VentureBeat

When it comes to PR strategy for launching companies, everyone’s got advice.

Some think there’s some sort of magic to it. A story in the New York Times today about how public relations is done in Silicon Valley perpetuates that idea that you need some sort of secret recipe. But I don’t think it has to be that complicated. I believe there’s two main strategies. Depending on where you are as a company, you’ll want to pick:

1) If you’re a company with a Web product that you’re still iterating, and trying to make better, you should just get it out there, fine-tune it based on feedback from early interested users, and keep improving it;

or

2) If you’re a company with a concept or product that’s ready, and you want to grab users and market mindshare before other competing products get out there, then think about a big-splash launch, hitting as many people and publications possible (conference launches may help too). For non-Web products this is a good way to go, because iteration is more difficult. Even for some Web companies, though, speed is crucial, and thus a big-bang is recommended. Pandora, for example, moved quickly to steal mind-share on the iPhone, which forced iMeem to essentially give up and focus on the Google Android mobile platform.

The NYT story, written by Claire Cain Miller (Claire actually talked with me as part of her reporting on it), follows the developments around efforts by a company called Wordnik to generate buzz. Wordnik is a site that provides information about specific words, a sort of dictionary on steroids, and looks like a useful site.

The story is about how a PR person, Brooke Hammerling (below), who I also know, sought to drum up more buzz for the company, under encouragement from a big-name investor Roger McNamee, by using alternative methods to publicize Wordnik — and among other things by bypassing the top tech blogs.

The strategy didn’t seem to work, from a big-bang perspective. For one, I hadn’t heard of the company until Claire called me up to talk about it as part of her reporting. And Mike Arrington of TechCrunch just wrote a piece about its flat-lining launch. That’s not to say that Wordnik won’t do well in the future, because it looks professional, and could be loved by wordsmiths. It just didn’t have a very spectacular launch.

I called Hammerling about the story, and she says now that the intent was actually never to have a big-bang, but to try to get to users who would play with Wordnik, and to build a viral strategy. I also talked with the NYT’s Miller, and she says that is consistent — though the story was actually never clear on what the campaign’s goals were. So taking their (Brooke and Claire’s) word for it, it appears the company was really trying to follow strategy No. 1, above: of a slow release-and-iterate. Though from the story, it probably thought way too hard about it all. If the company wanted a slow viral build-up, why would big tech blogs have been considered in the first place, as debated in the NYT story? I agree with Arrington’s assessment: PR strategy may not be as core to a company’s destiny as some would like to think. It’s really not rocket science.

The idea that avoiding blogs to engage in some more sophisticated social media campaign is just silly. It may sound self-serving, but hang with me a sec: Arrington uses the Topsy launch example, to refute this notion. Topsy had some great traffic, after TechCrunch’s post about it. In VentureBeat’s case, I’d point to the Powerset example: VentureBeat broke the news about search engine Powerset, at a time when the company was really struggling to finish raising a round of venture capital. After we wrote, the ensuing publicity created such a buzz (and controversy) that CEO Barney Pell told me that it was enough to convince venture capitalists to make the investment (that’s because the VCs had previously been concerned that the company wouldn’t be able to get any publicity). Within two years, Powerset ended up doing quite well, selling to Microsoft for $100 million.

Again, those examples are self-serving. But what it really shows is that you do want to reach out to blogs that are going to serve your targeted readers. TechCruch has a tremendous number of techies reading it. VentureBeat has a lot of investors and business executives and other media reading it. In both the Topsy and Powerset cases, the two blogs introduced these sites into a rich, vibrant conversation that mattered to that company, and other blogs picked up on it. In the Topsy case, VentureBeat piled in with a story after TechCrunch wrote about it. In the Powerset case, TechCrunch wrote about it soon after we did.

In the Wordnik case, it seemed to slow itself by not really engaging in the conversation in a straightforward way (though clearly, in a roundabout way, it may still become part of that conversation), and as argued above, that may be a good thing, especially if it’s just a work in progress!

By braking on the PR front, the product has a chance to better and better, as later users get to the fine-tuned product. By the way, that’s how YouTube and Google did it. Think of those two amazing companies, and how they handled their public relations:

Google — They basically didn’t do PR for several years. I remember talking with Scott Epstein, who was one of Google’s earliest VPs of marketing, and how he told me about getting rejected by the Google co-founders when he proposed a big marketing campaign. He even advocated bringing in the branding guru from Coke. But the the Google founders said they wanted to focus on the product, and let it speak for itself.

YouTube — They just kept iterating. Viral marketing (word of mouth) was crucial. Finally, it got good enough to land on various blogs, and it became a sensation.

Bottom line: I wouldn’t think too hard. Just get a solid PR firm, and have them do the work. Getting a good story with any decent blog is enough to grab attention. Many people go to the bigger blogs because they have the professionalism to write better, or have the perspective to write with more authority, and they also have the numbers of readers or distribution to get stories noticed (we have a syndication with the New York Times, for example). But it can start at a small blog too, as long as that writer speaks with authority about his or her topic (and thus will get attention). And that’s where the Miller’s NYT story was dead on: There’s a whole new set of places you can go that effectively act as small blogs: People with large twitter followings, for example.

I’d bet Wordnik’s roundabout way didn’t stunt its growth that much. It may have only lost a few weeks of time in really getting the word out there, and getting prominent mention in a big Times story won’t hurt, either.

[Picture credit: Gawker]

Next Story: With the iPhone’s Flash limbo, Posterous finds a workaround for video
Previous Story: Recently replaced Joost CEO Mike Volpi joins Index Ventures