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Ask PG: Do you still see value in traditional PR?

8 points by JohnN ↗ HN
After reading your article on PR, I was wondering if you still see any value in trying to court print publications. You spent $16,000 a month on your PR. Would you advise people to hire PR firms today?

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

18 comments

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DaniFong
Surely it depends on the audience. When we get the resources we need, we'll certainly use PR -- the people most in need of our service are possibly a hundred times more likely to read the Sunday paper than to browse Slashdot.
pg
It's still valuable, especially for larger companies, but no longer critical for newly founded startups. You probably shouldn't pay for PR till you have enough money that it doesn't hurt.
rams
But, the YC startups themselves seem to be the beneficiaries of excellent PR efforts, appearing in Time, Newsweek etc. Somebody who is equally smart, but not YC-funded will not get this kind of visibility. I just quit from a startup funded by VCs and led by a Harvard M.B.A. While working there, I realized that we were no smarter than our competitors, yet managed to hit the headlines every now and then, for reasons that I didn't quite understand. Since a lot of investors, and at times even enterprise customers display herd mentality, this does make a difference. For instance if on the strength of it's PR efforts a startup manages to make a sale to an enterprise customer, it's valuation does go up, No ?
JohnN
It seems to me that two startups can have be roughly the same in terms of how good it is, but one gets much better PR. Maybe PR only matters all things being equal.

I am thinking of PR strategies for my startup, any ideas? BTW its an open source newspaper

rms
How is your startup different from Wikinews?

Here is one PR idea that I've never actually tried, though I would be very curious to see if it worked. Write a press release about the problem your startup is solving in the style of a human-interest story. Try and put a human face on the story. Send it to every local newspaper in America and see what happens.

JohnN
its different because there are profiles, voting, comments plus we are focused on comment and opinion
thomasptacek
Have you ever worked with a PR firm that was actually worth the money? I've worked directly with 4 in the past and got fuck-all from it, but we're handling our own press now and kicking ass.
phony_identity
Viaweb's PR firm is discussed in the fourth paragraph here: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
thomasptacek
Schwartz. Perfect example. The government-issued PR firm for Boston companies. Competed with 2 companies simultaneously repped by them. Saw, maybe, 5? trade press hits between the two of them.

We didn't do much better, because we were also repped by a PR company, and playing the same pasteurized process press food strategy as the rest of them.

Which is my point. Wasting money on a jaded middleman to circulate press releases every time you make a dot release isn't something you should aspire to do when you can afford it, and PR isn't something you should avoid doing now.

My current company, a tiny startup, is in Forbes, Wired, EWeek, Network Computing, Inforworld, Baseline, not to mention Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit. Didn't spend a dime to do it. Definitely got lucky, but there's also definitely a trick to doing it.

I agree with the "survey" trick Graham talks about. I've seen that work over and over again.

mooneater
thomasptacek, I read the submarine essay, and also googled for the "survey" trick, but I cant find it.. can you provide a reference?
thomasptacek
Sorry, my fault for being incoherent. Look for the word "coup" in "Submarine". Viaweb injected a factoid into the, uh, press-o-sphere. Reporters love new factoids.

What I see work, over and over again, is companies manufacturing surveys or studies that come up with numbers and metrics about the market, like, "20,000 enterprises are deploying technology to stop the Storm worm". Some companies will do annual press releases about an official-sounding report they generate, like, "Weboopia's 5th Annual Twitter Study Concludes 4,897,489,281 Messages Delivered Over Twitter In 2007".

herdrick
What's your startup? What is your trick or tricks? Speak freely!
webwright
I was interviewed on a nationally syndicated radio show about my product and barely saw a blip in traffic...

I'd say it totally depends on your audience/product. There are plenty of people outside of our Web 2.0 echo chamber who pay a lot more attention to old media than new media.

Profile your buyers/users, understand where they spend their time, and make sure that you've got good visibility there.

thomasptacek
There's a nationally syndicated radio show about your product? That's awesome.
carter
The best PR is satisfied users. If you achieved product/market fit, then you don't need all these PR investments. I think.