PR Strategies for Startups from Successful Internet Entrepreneur Jason Calacanis
Jason Calacanis is the founder of Mahalo, a human-powered search engine, and previously co-founded Weblogs Inc. Weblogs Inc really helped prove blogging was a viable media business and reportedly sold to AOL for $25 million in 2005. These successes - as well as his experiences with the relaunced Netscape.com and TechCrunch 50 - demonstrate his qualifications as one of the top minds in the technology world today. He retired from blogging, but still maintains a popular email list.
His most recent email has the title “PR Strategies for Startups (Part One)” and was reprinted in full with permission by Marshal Sandler. In brief, the ten strategies are:
1. Be the brand. Be in love with your brand and share the love.
2. Be everywhere. Go to events and meet with people in your industry.
3. Always pick up the check. The initial investment of hosting dinners will pay itself back many times.
4. Be a human being. Develop real relationships with other people instead of just giving them business pitches.
5. Bond with journalists the right way. Read their last several stories and find out what they’re working on.
6. Have your CEO/founders communicate with journalists. The CEO should stay in regular communication with journalists and bloggers and comment on their stories.
7. Conduct interviews via email for greater accuracy. (Side note: Mark Cuban does this too). Assume the worst sentence in the interview will be the lead sentence in the story.
8. Invite people to stop by your office. Journalists/bloggers love to visit new locations to help them set the stage for a story.
9. Attach your brand to a movement. Use the existence of copycats to show you are the leader in a new and exciting space.
10. Embrace small media outlets. They can give you more attention and the big guys use them as resources for new stories.
The link below has much more detail on each individual point.
Source:
http://marshalsandler.com/?p=5950