Q&A | Dylan Tweney

Okay, that is it for my presentation. I think we have 10 or 15 minutes at least that I could do some Q&A. I'd be happy to answer any questions that you guys have, or if you don't get a chance to answer it, ask it here, you can reach me at the coordinates there. Yes?

Can you talk a little bit about the difference between the personal account and the corporate account and how to kind of, you know, keep the tone personal? On both sides, but it's the us's and the we's versus the I, you know, like how do you create that personal tone between those two?

Okay, so the question is how do you keep a personal tone on the corporate account and not, you know, how do you know what to put kind of on the corporate account versus the personal individual account? I don't know if I have any hard and fast rules for that. I mean, the main thing with the corporate account, and I think this is especially true for startups, is you really don't want to be too stiff and formal. You do want it to be personal, right? Which basically means you wanna give— you wanna make it clear that there's a human being behind there, but you also wanna be really careful that you're not saying things, or whoever's running it is not saying things that are offensive or could get you in legal trouble too, right? So I guess I would say, I mean, I don't know if I can give a hard and fast guideline on that, I would say err more, certainly at the startup stage, I mean, everybody knows that you're like 3 people, right, and maxed out credit cards. I don't think there's any reason to pretend that there's not a human behind that, right? So I think I would say err on the side of a more natural, casual, personal voice, even for the corporate account, but just make sure that there's some oversight and that everybody who has access to that account knows, like, OK, we don't talk about XYZ. Just set the guidelines. That would be my advice. All right.

Yes?

So I recently joined this whole startup community. Not recently, like 2 years ago. But until then, I really wasn't using the Twitter account. But I feel like everyone in the community, like investors, like media, everyone's just kind of very active in the Twitters. Think about, like, kind of be in the Twitter using mode, and do you have any other services that you also recommend that I should be looking into? Like, I think Medium is one.

Yeah, okay, so which networks? Twitter is definitely huge for startups and VCs and other investors, and it's enormously huge for journalists. So it's a great place to be present. It can be kind of a time sink. I think the way to manage it for me is to check it a few times a day, but not let it bracket that amount of time, but check it and engage several times a day, right?

Actually responding.

Actually responding to people and actually retweeting people. I think if you approach Twitter with a spirit of generosity, like, I'm here to see what's interesting and to promote and share and like things that are interesting, people respond well to that, particularly because there's a lot of toxic stuff on Twitter too, right? So if you can be that kind of more optimistic, positive voice, I think people are more inclined to engage. Medium is really good for tech and investors as well too. That's a little more difficult because it's a lot of long-form content, and to actually participate at a meaningful level in Medium means you have to write a lot and be a good writer. But I think even without writing, you can probably participate as a commenter and liking things. It's just like you're not gonna get as much out of the platform if you're not engaging. LinkedIn is super dorky, boring business platform, but it can be really useful. So don't overlook LinkedIn, because you can get tremendous reach for business-oriented topics. If you're doing any kind of enterprise tech or something that business people would use, it's not a bad place to be.

Right.

And then, of course, everybody in the world is on Twitter, or on Facebook. But often, you won't get much organic reach on Facebook if you're a company. You're going to have to pay. and run ad campaigns, and that's a whole different practice, like learning how to promote.

Yes, you had a question? What would be your advice on when is the right timing to get on Medium?

When is the right time to get on Medium?

No, to get media.

Oh, to get media.

Like on your startup.

Okay, so probably when you have a product. No sooner than that, for sure. You want to have a product, and ideally some customers. But, I mean, again, it depends on what your goal for getting media is. Why are you— so the question is, that I would ask is, why do we want media coverage now? Do we think it will lead to more customers? It very rarely does. Do we think it will— at least not immediately. Do you think it will lead to Funding, maybe it can, depending on the coverage and how well you're covered and how well you come across. Generally, getting media coverage is about boosting momentum that you already have, right? So if you have no momentum to begin with, getting coverage is not gonna give it to you. Okay, more questions. Back there.

I've got a startup, and right now we've got We have separate social media accounts for our business and our product, but I'm thinking that it should probably just be one.

Would you agree with that? Okay, so the question was, should you— right now you have separate social media accounts for business and product?

Yeah, one for the company and one for the product.

