PR Playbook: The Real Truth. How to Get It. What It Means.

Love the intro. Big hand for a house band. Friends with Zenefits. Too soon. Welcome to the panel. I'm Ed Zitron. Run Easy pr. Because I couldn't come up with a better name. Done enterprise pr. I've done all sorts of print. If I list all my clients, you'll just get annoyed. So I'm going to pass you on to my far more talented panelists made up of fantastic journalists, editorial people, and of course, one of the best people in enterprise pr. So starting with Matt Weinberger here from Business Insider. He's worked at Computer World and he's of course, covered all sorts of enterprise stuff and a lot of focus on developers.

Developers, developers, developers, developers and developers.

Mahabha Colleen, of course, here, formerly of TechCrunch. It's where many of you will know from. And of course, Y Combinator. Yes, editorial director, I believe.

Editorial director.

Lovely. And thank you that I will desperately need that soon. And of course, got Erica from Strategically. She has had clients such as Nvidia, Algolia, and of course, fastly. And finally, we've got Sarah Fryer from Bloomberg. Thank you all for coming. I'm so sorry in advance. So, Matt, we're going to kick off with you because I can see you. Yes, there's something, a poison within most clients I actually have, but also most clients in general. Metrics. I am sure you as founders have all had this thing when you've thought, you know what, the fact I've got 10,000 of one very innocuous thing. That's very interesting. So, Matt, what metrics actually matter and more importantly do not matter to you?

Well, I would say that metrics combat, baby, is probably the essential metric. No, for real, the metrics that really matter. We like revenue, we like growth. Like, the thing that drives me nuts as a reporter is you say we've grown 5,000% year over year and it's like, great, but you didn't exist this time last year. So twice of one is two and 1,000 times zero is still zero.

Yeah.

So give me something else to work with.

I pitched him that. That was me talking about my agencies.

You know, I always like to ask a number that you can give pretty easily without like revealing too much about your company is. I think staff numbers is interesting. Obviously, user numbers are always important. And if you can't say user numbers, like, you need to rethink that and maybe you're not ready for press yet. And yeah, I mean, obviously the holy grail is revenue or valuation.

Please, yeah, please just use revenue.

The more Numbers you can give, the more excuses you're giving to the reporter to actually care about your company and your story. If you're not giving numbers, then you have to give other reasons why we should care about what you're doing. And, and the emails we get often say this is a best in class solution that's ahead of the rest of the companies in its field. We're disrupting things, we're innovating. That means nothing. It doesn't tell us what you're actually doing or what you're actually building. So if you really, really can't give any numbers, at least tell us who your customers are or tell us some stories about hurdles you went through. Times when you thought that things weren't going to work out and then they did. We're trying to tell stories here. So if you give us something, even if you can't tell us your revenue because your board is like, absolutely no way. It's not time for that. Tell us something that makes you realize.

I'll tell you, there's one thing that everybody has. If you have a company, you know a lot about what your customers are doing. And sometimes, you know, we talk about data mining and getting down and we do it for marketing, but we don't do it for pr. So if you know customer behaviors, you may not be able to say, hey, you know, you know, Cisco's doing XYZ or so, and so is doing X, Y and Z with my product. But if you know that they're across the board in your data, your customers are doing the same thing. There's no reason why a journalist is sitting back going, yeah, I know that this CRM does, you know, everybody thinks this is the greatest thing. You have to expose those kinds of numbers. So I actually say if you can't tell your customers, you can't tell. There's a, you know, and there's a stage. You can't tell this stuff or you don't want to. Right. Because again, 100% growth over just starting is yours.

But then you also have to ask why you want press. Then if you're not ready to talk about all of these things, what do you want to talk about other than the fact that you exist and somehow you think that press is a good thing to get.

Right, Like a purpose. Yeah.

And I think that if you think that press is going to be the thing that gets you to that next level or makes it so that you have good enough numbers that you'd finally be ready to share, you really need to rethink that because people have this idea that they're going to get a spike like it used to be. You know, you get techcrunched and then you get this spike. And I think that still happens. But you can't use that as a plan for your launch strategy. If your launch strategy is. Is so united with press, getting press, I think you need to rethink your launch strategy.

Okay. And so say your founder is not as beautiful and interesting as, say, me or Stuart Butterfield.

