It’s easy to get journalists to write about you; it’s just hard to control what they write.
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]!