Jason Calacanis on Doing PR the Right Way
A lot of great stuff in Jason Calacanis’ ten best tips on PR for your startup. I especially like number #6, How a CEO should e-mail a journalist.
Your job as the CEO/founder is to create direct, honest and personal relationships with journalists. The truth is that PR people are selling you a share of their relationships with journalists, and their relationships are typically on shaky ground. You’re much better off building a personal relationship by sending a personal email like this:
Saul,
Nice piece on Facebook’s valuation. One insight I had: if the value of the company BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH than should Microsoft be thinking BLAH
BLAH BLAH? Thoughts?best regards,
Jason Calacanis
CEO, Mahalo.comIf you do that once every other day for a year or so you’ll develop relationships with 50 to 100 important folks. Of course, you have to have something of substance to say, so don’t waste their time and don’t write five page e-mails or you’ll look deranged. Short, to the point and intelligent. If you’re not smart enough to send something insightful, well, than I can’t really help you and you might want go work for someone smart for a couple of years.
Check out #9, where Jason gives good reasons for welcoming competitors and copycats and not suing them.
And #10 talks about leveraging small media outlets to reach the big ones.
Getting someone at The New York Times, WIRED or The Wall Street Journal to pay attention to you can take years. Small publications, however, don’t get their calls responded to by the big companies. This creates two big wins for you:
a) Small publications have more time for you
b) Big publications troll the small publications for storiesIn fact, you might not want to waste too much time getting to Walt Mossberg or John Markoff–those guys are jammed up big time. Great guys, and they know a great story when they see it, but the amount of incoming traffic they have is insane. Your best bet might be to find a vertical blog or podcast and talk to those folks. After you speak with them you can send the link to Mossberg or Markoff–or they might find it themselves.