I think I laughed you part of that.

I didn't mean to laugh that hard.

I taught him everything. We've never met anyway. But say that you don't have that kind of electrifying founder. You don't have, say, a Jason Lemkin, or you don't have someone who's very poppy, because I know, Sarah, you've been on air with Jason. So, you know, what do you do if the founder is kind of boring? Do you still want to hear from them?

I think that one thing that entrepreneurs often underestimate is how smart they are about other things that may not even relate so much to their current product or business. But the recruiting environment right now, or how hard it is to raise a Series A or any of those other things that tell a story that fit into a trend that maybe even if you're not super charismatic about your business yet can still get you out there in Bloomberg or TechCrunch or wherever, talking about things that matter to the startup environment. And then suddenly you're searchable on Google. People who are looking for whether they should work at your company see that you have been quoted somewhere and you're helping tell a larger story. You're being a resource, basically.

But I just want to put a little reality check in here. Very few people like Jason's one of them, but very few people actually are born ready to be on stage.

So how do you get them there?

Well, you do a couple of things. You find more than one spokesperson and you find out what they care about and what they're charismatic about. You know, it doesn't have to be like you said about the product, but maybe it's the fundraising process or maybe it's, I really like meetups and working with engineers, and this is how I develop my teams or hr, whatever it is. Then you say, okay, this is your sweet spot. Anytime we want to talk about that, that's what you're going to talk about. And you over here, let's do this. But the other thing is train. I can't explain it. I actually had someone say, I've been trained a million times and I'm not good at it, so I'm not going to talk about my company. If you're the CEO, at some point in your life, you will have to be on Bloomberg, hopefully, and you'll have to talk intelligently about your business. So it's not okay to say, I'm not comfortable. You're going to have to learn it's something that's the most important thing in your career.

I would also add that there's something that basically everyone is passionate about, and finding that thing can really turn someone, you know, they don't have to be who's charismatic right now. They don't have to be Ryan Gosling, who is the most charismatic person I can think of off the top, top of my head. They don't have to be Ryan Gosling. They don't have to be intensely charismatic. They don't have to be drawn to you. You don't have to be drawn to them. You don't have to go for a beer after work. But no one gets into data analytics unless they find something really interesting and really captivating about getting into looking at spreadsheets and finding touch on the pitching side, knowing that someone is passionate about that one thing. Finding that thing that they can speak to, not just about their own company, but the thing that they can speak to passionately and eloquently and be articulate about and maybe open my eyes up as a reporter to something that maybe before I didn't understand. That's just as valuable as providing me a really good charismatic interview where we spend the whole time laughing and giggling. You know what I mean? There's something to be said for that.

And if you need inspiration, just look at the transformation of Mark Zuckerberg and sort of the beginning of Facebook. Everyone really criticized him for being kind of robotic. And he had some instances on stage where he was really sweaty looking. You know, people are not born good at talking to the press, but now he's doing public Q and A's all the time. He's really, you know, getting more out there. He's writing up things on his Facebook wall to try to get people aware of what he's thinking about. That's really a difference from, you know, even two or three years ago.

But to your point, what he's been talking about, like on Facebook and whatever on his Facebook posts and his Q&As are stuff that he's very passionate about.

Right?

And that's kind of what let him turn a corner from talking about metrics, talking about growth and growth and growth and to things that he like, actual things that he feels very strongly about.

Well, that's. And that kind of naturally leads into what other founders have stood out. Colleen, you can say what other founders have stood out that have actually been great. And let's not think of the obvious, like Mark Zuckerberg, like what has made you, in fact, who has been potentially quite boring but actually been worth writing about. And the opposite.

Well, I'll just.

