But one senior exec working with Jerry (who shall remain anonymous) had an incredible knack for making an otherwise boring story interesting for the journalist by saying something sensational but completely unquotable. Something like this:

Journalist: so, you think you’re number one right now in the online advertising market? (this was the ’90s)

Exec: (with the official line) we’re very happy that so many marketers are finding that our advertising solutions are proving so effective for us and we’re confident that our steep growth curve will continue on up.

Journalist: sooo, can you give me some hard numbers on that? How far ahead of MSN and Excite do you think you really are? (again, this was the ’90s)

Exec : (official line) Because we’re a listed company you’ll find everything that I’m able to say about that in the quarterly numbers we released today… (leans forward, glances to either side conspiratorially, and whispers) …unofficially, dude, we are [expletive] [expletively] them up the [expletive] with a [improbably large object] and they are totally [expletive verb in the past-tense.] We’re talking [expletive]. And those [expletive] [collective expletive nouns] are so [expletive] stupid they don’t even know they’re [expletive] yet!

See, journalists (with very few exceptions) are prevented from reporting bad language, either by law or by editorial policy. And the exec’s outburst is so out of character with his company’s public culture and with previous things he’s been quoted as saying in the press, that neither his editor nor his readers are going to believe it if he did get it in print. The journalist will be dying to say something about this in his piece (because facts alone are never enough for a story, journalists can never resist adding opinion) but he’s got nothing he can quote the exec on. So most often he’ll headline it, “Yahoo! extremely confident about market dominance” and add something to the story along the lines of, “…[Exec] spoke in detail and with great enthusiasm to [publication] about how successful the company has been in recent quarters, and about how its dominance in online advertising sales was growing rapidly.” Mission accomplished.

• It’s easy to get journalists to write about you, it’s hard to control what they write

Every journalist wants to add opinion (or colour) to the facts of their story, and many journalists fall into the habit of either being always optimistic or always pessimistic in their opinion. Sometimes they tell themselves they’re ‘adding balance’ to a story: you’ve give them five fantastic new things your product does and they’ll feel the need to finish the story with, “Only time will tell whether market giant Google will enter this market and use its dominant position to ruin things for [your company].” Way to harsh the reader’s mellow. Other times, a journalist will have a negative opinion about a technology or a company or an industry and it seems nothing you can do or say will prevent them from using each new story as a bludgeon on your head.

There’s nothing you can do: ignore them, and they will write about you anyway and hate you more for it. They have no incentive to change their opinion on any topic at all, and many reasons to be as obstinate and irascible as they want, if only because audiences love a controversial journalist.

You may as well begin the long, slow process of turning them around to your point of view. It will take kid gloves, great patience, a lot of free meals and even then you will see only tiny incremental progress in the severity of the beatings you endure. But get there in the end and the same irascible, unreasonable, immune-to-reason critic you’ve suffered will be equally unshakeable in their faith in your business and product offering. You will be able to do no wrong in their eyes.

• Blog. Blog again. Blog some more.

Journalists need to research to really understand the story you’re pitching them, and the best possible way to research you is to read personal, insightful, opinionated and honest blog posts written by you on the company blog. About the company and its products when possible, and about your industry, the issues, the rare good things your competitors do, the fun things your customers say, or even just the nightmare trip you had sandwiched between Big Momma and Twitchy Guy in coach all the way to San Francisco only to have your demo crash right before the climax of your pitch (and how you dug yourself out of that hole and learned a few lessons the reader might find helpful.) Refer to your blog when talking with journalists, email them a link to a post if they express interest. Your company blog is a newspaper! That you control! How awesome would it be to have all your key journalists reading your newspaper? [Expletive] [expletive-ly] awesome! Those [expletive] [expletives] won’t [expletive] know what’s [expletive] [expletive action]!