One for the company and one for the product. That's probably a little confusing, yeah. I mean, like, do you have a lot of people following you on both of them?

I'm not the one actively managing that, so I don't have that number offhand.

If you don't already have a lot of people, there's almost no cost to consolidating. I would think, especially at an early stage, I'm not sure why you would have separate accounts, because it's just going to dilute your ability to build a cohesive audience. It's going to dilute your ability to engage with that audience, and it's going to confuse them about where stuff is going to come from. So it seems to me problematic to have multiple accounts. Okay, you had a question.

So you talk about if you don't get picked up by a reporter the first time, then hit them month after month. One of the challenges that I've had is staying interesting month after month. I feel like we have these yearly or biannual, like we raise a round of funding or some big development. How do you generate news or ideas for news? On a regular basis.

Right. So the question is, how do you stay interesting month after month? And that is really a challenge. Most companies will not have actual news every month. So there are a couple of ways. First of all, you don't have to do it every single month. That's sort of an ideal case. You want to set up some kind of repeating cadence. But it could be every 2 months. It could be every quarter. I think the other thing you can do is start to look for other ways of generating potentially newsworthy events. Look for speaking opportunities, conferences that you can give presentations at, other kinds of events you can do. Maybe you create an event that's happening with customers or something like that. Now, the fact that you're speaking at a conference is not in and of itself a newsworthy event, or the fact that you're throwing a customer party is not in itself newsworthy, but you can often turn that into interesting stuff. You can reach out to reporters and say, hey, I'm gonna be speaking at this, and also I'm an expert on, I don't know, whatever you're an expert, circuit board design or something, you reach out to the circuit board publications, and you can say, if you're gonna be at this event, I'd love to speak to you, be happy to give you an interview, and give you some background on what we're doing, or just give you perspective on what else is going on in the field. It's just an opportunity to— events can be very useful at generating that. Then milestones can be you hit 100,000 users, or you log a million hours of user time cumulatively. You can use that to potentially gin up interest.

Yeah.

And then sometimes it's not about press outreach, sometimes it's about creating content. So you're responding to something in the industry. I have a client who does anti-phishing stuff, anti-email phishing stuff, and so when there's news about phishing, they can write a blog post. We can produce a blog post that says, that responds to that and reach readers with that. If it's interesting enough and reaches a kind of high enough level, like a really big hack that millions of dollars were lost through a breach that started with a phishing attack, then you can use that as a chance to reach out to press as well and say, hey, you might be covering XYZ, this story, right, where millions of dollars were lost, we have some great perspective on that. Okay, more questions? Yeah, Mike.

I had one. You talked about targeting end users and creating awareness for your customers. Where does it make sense for a smaller startup to do more of a corporate or branding PR versus specifically trying to reach out to people that might be interested in your product?

OK, when does it make sense to do more corporate and branding PR?

Yeah, where it's not specifically about creating awareness for a potential customer.

Right. So, I mean, that's a tough decision because I think in the early stage, awareness is kind of the lifeblood, right? I mean, that is ultimately what you need. I guess the question is whether you're going for broad awareness or whether you're going for really targeted awareness. In the early stage, I'm not sure that there's actually that much of a difference. Like, what I said earlier is you don't need PR to survive, right? You need customers to survive. That's what you want. That's your ultimate goal. But I also think— and so your media coverage, or any PR that you do, is aimed at, ultimately, at getting coverage, or customers. But I don't think there's a direct connection. I don't think you can expect there to be a direct connection, because really, the most you're going to get is— say you get that story in TechCrunch. You might get 10,000 people, if you're lucky. You might get 5,000 people visiting your site from the 10,000. from the TechCrunch story. And that would be a terrific launch on TechCrunch. You've got a really hot product. People are super excited about it. And 5,000 people click through to your website in the wake of that. Maybe a couple thousand of those might sign up for the free trial. And then a week later, maybe 15 of them will actually still be using the product. There's a lot— it's going to fade really quickly. So it's not really about filling your funnel with customers. It's about awareness, no matter what you're doing. So it is really about building your corporate brand. So I don't know that there's a big distinction there. We're already a little past time. All right. We're at time. So if you want to follow up with me later, that's how you reach me. I'd be happy to talk to you after. Thank you very much for coming. Appreciate it.