Some of the people who've been great are just easy to talk to and that it's not so focused on getting the current news out. I think it's important to just think of things as a long term relationship that you're having with reporters or with the press, because that will pay off in the long run. One person who stands out for me recently is Ryan Hoover of Product Hunt. I'm sure you all know him, he's just kind of been around for the past few years. I remember when it was a 6am flight at SFO and this is, I think before he'd even started Product Hunt, he just came up and introduced himself to me. I was going on a personal trip somewhere and he was just like, hey, I just recognize you from, from TechCrunch. And he's just a nice guy who's sort of around and he's just been around and easy to talk to and really friendly and happy to provide information about Product Hunt or about what's going on in the space. So he's a great person. I think it's important for anyone whether you're a founder or you're a PR person or a marketing person who's sort of handling a founder to not restrain the personality too much and don't be too afraid of what they might say. I mean, unless the person's like a real jerk. But then maybe you should rethink being a jerk. But I think that people sometimes are maybe, I don't know, like get some counseling or something. But you don't have as much to be afraid of. I think sometimes people are so afraid talking to the press and really think that they're going to be out to get them and get a gotcha quote or something. And I don't think that's normally the reality. I think it's better to loosen up a bit.

Oh, I hate, I hate to play devil's advocate, my lady, but I've actually found with enterprise founders and I'm not insulting anyone, I hope if I am fight Me, I don't know that there's a great deal of founders that are more, er, towards the other side, which is. I'm so bloody good. Would you say that that is the worst thing they can do, anyone?

I think, honestly, I think one of the worst things that they can do is go to press and say, hey, listen, we're pretty awesome and we really need to raise a round right now. So if you could write a story about us right now, the timing would be so great. No one needs to do you any favors. You need to come across as, you know, doing a favor to the press by offering your great insight and, you know, having things that they actually need to tell, the stories they want to tell about the industry. So if you go at it, sort of, that's one of the worst things I've seen is people who think that they're owed, like, a great story about their company because it's convenient timing for them.

But there's something that's going on in the last couple years that I want to say. Unfortunately, I've been doing this for dog's ears and. And there was a time when you didn't let an executive go on stage before you sat him down. And we were just talking about this. I have a slide in my speaker training, which is, first, don't hold the journalist hostage. Most likely they're not going to be working on your product or using your product next week and they are not going to tell you how fabulous it is and they're not going to cheerlead for you. And then the second thing is sort of be human and be respectful of. They are working like, this is a job. They aren't doing you a favor. This is, you know, a million other people are pitching them. So I think that you have to take PR seriously. I've seen some very lazy interviews. Please get dressed. I mean, I'm wearing tennis shoes, so I can't. I can't. I always wear tennis shoes, but they're sparkly at least. Like, please show up early and on time. If your hair is wet, I know you just woke up. You know, there's just a seriousness about it. You know, don't tell the journalist that. I don't really have anything else to say because, you know, I'm hungry. There is a reason that you're here. There's a job that you have to do, but more importantly, they have a job to do. And I think there's sort of like a. We're a great company, you should be covering us because you're supposed to attitude that needs to kind of reverse.

That's exactly what I've been seeing a lot of like, like with one current and some former clients where it's this approach of just. Well, they were on TechCrunch. That's Facebook. That is literally Mark Zuckerberg. But we are social, mate. It's 9am and I started drinking at eight. I know, but still, please stop and seriously, best advice to founders death is certain. Like we're all going to make our way to the grave eventually. But more importantly, you are not better than anyone unless you can prove it. Seriously. Otherwise you are born to fail. Now of course have the cockiness you need to say where you actually excel. But if it's like 9,000% growth of hedge related products you have, but you've never given a single hedge related product statement before, don't know why you're selling hedges, then it's just gobshite. It's nonsense.

But I also think it's about relationships, right? So you wouldn't go, you would bump into someone on the street and say, hey, let me tell you about my product aggressively, right? You wouldn't act the same. I remember I did a panel on social media and you know, we all do our crazy stuff on Twitter, but someone said the one thing is that, you know, if you're a jerk on the Internet or you're a jerk with somebody, like the Internet never forgets. And I was like, same thing. When you walk into a party in public, they never forget that. So it's the same attitude, the same respectfulness. You want to put your company in the best light, like just take it seriously. I think that's the most thing. It's not a laid back event.

Anything to say on the subject, Matt?

Just to all of that and speaking to founder arrogance and all of that, my least favorite thing. This is a huge pet peeve. I get in pitches. Increasingly it's you need to write about us. Because CNN and ESPN and TechCrunch all wrote about us. And I'm like, so you want me to write a story that people have already read three times and you don't have anything new to add? You just want to be able to add the Business Insider logo to your website. So do you just want to send me the article you want and just cut out the middleman?

Can I do that?

