Buzzgain » PR

Why dont technology startups leverage PR even if its more effective?

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:32:00 +0000

Our good friend Todd posted a very good piece on how PR helps raise venture capital. In it, he quotes a survey from BIGfrontier Communications that has the following statistics:

Startup companies that engage in PR campaigns are 30% more successful in getting funding within one to three months than those that don’t.

Forty-four percent of the respondents who used PR outreach received funding in the one-to-three-month time period versus 14% of those that did not.

Seventy-eight percent of respondents who said PR helped in their funding efforts are planning to use some of their VC dollars for additional PR.

Ironically, the survey also found that only 18% of the 300 startups surveyed had a PR program in place during the funding process.

So it begs the question why dont startups employ PR as a marketing strategy early as they can? Or why dont they hire a PR agency quicker?

Running a startup myself and having a background in Marketing, I can tell you my main reasons are the following:

1. PR is not easy. Putting an ad campaign on Google for paid adwords is dead simple. Buying a target email list is relatively easy. Putting together an email campaign (or a poorly conceived spam campaign) is easier. Attending a trade show and putting together a booth to attract customers is easier than having to build relationships with reporters and bloggers. PR depends on people. Other marketing forms are dependent on money and processes. Entrepreneurs who have a background in technology prefer working with things that are predictable (since everything else about the startup is unpredictable).

2. PR takes time. That’s the one thing entrepreneurs and smaller companies dont have enough of. Yes, everything takes time and there’s a return on time (ROT, not ROI) and PR does provide a great return on time. Only if you have done it before can you navigate the landscape. Most first time entrepreneurs have not.

3. Hiring a PR agency is “expensive”. The average quote from any good PR agency you’d get for even a 2-5 person startup is $10,000 a month in Silicon Valley. I can do a Google ad words campaign with less than $100 budget per month. Here’s the funny part: If that becomes $300 budget daily, that’s as much as PR. But its in bite-sized chunks.

4. PR requires specialists. The first marketing hire is paid to “put together a website, manage a trade show booth”. There are not enough qualified PR individual consultants to help smaller companies with smaller budgets.

5. PR is not tied to the lead generation process or the board level agenda. PR generates awareness and that’s not easily accountable. In my board meeting every month, I get asked about my lead generation funnel. Never have I been asked to show the recent press clips about the company.

Finally, making your mark through the noisy world right now is tough. There are innumerable startups in any given field and there’s way too much noise with multiple companies providing the same message and solutions. Given that reality, how is spending on PR justified if you are going to be yet another startup in the crowd?

Having identfied the reasons why entrepreneurs dont invest in PR, we’ll follow this up with possible solutions for how the PR world can adapt to the challenge in a future post.

More PR bashing by Jason

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:17:12 +0000

Besides Jason who talks about “Do it yourself PR” there are several others who claim the best thing to do is to fire your PR firm, pitch yourself and never hire a PR firm in the first place.

I have to say there are great PR folks and there are awful PR folks, and then the useless middle. If you can get a great PR person (note I did not say firm) to partner with, do it. If not, Do it yourself PR.

Welcome to the BuzzGain Blog

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:11:43 +0000

BuzzGain is a disruptive media engagement solution to help companies and individuals to “Do it yourself PR (Public Relations)”. Our online solution helps discover, engage, analyze and report on their PR outreach efforts in an actionable fashion. This reduces costs of PR by at least 60%.

Interesting Reads for Jan 5th: Magazine Ads, Digital Influence

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:58:39 +0000

1. NYtimes: Magazine sport fewer ad pages this January than usual.

January issues tend to be thin even in good years, and most magazines posted a decline in ad pages. But the average decline across all monthly magazines was only 17 percent, and most Condé Nast magazines fared much worse, according to analysis of Media Industry Newsletter data.

Wired, which is usually thick with consumer electronics ads, was the worst hit, down 47 percent from a year ago to 43.6 ad pages. Architectural Digest fell 46 percent, to 63.2, from 116.8. Vogue and Lucky were both down about 44 percent.

2. John Bell: The 13 Skills of the Public Relations Pro of the Future

Marketing and public relations are coming together. PR is growing as an industry while “traditional” advertising – what ever that is – remains flat. Still, we have taken no new ground in ‘measurement’ and articulating the tremendous ROI of P

How much to pay consultants for Social Media expertise?

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:21:50 +0000

The 2nd most vexing topic after “How do I measure social media ROI” is “How much do I pay for social media?“.

