Stage Two Consulting

Today I tried a new medium for pitching a story - a twelve second long video pitch. There’s continuous discussion about PR spam, and what’s the right way to pitch stories to bloggers and to press. Stowe Boyd explained his clear and unequivocal preference for being pitched via Twitter. This lead to a follow up post, and Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb also wrote a piece on twit-pitching.

I have pitched a few stories via Twitter, and in fact I was one of the 1st people to follow and post to the Twitter account called micropr, which I heard about from Brian Solis. I’ve pitched there numerous times, though I’ve never actually gotten a response (nor have we had success from #twitpitch or #pitch140). That said, I remain undaunted, and I truly do believe in the potential of new communication/social tools.

I have a story going out on the wire tomorrow morning at 9AM for Spleak Media Network (announcing some big new content partners - to give some perspective, their last content partnership announcement was with Hearst Digital Media).  If you want the news prior to embargo, please email/twitter me.  This morning, the first thing I did was login to my 12seconds.tv account (by the way, 12seconds.tv is nearing launch - stay tuned!), and record a couple of twelve second pitches. My first was terrible, so I canceled it. The second was a little better, take a look:

Spleak on 12seconds - take 1 on 12seconds.tv
Spleak on 12seconds - take 1 on 12seconds.tv

But still, it seems like there’s a dearth of information. How will someone make any kind of judgment call about whether it’s worth following up? So I tried a third take; my favorite so far:

Spleak, take: better on 12seconds.tv
Spleak, take: better on 12seconds.tv

I think this is an interesting tool for pitching stories. Considering the ongoing changes in communications and the media landscape, It’s important to explore various media and pitch avenues. While I agree with the folks at RWW that not everyone wants the standard email pitch, for many people it is still the best way to share news. But it’s part of my job to experiment with and try different mechanisms and tools for communicating both with clients and with press. If you have thoughts on video pitching in twelve seconds or less, I’d like to hear them. How were my attempts? What would you do differently?

LOUD3R is a client based in Los Angeles, CA. They launched their network of vertical websites today, and it’s going off like a house a’fire.

LOUD3R uses a semantic publishing engine, combined with human editors, to create websites. The websites are each targeted at a different subject or niche, things like custom sneakers, motorcycles, wine and cricket. They launched today with 25 websites, covering a variety of topics. The goal is to create really great destination sites for all kinds of topics, including subjects that are often under-served online. The sites include:

One of the goals behind the technology is to help cut down on all the noise. For many of us, RSS readers daily become full of WAY too many stories, and often those feeds include duplications, spam, splogs, dead links, and other junk. LOUD3R uses semantic technology and natural language processing to find, filter, cluster, rank and display only the best, freshest stories about a particular topic. This way enthusiasts for a particular subject have a great destination to go, every day, to find the best new content for their topic of interest, be it mixed martial arts, custom sneakers, soccer or motorcycles (or anything else.)

Each of the sites shares the same 3R branding (SNEAK3R for custom sneakers, DECANT3R for wine, FAST3R for motorcycles, etc.) They own more than 550 URL’s that share the 3R brand umbrella. They will continue to publish new websites at a rate of 10-15 sites / month. The press release is up on PR Web here. If you have any questions about LOUD3R or want to chat with Lowell Goss (the founder and CEO) please contact me here: david@stagetwoconsulting.com.

Here are the first few articles to break today (we’ll be updating the list all day long).

• Louis Gray was the first I saw today.
• Mashable
• Webware
• Journalism.co.UK
• Download Squad
• BNET
• drob
• Social Media Club

Go LOUD3R go!

Tomorrow, Lowell Goss, CEO of LOUD3R, a new client here at Stage Two, is speaking at the Under the Radar Conference. LOUD3R offers a network of enthusiast-oriented Websites to help millions of people find great information about topics they love. It is difficult to find quality Web content for topics that aren’t mainstream – whether it’s just trying to find good sites, or sifting through junk (spam, splogs and dupes) on RSS feeds.

To solve this problem, LOUD3R is launching a network of sites created by a semantic content engine that gathers, ranks and publishes the best content (news, editorial, photos, video) for a given topic, while filtering out all the junk.

It’s an exciting time for the LOUD3R team as they begin wrapping up beta and prepare to launch the network later this month. We are currently setting up interviews and briefings to learn more about LOUD3R, so if you would like to speak with Lowell for a more in depth look at the powerful tools behind the network, give us a call, email, tweet, comment or whistle – whatever works for you.

I must say, I’m tired of the backlash against the entire PR industry. Are there “bad” PR firms? I don’t know. I’d say there are firms that probably aren’t a good fit for your particular needs. This doesn’t make them “bad”. Do they all “get” the conversations which ensue across the tech blogosphere? Nope. This too, doesn’t make them “bad”. To qualify the statement - a “bad” PR firm is one who doesn’t meet your expectations - end of story. Some PR firms will be perfect for you, some won’t. The best advice I can give is to try to find a good fit.

But there are a few occasions where you won’t need any PR help, maybe this list will help you (warning, heavy sarcasm follows):

1. You already know all the press in your industry - if this is the case, then guess what, YOU ARE doing PR! Congrats!
2. It’s all about word-of-mouth - hey, YouTube did it, Yelp did it (well, they did in San Francisco, but aren’t really anywhere else), Flickr did it (sorta, they got bought fairly early). I’m sure we can all list another dozen or two companies who’ve been very successful with nothing but word-of-mouth. If you are guaranteed to be one of them, then you do not need PR.
3. Growth isn’t really important - maybe you have some amazing new technology but don’t really need to build a user base (for whatever reason). Further, getting in front of the big companies you’d want to get in front of is not a priority. You do not need PR.
4. You have a blog - already blogging? Well then, why bother with drawing attention to it? I’m sure the traffic will just show up as long as you keep at it. You may want to use Twitter too, that’ll just seal the deal.
5. You have no marketing strategy whatsoever - if you aren’t really planning to market your product or service, you probably shouldn’t pursue PR. It won’t help.
6. Your product is inherently viral - this is kind of a rehash of #2 above, but since it comes up so often, I figured I could put it on the list twice. Also, I realized I forgot to mention Facebook in my earlier list of viral successes. Are we up to 20 example yet? If not, keep counting!
7. Don’t want to get ripped off - PR firms do tend to be expensive. Then again, so are good programmers. And good IT folks. And good CFOs. And good hosting companies. Probably shouldn’t spend on any of those things either, you might get ripped off.