Sometimes.

But can we talk about news? Like what is news?

Yeah, seriously.

I don't know if anybody notices, but news actually means new. You can't keep pitching olds. You have to send out news. And sometimes that means that you can only pitch two or three people with news. And then if you put it on your website first, it's officially old. So, you know, kind of understand like why you're sending out, what you're sending out and who you're pitching it to. And there might be a feature editor that can do something, you know, slower. But I don't know, you guys, a tech crunch. You guys, jobs. I mean, you're trying to break news, right?

Right. Yeah. And I think not crying wolf is really important. You know, like you want to be able to trust when someone does come to you with something that it is something new and that it is an exclusive. If you say it's an exclusive. One other CEO I was just thinking about, you asked Josh McFarland, who was just on stage before this. He was the CEO of telepart. That's just this amazing sort of enterprise company that I probably heard from him three times, maybe like the entire time that Teleport. Cause they ended up selling and each time it was really with some impressive numbers and new news. And they had just moved to a new office and just hired 100 more people and they were doing all of these big things. It's like every time I heard from him, it was great because otherwise he was too busy building his business to be calling me every day and saying.

Can you write about us?

Well, question. Did you run all of those stories?

Probably like maybe three out of five.

You know, that's valuable for you all to know. Even if you have the best relationship in the world with a journalist, it's just not. Never expect them to do everything you can. Give a percentage likelihood. And my esteemed PR friends, if you're in here, please fight me. But also, I really do encourage you to not over promise your clients. You need to be honest and respectful because these people do not work for you. Actually, founders, that's worth knowing as well. They are not here. Well, Eric might, but writers don't work for you. And it's scary to face that fact because you thirst endlessly for the press and you desperately want them to write about your very special child. Your large son is live and now we must write about it. But you're not actually doing the right thing. Even if you have a great relationship with someone, you might swing and miss sometimes. Don't get pissy.

One thing I'd add to that though is there might be times when you pitch news and we'll take the call and we'll do the interview and we'll think that's really interesting. That's good background for a story I'm working on down the road. Or maybe I'll slip that in when I write a more thematic piece about this. And then the founder gets will try not to surprise you by not writing it, but don't always expect that every briefing call will turn into a story, because sometimes we'll take the call, we'll be interested, but there just won't be enough meat there to write something right now. But we still know you, you still built a relationship, so it's still valuable down the road, I think. You know, just in those cases, don't be frustrated. And then also don't pitch something that's not ready yet. I've had some situations where people have come to me with exclusives, which we love exclusives. That really helps us sell the story to our editors if no one's heard of you. But then the person said, okay, well can we delay it a couple weeks? Because we really need to get it, we need to clear out the bugs before we launch it. Oh, can we delay it another couple weeks? Can we delay it another couple weeks? Then I got a call the night before they wanted to launch it saying, hey, can you put your story out? It's 6am tomorrow. I was starting to think that, you know, this product maybe wasn't happening. So no, I hadn't written the story yet. So they didn't get the, you know, after all that work, they didn't get anything out of it.

But on the subject of exclusives, though, and this is also going to move into a specific point I want every founder to hear. So you say exclusive. That doesn't. You can't put lipstick on a pig though. I've tried. And the momentum release. Let's talk about the frickin momentum release.

Well, I got a pitch recently. It was promised me as an exclusive. You'll talk to this company. It's great. They have blah, blah, blah, just join the board. They just have all this money, whatever. So I take the interview. It was a great interview. I'm getting super excited to write it. And I Google it to confirm someone's title. And right there on the board of directors is the person who was supposed to, who I was writing, blah, blah, blah, join the board. And there on Crunchbase was that funding round. So I'm like. So I email the guy, I'm like, what about this was exclusive? He goes, oh, yeah, well, those momentum numbers are new. And the momentum numbers are like, we increased active engaged users 300% in 18 months. And I'm like, I hate you. Yeah, I hate you. Thank you for wasting my time. Oh, no, I didn't. And now and then, to your point, when that happens and that guy shows up in my inbox periodically going, no, seriously, this is an exclusive. I'm like, never. Let's talk. Let's discuss the meaning of the word. You keep using that word.

