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> I and my team have probably reached out to tens of thousands of reporters If you said you put together a list of emails 10k in number I'd believe you, though

> I and my team have probably reached out to tens of thousands of reporters If you said you put together a list of emails 10k in number I'd believe you, though I'd say a lot of those emails are worthless. I was a PR firm, or at least a founding partner in one, and those kinds of numbers aren't realistic if you're talking about having a valid, active contact and actually having some meaningful interaction with that journalist. PR, or at least PR done by professionals, is always quality over quantity. The kind of PR you're talking about is what's provided by sites like prweb, which is just north of worthless unless your sole metric is the number of places that have re-printed your press release. Most programmers here (myself included, I changed careers) would, I imagine, cringe if the marketing guy said he was going to do some of the coding. There's a reason programming is a profession and people who know what they're doing get paid well. Same goes for PR. You probably can build that iPhone app yourself, but you probably shouldn't. Leave PR to the people who do it for a living. Having said that, most small companies shouldn't bother with PR. Small companies should focus on sales. I say this from experience having built companies and having done PR for companies from the largest (major airlines, telecom companies, hotel chains) to the smallest local businesses. Put another way, when we launched our PR agency we didn't PR ourselves -- well once, and it was a complete waste of time. A mention somewhere might be neat but it's nearly worthless for a new company. If you don't believe me dig up the research on how valuable that mention in TC actually is. When journalists start coming to you, hire a PR person.

austenallred 13y ago
You took a single line from what I said and completely misconstrued what I and my team [used to] do, making a wide variety of incorrect assumptions along the way. There were a half dozen of us at working for dozens of clients for a few years. Some targeted mommy bloggers, others bigger tech publications, and of course we have great relationships with many major journalists. But when we didn't, we would email. And our hit rate wasn't incredible, but saying that the other emails were worthless is simply not true. Those emails resulted in millions of dollars of sales. If "PR" means "getting a write-up in the New York Times" then sure, most small companies shouldn't worry about it. But for most of the companies we work with more write-ups in smaller blogs and the occasional TechCrunch writeup means more sales; it was a direct, causal relationship that worked (and works) wonders.
AznHisoka 13y ago
"Having said that, most small companies shouldn't bother with PR." Yep, at least not the typical definition of "PR". Expand that to industry blogs about your niche though, and you might want to put some investment into that type of PR.
- lenepp 13y ago
  I totally agree. Actually it would probably be better if small companies, especially small startups, would think about this activity as "Attention" rather than "PR" or "Marketing". What you want when you're a small startup is the right kind of attention from the right people at the right time.

austenallred 13y ago

You took a single line from what I said and completely misconstrued what I and my team [used to] do, making a wide variety of incorrect assumptions along the way. There were a half dozen of us at working for dozens of clients for a few years. Some targeted mommy bloggers, others bigger tech publications, and of course we have great relationships with many major journalists. But when we didn't, we would email. And our hit rate wasn't incredible, but saying that the other emails were worthless is simply not true. Those emails resulted in millions of dollars of sales. If "PR" means "getting a write-up in the New York Times" then sure, most small companies shouldn't worry about it. But for most of the companies we work with more write-ups in smaller blogs and the occasional TechCrunch writeup means more sales; it was a direct, causal relationship that worked (and works) wonders.

AznHisoka 13y ago

"Having said that, most small companies shouldn't bother with PR." Yep, at least not the typical definition of "PR". Expand that to industry blogs about your niche though, and you might want to put some investment into that type of PR.

lenepp 13y ago
I totally agree. Actually it would probably be better if small companies, especially small startups, would think about this activity as "Attention" rather than "PR" or "Marketing". What you want when you're a small startup is the right kind of attention from the right people at the right time.