Friend and social media consultant, Chris has started a new company. His website display’s their pricing. B L Ochman has had a similar practice for years, displaying her pricing upfront. Its a pretty open and upfront policy which I think is very different from the many consultants who will answer the question with a standard “It depends”. Regardless of whether you think the pricing is too high, or its just right, its a starting point.

I know many consultants are loathe to price by the hour, since it means you have to work “that many hours” regardless of if you are efficient or not. Also pricing by the hour opens you up to competitive pricing – because clients want to compare prices between service providers. This is the vexing problem for most. If a consultant is highly efficient, they get more work done in quicker time, they expect to charge more. But since differentiation is so difficult for most consultants in social media, they have to bid “competitively” – thereby reducing their “rates”.

I have contracted with 3 different agencies for Social Media services before and paid very different rates for their services.

Here’s the myth of social media consultant pricing:

You get what you pay for.

Not at all.

The reality is

You get what you set the objectives for.

If you are clear about what you need to get done, great! You’ll get exactly what you asked for. The objective could be to come up with a strategy, execute some campaign or just get your folks trained and ready. Any of these comes at a price. So how about some examples:

Granted these projects were all different, but to give you a quick sense of pricing:

1. Introduction of blogging hands on class: We did this in 2006 to 15 people at our company. Most knew about blogs, but were not sure how to go about getting started with blogging. The trainer was a social media practitioner and was a pretty good blogger in his own right. We paid $4800 for two days of training. This included a “get to know the team dinner (the previous night of the training). We also reimbursed expenses (airfare, 3 days of hotel and dinner). The objective was to get people comfortable with blogging and get them to actually start to post.

2. Blogger relations: This was included as a part of our PR agency’s monthly retainer. Our monthly retainer was $9600 and they added another $3500 per month for this project. The objective was to engage with the top 15 influencers in our space. This project included identification of the blogger, engaging with them and building a relationship between them and our product teams . We identified this to be a 3 month effort at the minimum.

3. SEO optimizing our blog content. One of our objectives for the blog was to provide content that would appear higher up in the organic search rankings. Now there are folks that wont call this social media, but our objectives were to drive traffic to our site by all means and our own blog was one of them. Our SEO consultant charged us $50 per post to a maximum of 20 posts per month or about $1000 per month. This was just for SEO and cleanup NOT writing the posts in the first place.

I’ll explore which of these gave us the biggest bang for the buck in a later post, but this should give you some ball park estimates.

What have you paid for social media consultants? Did you get what you paid for? What would you do better / differently?

Image credit: David DMuir

How many twitter followers does it take make an impact?

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:19:59 +0000

This post primarily discusses corporate uses and engagement with Twitter, unlike how most people use it to keep up with friends and discuss “What are you doing”? The # of companies on twitter is growing dramatically from fewer than 5 in 2007 to over 500 in 2008.

Given that twitter has about 1.3 million registered accounts, the question we get asked frequently is:

: Jason asks where we got the 1.3 Million number vs. 3.1 reported by TwitDir. Two items: 1) We only track accounts that have more than 5 friends and at least 10 tweets. We think these are real users vs. bots. If we did all accounts, we track about 3.27 Million. Bottom line there are a TON of fake accounts on twitter.

2) We also did this initial run in July. We’ll update for September, but we doubt There were 1.5+M accounts added in 2 months.

“So if I get on twitter and make a lot of “friends” will our messages get propagated faster?”.

This is usually by a corporate client, who does not have a basic understanding of twitter or has just heard that twitter helps you get “Buzz”.

Usually we have to go over basics of twitter and community with them before they ask the next question:

“So how can we can get the key influencers to follow us and tweet about?”.

Another discussion ensues and topics such as engaging users and not spamming them comes up. They usually look a little lost at this point, but are able to somewhat relate to email spam so they eventually get it.

The next question comes up within the 30 minutes of discussion:

“So how many people have to follow us for our message to be heard?”.

We’re not sure if you really want to answer this question, but its a worthwhile exercise. There are varying degrees of influence on twitter. We define 3 types of twitter engagement. Each of these types of engagement is an increasing amount of influence obviously:

1. Another twitter user follows you (and based on her tweet history) tweets at about the same time as you do. Else if you are in different timezones, your influence on that person is lesser.

2. A twitter follower replies to your tweets (@replies) with a certain frequency. Or the # of @ replies you get as a twitter user.

3. A twitter follower retweets your tweets with some frequency.

There are 3 things that stand out when you analyze twitter statistics.

1. The top 250 twitter users (with the most number of followers, the most number of friends (people they follow) and the # of tweets) carry an inordinate amount of “influence”.