But I do think there's a couple of things. One, just back on. Can we talk about a little bit of timing? So, one, if you do an interview and it may just get bumped because somebody has earnings, and I think that might be a priority, or somebody raises a ridiculous round, and so it doesn't mean that your story will never get written, but just add a little bit more meat to it after this cycle goes away. So I just want to throw out the bump there. But also to actually. I mean, it's, you know, look at the events that are happening and figure out where the journalist is actually going to be.

Think of as a human. Is this news? And I don't mean, like, try and take your ego, put it in a box and just say, all right, is this really important to the world? I mean, within the world of X reporter and Y reporter. But on the subject of founders, who would you rather hear from? A PR person or a founder? Starting with you, Matt?

Neither. I mean, I'm joking, but I'm also not. Because a lot of times the best stories are the ones where I see an app in the app store and I'm like, that's cool. I wonder what the deal with this is, or everyone's talking about this on product hunt or on Twitter or whatever. Ideally, I love hearing from founders because it's a PR person's job to say, and I've gotten this pitch before, I see you writing about Microsoft databases. Are you interested in writing about our new line of light bulbs for art galleries? It's like a word generator. It's word salad. But when a founder reaches out and they say, hey, full disclosure, I'm the founder and CEO of this company and we are solving this problem that you called out in a piece, and we think that this fits in well, at least from a technical perspective, from a product perspective, from an overall storyline perspective, first off, it's good to hear from the founder, because then I have that contact. And second off, it's more likely than not, even if I end up not taking the briefing, it's perspective I didn't have, and it's almost guaranteed to be relevant.

Colleen, from your days.

Yeah, I think it's important for founders to be able to talk about what they do. And one thing that we always say at Y Combinator now is that you wouldn't, especially in the early days, you wouldn't outsource the engineering of your product. You wouldn't say, oh, we're just going to hire an engineer to make the product. You make the product yourself or whether you're technical or you hire some engineers. And so you shouldn't, especially in the early days, outsource the storytelling of what you're building. And obviously, as you get larger as a company, then you hire someone like Erica or Ed to help you out because you have other things that you're working on. But I think it's so important that the founder is really the best person to tell their story. I mean, ideally, as a founder, you're better at telling the story and talking to a reporter than even Erica or Ed or your PR person is. So founders first, I think.

I mean, I think it just depends on the information. PR people add something to the equation by being aware of what you've written in the past and having followed you and what you're interested in. And so they might give you something that's a little bit more relevant. But I really do enjoy getting emails from people after they've read a story I've written and their founder and they're saying, you know what, this story you wrote on LinkedIn today was actually really interesting. And here's what I think about it. Then I might say, hey, actually, do you want to hop on the phone about something else? Because I think you might be good for that. And then we kind of build a rapport that way. And it can be a good spontaneous relationship building exercise to when you see a story that actually sparks something in your mind about the next step of this new news or a broader point, go ahead and email the journalist. You never know what opportunity that might open up.

And one thing I think it's interesting that Matt had mentioned is that the way you're getting stories is by seeing what's going on on Twitter and what people are talking about and seeing what's bubbling up on Product Hunt and these other things. So I think that's important for founders and people who work at companies to remember that it doesn't all start with the press. Like, if you don't get a reporter to bite on a certain product that you've built or a certain milestone or something that you have, like you can write a blog post and Put it on your company blog and put it on Twitter or put your product on product hunt or put it on, start a thread on Reddit or wherever and these things will bubble up. Right now there are so many different opportunities. It's not just the press aren't the only gatekeepers.

Make us notice, make us care. There's more opportunity for that than ever. And it's like no amount of cold pitching and cold emails and Ed especially cannot make me care about anything. But if you can, but if you don't have something really good that resonates with people, we're not going to care in the first place. And so going to product hunt, getting people engaged, that makes us notice, that makes us care, I would say.

So I put this predominantly to you and Sarah. You have a PR firm or you're on your own founder and you just have your office and five people who hate you already, wife left you. Very sad story. But nevertheless, you have to still pitch your product. What's the best way to get in touch? Email, Phone maybe?

Do you like, never the phone.

Never the phone.

That's a personal rule. Some people feel differently. It feels really weird to me to get a call because it's like I'm at Safeway and my phone rings and I'm sitting there trying to figure out if it's a better deal to buy a 16 ounce canopies for $2.99 or an 18 ounce for $3.50 and I get a call being like, hey, are you interested in our new SQL database running on Amazon EC2? And I'm like, not in the best of times and certainly not now. So personally I say never call.

