Thanks for the article.
Getting press is just one component of getting awareness, along with content marketing, SEO and other tools. None of this takes away from building a great product.
To paraphrase he said 70% of your marketing effort should go into building a better product.
It's not some sort of naive idealism. It's reality.
And to quote Edwin Land: Marketing is what you do when you have an inferior product.
I was a journalist for 10 years. Different kinds of reporters want different things, but they all have one thing in common. They hate being instrumentalized by press-hungry companies, and they do not exist to publicize startups. They exist to inform and entertain their readers. If you try to use them, they will ignore you. You need to figure out how you can help them report better, not just on your company, but on tech in general.
Basically, journalists want scoops and fresh points of view. If they can't surprise their readers with what they write, then they shouldn't be writing at all. Think about the stories you like: they all caught you a little off guard, either by the facts they contained or the quality of their analysis.
You need to reflect on where you fit into the supply chain of information. The next time something makes you say "Really?" or "Holy sh*t!", your next thought should be: Has this been reported yet, and if not, which journalist would want to write this story? Then you should email them.
That's how news should work. It should be something that makes people talk. Frankly, partnerships, metrics and product updates make for boring journalism that leaves readers dissatisfied, but strokes the egos of the companies involved.
You know what makes for exciting news? Finding a homeless dude and teaching him how to code. I don't know if Patrick McConlogue wanted exposure when he did that, but he got it, and if that was deliberate, the man is a genius. Everyone on HN has the capacity to make news like this. Forget about the latest app for an app that you're making, and do something big-hearted and cool. The press will eat it up.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/york-city-programmer-homele...
I'm going to focus more in depth later on how to create these more "qualitative" stories like trend pieces and founder profiles.
The way things are right now, though. A lot of people rely upon tech publications for new product information, which startups have money (and might be hiring) and what's coming down the pike. These are the most efficient means of getting that information out these publications.
It's OK if technology news is transactional. It's just that most people who want press have not asked themselves what they're bringing to the table. Too often, it's just a request for coverage, and that will fail.
Founders who want exposure should find out how they can help reporters do their jobs better, by making intros, flagging interesting posts on HN, digging into their own data for insights and generally working hard to make the reporter look good. If a source can complete his side of the transaction, then the journalist will want to help in turn.
The way things work now, tech PR firms serve up tech journalists to CEOs at swanky dinners where no one says anything interesting, and the reporter goes home with a bunch of canned quotes that would be useless in a story.
To sum it up: Anyone who wants press should be giving reporters access, insights and information that will lead to stories that tens or hundreds of thousands of people would want to read. Figure out how to do that, and you have the basis for a relationship.
1) If your company is not currently newsworthy enough alone try pitching broader topics. eg the raise of wearable tech. Startup hype in City X. etc
Help the journalist with intro to other (not 100% competitive) founders.
2) Ask the journalist what kind of article he wants to write and what role our startup will play in this article (or where he sees you).
If you understand roughly what kind of article a journalist is going for you can deliver by far better usable quotes.
There's lots of great things that you can do to be of help to a journalist even when you're not pitching them. For example, follow reporters you want to cover you on Twitter. They frequently have "hair on fire" requests that maybe you can help them with. I saw a reporter ask the other day, "Have any of my followers managed a Hadoop cluster?"