2. The average number of followers for the top 100 twitters is 9304, with the top at about 93,000 followers and #100 at about 6300 followers.

3. If you have less than 100 followers (with some exceptions), which over 500,000 users on twitter do, your influence rank drops to less than 8 (give time zone considerations). Meaning less than 18 people are really viewing your tweets, which indicates 4 of them are likely to @ reply and 1 is most likely to retweet.

The graph below shows Twitter influence. The top 100 users carry 65% of the influence on twitter and they have a minimum of 6300+ followers to a maximum of ~90,000 followers. Users from 100-5000 have 22% of twitter influence and so on.

Some questions:

1. Corporate clients still believe the best use of twitter is to leverage it as “yet another channel” for their message amplification. What are the best techniques you have used to convince them about the value of engaging their customers on twitter?

2. How are you recommending your clients engage with twitter users?

3. What’s the best example of large companies engaging on twitter?

Evolving from a PR/Social Media conversation to a business conversation

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:10:24 +0000

The only qualification I have to make this blog entry is that I have been a VP of Marketing before and have managed a annual PR budget of about $1.2 Million. I dont claim to know the business of PR well, but when has that stopped a blogger from giving his opinion right?

The question I want to address though is one asked by my friend Jennifer and another PR professional Michelle.

“Where do you think that line should be drawn? Subscribers? Alexa rankings? Google page rank? Technorati? Which bloggers make the list of desirables? Tell me…”

The question is one of which bloggers should you target – the “A list” ones with many readers or the other list – who have very little readership.

I think the question fundamentally should be a different one.

Web masters in the late 90’s (every marketing team had one remember), have now evolved into Internet Marketing functions whose role includes SEM, SEO, site design, buying optimization etc.

The PR professional has to go away from answering the question “How can I generate the most Buzz” to “How can I impact the marketing goals – be it for a company or a client“? Many smart PR professionals are already doing this.

The Buzz question prompts you to look for more PR mentions, or get your CEO on the cover of Forbes or get mentioned in EVERY local newspaper.

The Impact question begs you to measure the net result or “ROI of that buzz creation” to the bottom line. What that means is that you have to come with reports not that state the # of mentions and press clips of every mention, but reports that indicate “What % of the registered users came because you got a mention in a blog” Or “What was the conversion ratio for prospects when we got a mention on NYTimes vs. the Wall Street Journal”. I am the first to tell you that this is difficult currently to do, but you have to get there.

If you set out to address that question however and you are convinced that’s the way to go, then you’ll spend your time on 3 metrics through the customer acquisition pipeline:

1. Awareness generation: How many people were made aware of your products / offerings? This could be a simple case of taking the # of publications and bloggers you pitched to & got written up in and adding them up. Its not a great number but its a start. This is what you are probably most familiar with.

2. Actionable intent: How many people visited your website after that mention in that blog OR media publication? This is MORE possible to do now than ever. Granted you wont get EXACT metrics, but you will get close enough numbers. Become friends with you web analytics person and they’ll give you a good start.

3. Converted prospects: How many people from the previous number actually performed the call to action. This is also an important metric to track. Again this metric is being tracked by the analytics tools – you just need to be more familiar with them.

You need these three numbers because only then is it possible to justify your time spent on bloggers outside the “A list”. Why?

Its is our contention that the conversion ratio (# of people visiting to taking action to converting) is BEST in the niche blogs. Their audience is specific, tailored and is passionate about the only thing that blogger covers. That blogger usually has a GREATER influence over his niche audience than a blog network does.

Second, niche bloggers are more likely to give you good links that will improve the organic ranking of website in Google searches. This is huge since organic traffic is literally “free” or minimal cost to your company.

The large A list blogs and blog networks give you great traffic (i.e. awareness) BUT the conversion ratios are correspondingly poor.

You can argue if conversion ratios matter. That’s question #2.

It does. The reason it matters is the MOST EXPENSIVE method to generate leads and conversions currently is Google SEM (Or Search Engine Marketing) or Pay Per Click (PPC) as they call it in the industry. As an alternative organic search results (which are obtained with more links to your website and good content) are a lot less expensive.

So if you can prove (with real reports and numbers to your VP Marketing) that you can generate better conversion ratios and deliver leads at a lower cost, you will never have to justify talking to B list bloggers or justify your engagement with any type of social media.