I think I have a different reason. It's just because if you're working on a breaking news situation, if you're chasing a tip, if, if you're trying to cover something that just hit and your phone rings, that's your source calling you back, or at least you hope. And then if you answer that call and it's like, hi Sarah, just hoping you would have a minute. Did you get my email? Like, hey, we're really hoping you might be interested in meeting with this person. Just send me another email. I understand that I am not the best at answering emails because I get hundreds of them, but send it again and again and I might still not look at it. But if I, if you catch me like on a slow Sunday when I'm just looking at my phone for anything.

To do, I'm going to stop you there. Don't email reporters on the weekend. Don't call them either. But especially not that. You just said Sunday. I'm trying to save you.

I mean, I'm just saying if you catch me in a slow moment when I'm actually looking through my email for like, what did I miss this week that was just, you know, this week was so insane and sometimes I'll miss invitations to really great things, sometimes I'll miss great conversations or insight.

I missed the Beastie Boys last night.

Yeah.

See the email.

But it was earnings week for me, so I mean, it's just, you gotta just keep trying and.

But it's not a one time thing.

It's not a one time thing.

Yeah.

And it doesn't mean that if I don't answer your email a, it doesn't mean that I won't answer your next pitch. It's not personal. It's not a referendum on you or your pitching skills. You just can't see or answer everything. But conversely, recently I got a pitch where twice a day for five solid days, I got the. Did you see this email? Did you, did you get that thing I sent you? Did you get the thing I sent you plus the voicemail, plus, like at a certain point, just cut your losses. I am not interested. I am not going to write this story. Like, I get that I didn't email you back and I'm deeply sorry about that, but I too am not great at email. But I'm just not that into you.

Are you actually sorry as well? Probably not.

Can I speak to that though? Because we asked about you, the PR person contacting you versus the founder. So when you hire your PR person, you hope that they come with a few relationships with media that they know and that the other thing is, you know, as PR people, we have to learn, especially with startups or young companies, that these relationships are important to you in your career. So I have to let it go. If I introduce you to Tom Henderson at Network World and I get you in his face. Tom knows who I am. That's not a big deal. He'll know who I am for the next 10 years. But you need to invest in knowing the press. You have to invest in taking the time to know what you write about versus how you're not at TechCrunch anymore, versus what he writes about. And play, please stop emailing her and.

Actually stop emailing me.

But you know, that's, I mean, and so if you are sitting down with your PR person, they should be saying, okay, here are your top five people that actually care about You. And when we go back and have big news, we're going to make sure we contact them. There are always lists, but the relationship at some point has to go to the spokesperson. I can't hold onto it. I can't keep it away. Hopefully at. After you've gotten on the phone, I'm the person who follows up and makes sure it goes to fruition. But the relationship has to go beyond.

Me because I have. When I was at TechCrunch, I definitely got calls from you and that was fine. You know, if you say no calls ever, it's like, that's actually not really true. I mean, depending on the reporter. Like, Matt definitely never wants to call.

There are very few. But there have been times where I've given a PR person my number because we were having an in person coffee meeting or something and I regretted it basically instantly, like, that kind of thing. But there are some PR people. I text with them, I call them. But that's because we've been working together at this point with that particular PR person for three, four years, however long it is. And at that point, it's like, I'm not going to take all their pitches. I tell Ed no all the time. All the time.

Outside his house and the bathroom.

That's right. It's awful. I don't know how you found where I lived anyway, but no, it's that. But at the very least, when Ed pitches me, because Ed and I have this relationship, I read the email, I take the call, I read it, and 90% of the time I say no. But I at least read it, I take it seriously. And that's something that gets built from the relationship. And also understanding that sometimes there will be an answer and sometimes the answer will be no is also part of building that relationship, I think, because how you react to a no says a lot about you and the relationship you're trying to build.

And what about social media, though? What about hearing from founders on social media? Because I registered for CES as media to cover it from PR and marketing standpoint. And I had thirsty founders up and down my tweets, which is not a good place to find me, by the way. I will throw you to the wolves. It's horrible. But seriously, these founders would come to me and be like, hey, do you.