Okay, I think that’s all my cynical little mind can come up with. Phew, ranting can be frustrating!

The reality check, again, is that there is no one size-fits-all solution. I’ve said this over and over again! Some startups will find success with internal resources only (hopefully you’ll keep reading our blog and find useful posts like these two). Others should get an external firm. Try to think for yourself and ask your advisers for their thoughts, and make a good choice for your own needs.

I will end with this thought: most startups fail. Yes, even here in Silicon Valley, the math says most do fail. If you need help getting the word out, you should figure out how a marketing strategy firm, PR firm, “social media consultant”, or other resource can help you increase your odds of success.

My good friend, colleague, pseudo-competitor, fellow blogger, and much better photographer Brian Solis put a guest post up on TechCrunch today entitled the Evolution of the Press Release. If you are in marketing, I’d call it a must-read. I’m pretty sure his inspiration for the post is what Elliott refered to as “PitchMeme“, the minor brouhaha which occurred around Gina Trapani’s controversial “bad PR people’s wiki“. I call it controversial because I don’t like the “lumping in” of all PR folks into one big batch - the same way bloggers don’t like to all be looked at the same way (think about it!). The topic’s been pretty well covered already, and my thoughts on how bloggers should address things were in my blog post Friday.

I thought it would be prudent to put up a note on how we recommend our clients write and structure press releases (UPDATED: DON’T FORGET TO NOTICE THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT (FROM THE ORIGINAL POST) - for when they are necessary, that is). Some of this is very traditional, some of it’s a bit “two-oh-ish”, and it’s an evolving, living process. When dealing with marketing strategy and outreach in today’s high tech world, it’s important not to get fixated on what worked yesterday as it may no longer be relevant. UPDATED: IF YOU THINK I AM SAYING “DO THIS ALL THE TIME”, PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE (YES, IT TOO WAS IN THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE): Further, there’s no true “one size fits all” approach, you must tweak your strategies to meet your clients’ specific needs. That said, here’s our rough template:

Opening
Title - should communicate in a “non-tricky/clever” manner the message. No need to be cute here, just summarize your news in one sentence (which is why I’m so bullish on the importance of positioning).
Subtitle - optional, use if a 2nd sentence helps fill out the details.
Opening paragraph - 2 or 3 sentences that quickly get the info out. Assume your audience won’t read any further than this, so if you can’t figure out how to be interesting this briefly, odds are pretty good you either have (1) too much story, or (2) not enough story. Both are bad, consider either making multiple releases or not doing it at all, respectively.

Supporting Details
Okay, this is your time to give some background, help flush out the rest of the story. Stats, market size, demographics, details details details all belong here. I recommend being to the point, again, keeping away from the “cute” factor. 4 sentences max, and if you have a lot of details, consider making a bulleted list instead of a paragraph.

Quote
The simplest reason to have a quote is this: it will inevitably get copied-and-pasted into an article somewhere, and it saves the journalist from having to email you for a quote for their article. Your quote should sound like a human being said it, and not be jargony robot-English. Also, there’s no reason to deviate from the “standard quote” format of:

“I said something cool,” said FIRSTNAME LASTNAME, the TITLE of COMPANY. “I’m excited about that cool thing I said especially because it’s so cool.”

Focus on the business implications, and/or partnership details
This is a good time to explain why the story matters SOOO much. Either there’s a huge opportunity for the company to expand, or possibly a big deal with a big partner/customer is being announced (if so, make sure you’ve referenced this earlier!). Think about the business/industry implications of your announcement, and make them clearly comprehensible.

[optional] partner/3rd party Quote
IF you are working with a partner, give them their quote here. If not, but you have a *very well known* fan of the company, they can make a quote. It’s absolutely not necessary otherwise, and should fit very naturally - if not, don’t include something just to fill in space (shorter press releases are always better than longer ones).

Background
This is a good place to wrap it up, either by including some broad background info on the company (such as a boiler plate) or some content you generically use to describe the company/service/product/market. It’s okay to reuse this content, it’s helping out those who may be new to hearing about you.

Useful Links
In “social media PR” style, we’ve begun including a bulleted list of relevant links. These links could include a company home page, blog, product details/specs/pictures, partner home page, useful resource, Twitter URL, RSS feeds, or anything else. In my opinion this section should have every link a journalist would want to be able to find other details that complement your release.

Contact Info
Phone number and email is a must-include, and I’m generally recommending having IM information here as well. If you use Twitter or other means of near-real-time communication, you should have this included as well.

That’s it for the Stage Two-styled New-Meets-Old-Media Press Release (as of May 11, 2008 - who knows what this will look like a month from now!). Hope this is helpful, and I welcome/encourage feedback via comments.

UPDATED: I’ve added two very large callouts in the beginning of this blog post.  This is because I want to make sure that anyone who is just ’scanning’ the post instead of reading it fully notices that I am not advocating a strategy of “always write press releases, and always make them the exact same.” Sorry about the big, bold text, it felt necessary.