Christian Anderson (a former colleague at Jobster) had an interesting (and well-researched) post on his blog called “How to Pitch Robert Scoble — HINT: No Direct Tweets“… , which led to a discussion on FriendFeed (with Robert himself weighing in) that was pretty interesting.
I had a contribution bouncing around in my head but held off responding until I read an absolutely fabulous quote from one of my favorite books on marketing:
““No one ever got anywhere by lavishing calls on Oprah. The only time I’ve succeeded in my career with Oprah was [when] Oprah called us.”
— Barry Krause, in Made to Stick
This advice can be generalized to getting PR, blog coverage, angel and VC interest, and more… And can be summed up in one tight little phrase: “Be worth talking about.”
So how do you get to be worth talking about? Redirect every bit of outgoing energy you’re spending on getting noticed to being worthy of notice. Near as I can tell, this isn’t just a matter of building something great… It seems to be some arcane combination of:
- Building something people want.
- Find a parade that’s forming and start walking in front of it. We’ve (by pure luck) done well from PR perspective by diving headfirst into the “information overload” meme that seems to have growing interest and press coverage. Whether you’re building a comfortable lifestyle business or shooting for the moon, it’s great thing to be topical. A great contempory example of this is FriendFeed– they’ve (perhaps accidentally) inserted themselves into the Twitter conversation. If Twitter had never existed, would FriendFeed have gotten a tenth of the organic PR?
- Figure out the best way to deliver your message– find a way to make it sticky (“Made to Stick” espouses being simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, a story). Entrepreneurs (especially if they are web geeks) notoriously marginalize this step, but there’s all sorts of great stories about simple messaging shifts making a huge difference. I don’t think we’ve nailed the perfect message for RescueTime, but I’m in a fairly constant state of brainstorming and experimentation… I’ll tell our story with a new permutation just about every day to see if I can find something that resonates just a little better (this is one of the many reasons that “stealth” companies are so often ridiculous).
- For God’s sake, get some freakin’ traction. Bloggers and reporters are in the business of reporting on the metaphorical parades that I just talked about. The best way to prove that you’re at the front of a parade is to have an army of enthusiastic users who are already using assorted channels (word of mouth, blogs, twitter, etc) to tell the world how important you are to THEM. It doesn’t take MUCH traction– two or three vocal users is often enough to convince a blogger than you’re worth a second look.
I’ll finish with a great quote from Seth Godin on “grand openings“:
“The best time to promote something is after it has raving fans, after you’ve discovered that it works, after it has a groundswell of support, [ed: and after you've figured out how to effectively talk about it]. And more important, the best way to promote something is consistently and persistently and for a long time. Save the bunting for Flag Day.”