Want to come and see my product?

You're pretty. You want to go sell it? It's like, you want to meet at ces, like, no, that's literally. I would. I have a colonoscopy. I have to be at Otherwise, definitely. But social media, though, tweets bad, Facebook bad.

I don't know. I feel like there's a fine line because there have been some good stories I write from Twitter, but they're usually like, I am actually adding to this conversation. And others that are just like, ha ha. I too love Kanye West. Here, here, take my pitch about something not related to anything. There was one time it was just the biggest swing and a miss. I was talking about, actually, Kanye on Twitter. You remember this? And this guy was like, haha. If I give you. Does this mean that if I give you a pitch that's about Kanye west, you'll write it? And I'm like, you know what? That is a bold claim given that I write about enterprise it. So if you can do that, then I can guarantee I'll at least get on the phone and they pitch it to me. And it's like, this is the CEO I'm representing here. He loves Kanye west too. I'm like, nope, we're done. So just be careful. Tread with caution would be my advice. Add value, for lack of a better term.

What would you say?

First of all, I would actually stay away from tweeting directly to a journalist after 5pm because it seems like a good job or idea after a couple of beers, and it's just not the right thing. If you want to engage in an ongoing conversation that everybody else is a part of, that's okay. But pitching your product, you know, after three glasses of wine is just really annoying. And think about it like dating, right? Are you that guy that comes in and runs up to the girl and goes, girls. Or are you the woman who.

That's how I met my husband, actually.

Yeah, I know. Or you know. Or are you that rude person that just sort of throws up or says, hey, babe, you know that credit card commercial where he's like, you're back. Nobody really wants that experience. And so again, journalists are people too. They have jobs to do, they have personal life, they have kids. Ask them nice things when you get on the phone with them, like, how are you doing? How do you feel? Little things like that. It would be nice to actually just.

How is your human life?

Yeah.

What do you do?

Like, what is it?

On a regular basis, I want to.

Throw in something crazy that I actually think it's going to. To meet in person at conferences and dinners and other events. I mean, if you cold call me while I'm trying to break news on something, I'll have bad feelings about that, but I probably won't Remember your name. Yeah. If you meet me at an event and say, hey, like, listen, I just really want some advice on how to get a story into Bloomberg because, you know, I really like the work that, you know, Brian Womack or Jack Clark or you do, and, you know, what would be the best way to do that? And people who come to me informed about stuff with good questions and wanting advice. I'm always happy to help people. And I think that the time when I'm at an event or when I'm at a conference, that's when I've blocked off some time to just be open to new people and new experiences and new pitches.

So if I'm at an event, I'm there to learn something. Yeah, I'm there. I'm there to get a deeper understanding. And I love, like, if it's. If it's a technology that I don't fully wrap my mind around or if it's an event, like, it takes a lot to get me and I imagine you off, away from your desk because that's just the nature of breaking news. So if I made the time to be at an event, I am there to be met and met with and I am there to learn. Learn, basically. So that is a great time to come up and talk and be a human. Don't network, just have a conversation. I think that's. Yeah.

There's an alarming amount of followers, founders and PR people, but they fall into the same category of the. That they've just learned to human. They got out of Chrysalis and into the human suit, like in Men in Black. But they. They don't seem to have quite got the human things like, hello, fellow humans, I have not drunk the sugar water yet. But this actually comes into something quite natural because speaking naturally is important, of course. How do you start with you again? Map. How do you actually tell you what. No, you, Colleen, how do you take something like a CRM or Customer Happiness, Something quite just on the surface to average people, that is quite dull. What makes something like that stand out?

I think you have to start from what it means and how it's used. As much as it's important to have some numbers and different things that you can tie in. Because everyone likes a headline. You have to say, oh, every time you buy a product online, every company has to use this one thing. Or like, every time that an airline does a certain thing, they use this software to do this thing. I think there are always ways to tie it back into the real world. And you kind of have To I know that when you're a founder or when you're at a company, you're so in the weeds that you just kind of think about your product in a very different way. And I think that's why it can be helpful to meet with a PR person or talk to somebody else about it. But I think just taking it from a further out point of view and seeing how this affects my daily life as just a regular person.

Right.

