Journalist Hermione Way shares how startup founders can get press coverage. Contact reporters on the platforms they actually use, craft a story with real impact, and launch in memorable ways like Huddle's marching band at a tech conference. Keep a targeted press list and frame what your product actually solves.
Chapters
How to get the attention from the press if you're a startup. As I said, I've been a technology journalist for the past 6 years. Started off writing in London, moved to Silicon Valley 4 years ago, and have done a lot of things since. So hopefully I can give you some good perspective of what it's like to be a journalist or a blogger in the Valley, and what it's like this side of the table. So this is a do— the dos and don'ts of How do they get the attention of the press? So my first do is think outside of the box, literally. This is my inbox right now. As you can see, I have nearly 19,000 unread emails. And that's because as a blogger, as a journalist, we get sent so many press releases. I probably get sent 30 or 40 press releases or some sort of launch news every day. So when I say think outside of the box, try and use other platforms to communicate with bloggers and journalists. You'll find that different bloggers and different journalists prefer different platforms. For example, I'm really into Facebook. I love Facebook. I'm on it all day long. If you send me a press release on Facebook or you send some contact on Facebook, I'm 90% more likely to reply than if you send me an email. I just hate email. It's just, I don't want to deal with it. So Robert Scoble, does everyone know Robert Scoble? Yes. He loves Google+, right? He loves Twitter. So if you send him a message on Google+, he's more likely to reply than if you send him an email. So when I'm talking about think outside the box, I'm literally thinking, try and find bloggers who are using different platforms to communicate with their audience. Do have an interesting story. So this is a quote from Michael Arrington. Actually, it was Robert Scoble who asked him one day, so what do you think you are? What are you? Are you a journalist? Are you a blogger? Are you a business guy? And he actually turned around and said, actually, I'm not a journalist. I'm an entertainer. So do have an interesting story. If Michael Arrington thinks that He's an entertainer, and his readers need to be entertained. You need to come up with an interesting story. And I think a lot of startups that pitch to me, they just tell me what their company does. They're not telling me what problem they're trying to solve or what the impact is of solving that problem. And always funny anecdotes, or one of our— 2 of our team members at Startup World, are sleeping in the same bed as each other. They're not gay. Not that that's a problem. But this is part of the startup journey, right? We're all bootstrapping. We're all sleeping, I don't know, God knows where. And so they're telling me the story, you know, we're in San Francisco. We can only afford one hotel room because we're bootstrapping. This makes the story a little bit more entertaining. So just think about that when you're pitching to the press. If somebody comes up to me and is like, we're a social media dashboard, it's like, no. But if it's like, yeah, dude, I'm so tired because I had to share my bed with my co-founder last night, that creates an emotional reaction in me because it's funny. So do think of your story when you're pitching to journalists, and do make sure you have thought of how your story comes across. Do think of unusual ways to launch. We're living in a time where everyone has a startup, everyone's changing the world, everyone's raising $1 million, everyone has Ashton Kutcher as an investor. So, you know, we're in a time where when you launch your startup, you're competing against probably 300 other startups that are launching on the same day as you. This is a good example of an unusual way to launch. This is a marketing campaign I helped a startup with called Huddle. Huddle is an enterprise software solution, kind of like Salesforce. Anyone heard of Huddle? You've heard of it. It's a British startup. Is it a sports app? No, it's an enterprise solution. So this is Huddle on the right here. At this point, I think they were a 20-person startup. And they do exactly the same thing as Microsoft SharePoint. Obviously, Microsoft SharePoint is Goliath. It's this huge corporation, billions of dollars in backing. They were like, Hermione, how can we make some noise in the market? How can we get SharePoint customers to use Huddle? We have a better product. We have better UX, better design, better development, but how do we make noise? So we came up with this idea that we would march a 120-person marching band with cheerleaders with Huddle t-shirts into the Microsoft SharePoint conference in LA, in Anaheim. And this is like Microsoft's flagship conference in Anaheim. Everyone's buttoned down, very serious. And we're this small little startup that has hardly any budgets. We hire this marching band. And we marched them into the conference and around the conference center. Of course, the police were called. The cops came, and they closed us down, and we were covered in every tech blog, TechCrunch, The Next Web. The title was, Police Called as Microsoft Shuts Down Huddle. So that was, like, awesome. That was, like, the best press we could have ever got. Okay, it was slightly negative, but you know the quote, any good is good press. Any press is good press. And also, you know, it was this big Goliath, this big corporation, Microsoft, evil, shutting down this small, thriving startup that was just trying to make some noise. So it was a good perspective in terms of a story. So do think of unusual ways to launch. Do sell press the bigger picture. a towing startup. They pitched to me, I think, here in San Francisco, and they said, yeah, we have an app that streamlines towing. And I was like, that's really boring. That's so boring. But then they told me if they can streamline towing, they told me the size of the towing industry. I can't remember what it is now, but they told me there's a lot of a lot of excess when it comes to towing. And this app was kind of like the Uber for towing, and it would get the drivers paid more. It would waste less gas mileage in terms of, you know, for the environment. And so, you know, by giving me the bigger picture here on their product, on their startup, then I could see that actually this small app, this Uber for towing, was actually a really sexy story. And I ended up writing about it. The bigger picture was that they were saving the environment by using less trucks on the road. There was less waste. And so this became a really interesting story. So just make sure when you're pitching, you always kind of zoom out and give the worldview, the world picture. Do make a spreadsheet of all press sorted by what they do and what they write about. Okay? Everybody is so easily available, and we all can get each other's email addresses and Twitter and Facebook. I found really helpful is to write an address, write a spreadsheet of different tech bloggers, what publication they write for, what their beat is, what they cover. This might seem very obvious to you, but I do consumer app coverage. And some people pitch hardcore enterprise stuff or clean tech. And I'm like, dude, that's not really my game, so why waste the time sending me that press release? You could have just looked at your spreadsheet, saw who does environmental stuff or whatever it may be, and sent it straight to him. So each journalist, each blogger has a different beat, has a different patch that they cover. And so make sure you just recognize that and send the right release to the right journalists. Otherwise, you're just wasting their time, and you're just wasting your time. And they're not going to look at it. Thanks.
