But techcrunch has a policy of not posting their story if an embargo is broken, so we didn't get the TC story that we had briefed them on.
Just look at Brightcove 5's launch that happened a few hours ago (9pm PST). TC posted their story at 8:50pm, everyone else followed at 9pm PST.
I posted the article - and included the embargo paras, which my co-founder and I nearly cut - because I thought the backstory would be useful/interesting to the folks there, who seemed to be unaware of the pr process during the prerelease of blekko. I wanted to open that up for them.
Your comment was spot-on good advice for the ycomb co's though. I voted it up.
Really irked that wsj broke our embargo. Irritated that I wasn't in the office when our site went live after 3.33 years, irritated that we didn't get to do the last bug-fix push to production, irritated that I knew TC wouldn't post, irritated that other journos would be irritated with me, irritated that it flatted the temporal curve on the launch pop. And for what?
Time-sync on stories is actually a good thing for the news stream. I don't see why journos don't get that.
(In case anyone is curious, I have absolutely 0 financial stake in the business so I will not make a dollar wether you hire them or not, just offering to help if anyone is interested)
I think in the end, like most other things, it depends on the type of company you're trying to build. In Blekko's case they're trying to build a search engine, so they want to get as much mainstream press as possible. Someone like GitHub, for example, with a much more technical and focused user base, did just fine by going to conferences and buying developers free drinks.
Blekko, as a well-funded entrant with great tech cred trying to bust into a very interesting and nearly monopolized field, clearly counted.
If you are smaller and don't have that buzz, you don't have that luxury. Depending on your size and market, you don't need a PR firm (a good PR advisor is worthwhile). For many companies, it's better to figure out the place and writer you really want to cover you and offer an exclusive. You can then get follow-on press from other places by offering them untold angles -- especially ones that that writer or place would be interested in.
As a journalist, I hate embargoes, even as I understand why and how they are useful.
But the best advice I can give is not to think of blogs/publications as simply places to exploit. Writers can smell that from far off. Learn to cultivate relationships. Be a source. Critique our stories. Suggest trend stories and cool stuff other people are working on. Ask to talk off the record when you meet us at events and conferences. Learn to speak openly and honestly on the record.
In turn, you'll likely find writers you like. Writers will tell you things off the record (things we can't print) and are people who may write about you not just in this venture, but in your next. Writers are, like you, part of the tech ecosystem.
How many of those 1400 retweets are just bots automatically retweeting anything coming from Mashable? The dark secret of twitter marketing is that the number of tweets can be so misleading because of the bot activity. You'll also see a ton of twitter bots when you get coverage on RWW, and I'm sure others.
And yes, I've actually watched live coverage of articles I'm interested in (e.g. covering my sites) spread and checked out most tweets that came up. It's quite easy for a human to spot a bot vs real user tweeting once you look at their twitter stream. Most are bots.
Because they (admirably, IMHO) have a policy of disregarding these ridiculous one-sided embargo agreements. If you want them to hold back on a story, you have to ask them FIRST. You can't just spam them a press release that says pretty please don't publish this yet on the top.
Typically the only exception is if you're giving them an exclusive (and, again, you need to get that in writing before you send them your top secret press release)