And Sarah, I think she hit it on the head. Like, you want to be able to explain it in context, but also the competitive landscape, like, is this a threat to Oracle? Is this taking share away from Microsoft in this product and help the reporter put not the name of your company in the headline, but the name of a bigger company that people actually want to hear about. And maybe you're one of three companies that are doing this and they can write a story that's a Microsoft story instead of a tiny company story that will actually get wider reach. And you might not like being thrown in with a bunch of competitors in the same story, but do you want people to read the story? Probably.

And I also think it's important to not get super petty about being lumped in with some other people when you think like, oh, they're not really our competitors, or I can't believe that they put us in the headline with that thing or whatever. It's like, try to sit on your hands and not email the reporter and get mad at them because they tied you in with something that's not exactly true. Because I think in a lot of cases, any press is good press. And you don't want to be petty and think of this relationship as a long term thing.

But I want to add a couple of things to this. So we talked about it's got to be something new, right? But it also has to be something unique. Like you have to be able to say that. But your audiences are completely different. So again, Bloomberg's audience, who cares about Bloomberg and who cares about TechCrunch and, and who cares about Network World? Those audiences are different. So you may have the same story, but you have to tailor it for who actually reads the publication.

And even the different reporters at these publications, Matt is not the same as Matt Rosoff.

Right?

That happens more often than you would think. Yes.

And so what I'm saying is that you don't come out and you say, I have news. Let me just email the last person that I just talked to. You have to sit down. People ask me, like, how hard is pr. Well, PR is not. It's a full time job, but it's not. You have to sit down and plan before you start. Don't just start spamming the world with your one little piece of information.

Don't spam anything. Seriously. They know.

And most of the time, I like to sneak in something that I call an impending doom. And so, you know, again, I am not the user of your product, but the users of your product should be worried that if they don't use your product, they won't get this value. They won't achieve this thing. They're missing out on that thing. Their competition will do something. So with every message, I like to have what I call an impending doom. These guys, they get that like, oh my God, my readers need to know this because they will fall into a pit and die. And there's a thing at the bottom.

Sometimes very literally.

Yeah.

So one final thing, because we have a technically at time, apparently Jason gave us an extra minute. I'm just gonna say, Matt, tell me probably the worst pitch you got on the phone in person.

It can't be mine.

Oh, man.

No.

He will say, this is a little question.

Come back to me, Sarah, come on.

The other day I got a pitch for a helmet that turned into a purse. What? I'm not sure why they pitched me.

That, but for city bikes.

Oh, really?

Wouldn't you think that's actually a great idea? Sorry.

Okay.

I always worry about those city bikes and I'm like, oh, how like I'm not just carrying around a helmet. So I wouldn't actually just go rent a city bike.

You know what? Okay, Audi. I overlooked it, but I was in the middle of a go back and.

Look at that pitch.

I would buy that purse.

Was it a Y Combinator company?

Yeah.

In all seriousness, I think that the pitches that are, that are probably the worst are the ones that put a lot of flowery language that doesn't mean anything in the text. And then you read the email and you're like, this doesn't make any sense to a human. I don't have time to think about it. Moving on. If you're saying that you have a next generation solution for business customers that will revolutionize the way they sell like that. Tell me exactly what you're doing.

Yeah, I think the worst pitches that I get, just generally speaking, are the ones that try to pull something from my Twitter or my Facebook or whatever and are like, hi, Matt, if you're not too Busy playing Fallout 4, why don't you read this pitch then a bunch of copy and pasted text. And those drive me up a wall all the time. Just because it's like, thanks for putting in the sheer minimum, like, the absolute minimum amount of effort.

I have met many humans in my time and they like activities.

How are you enjoying baseball?

Once I got. Once I got. To whom it may concern, like, how are you?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I hope you're doing well.

Sometimes they do have. They do have. Fill in the blank. There must be some, like, PR auto generator of pitches. They were all like, dear Sarah, I read your recent story. Quote, story that has nothing to do with the product. End quote.

Oh, yeah.

I was wondering if you'd be interested in totally off topic thing that I would never cover because I just, you know, I don't cover elementary school software. Like, it just. You have to just actually make an effort.

That's right. You can't automate effort.

All right, I'm calling it there. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you to the wonderful panelists.