The single most effective one-time sales promotion for our application

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:09:38 +0000

Iphone developers responded to a survey by App Store HQ blog on the most effective marketing for their applications. Here are some of the results:

Soliciting user reviews – 2.01 / 7 responses
Making frequent updates to increase App Store visibility – 2.3 / 10 responses
Paid PR – rating 3 / 2 responses
Offering a Lite version – 2.58 / 12 responses
Submitting to app review blogs – 2.4 / 10 responses

Developers gave 3/3 rating for Paid Public Relations. But more people tried offering a lite version and making frequent updates to the product to increase Apple Store visiblity.

Other quotes:

“The single most effective one-time sales promotion for one of our apps was an in-house PR campaign… The app was innovative and the story was picked up at wired.com and subsequently at many other leading tech/music online outlets. I had been very careful to put links into the release copy, most of which were pasted into stories intact. This PR blast drove thousands of sales within a few days. But then sales fell off a cliff as the stories fell away from tech blog home pages. We have tried all the other tricks. We find that nothing succeeds like success. Get in the top 10 or top 20 and you’re likely to stay there indefinitely.

“Our PR team got us placement on tech news sites, which led to articles on Wired.com and BoingBoing the first week of the app’s launch. After that, WOM has led to a remarkably consistent download rate, with small spikes during future press coverage.”

Two things come to mind immediately:

1. Developers (most other folks included) do things that they can control and in their comfort zone – making changes to the application and offering a lite version – they can control.

2. Those that used PR found it to be awesome. But too few people tried PR to get awareness for their applications.

Question for PR folks – If you know the value proposition of what you sell has a GREAT return on investment, how do you go about making sure your customer buys or “tries” your product before they buy?

The Moral and Ethical dilemma of blogger relations: Email Addresses

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:04:49 +0000

Lets talk about the age old question about the differences between bloggers and journalists from the main stream media. First a categorization. To us there are 3 broad categories of people you can target to generate buzz.

1. Main stream media – journalists, reporters, freelancers, editors and publishers of magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, etc. These professionals are paid to learn and write about news and happenings. Our main competitors including Vocus and Cision (and smaller ones like Burrelles Luce) provide extensive information on over 40,000 of these professionals with their media database offering. Any media database has typically information about the publication, its reach, the beat the reporter covers and the reporters contact information (email and in some cases phone).

2. Blog Networks – Since early part of this decade, online publications that started as small one person blogs such as GigaOm and TechCrunch, now have multiple writers and editors with a fairly similar agenda to the main stream media but a focus on specific content such as startups (e.g. Paid Content) or social media (e.g. Mashable). The writers for these have a revenue (and hence pageviews, readership) goal either via sponsorships and advertising so they are also “pitched” by PR professionals. Some of these professionals encourage and lovehaving their contact information available online (providing an easy way for potential PR professionals to contact them) and others dont like being “spammed” with irrelevant pitches.

3. Independent bloggers – These are the mostly one person industry experts – Some of them love to have people email and contact them about new products and services – e.g. Louis Gray, (disclaimer: he’s helping us) and others feel its spam.

Our customers prefer to have the contact information for all of the folks in our database. We have about 80% of our targets mapped to email and phone, but we are choosing in our present version to NOT show direct contact information for the individual bloggers until we are certain they are not going to be used for sending useless PR pitchesand get blacklisted.

We currently allow our customers to comment on their blogs or news sites, but do offer contact information for the main stream media.

What’s your suggestion for the best way to encourage engagement between these 3 categories of influencers and the best way for our customers to get access to them?

The best case for investing in PR during the downturn

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:04:34 +0000

I would highly recommend sending a link to this article to every one your PR clients. Summary:

27-year-old Sherwood Partners in Palo Alto, long known to industry insiders as “the undertaker” because its primary role is to efficiently shutter companies.

Sherwood’s gregarious cofounder Marty Pichinson on Friday afternoon, he was just wrapping up an hour-long conference call, juggling two new calls, and eager to escape the office after a very long week. Before he took off, Pichinson, who has an inimitable flair for drama, told me why startups should keep their PR people, how to negotiate with a landlord, and what most startup employees can expect in the way of a severance package.

The money paragraph:

What about public relations?

Do you listen to Warren Buffett and strike when there’s trouble? Is PR cheaper than advertising? The answer is yes. Are you better to have a third party tell reporters how great your product is? The key is to negotiate. I’m not a believer in cutting public relations if the machine is well-oiled and people are reading about you. It takes three to six months to get public relations up and running. Why throw it away?

Now, do you need an inside marketing person? Probably not at $150,000 a year. Also, outside PR probably has a wider net.