Brians_Cat from the Ben Huh interview

Edited by Larry Chiang

The Silicon Valley startup scene is obsessed with press.

A financing announcement in Matt Marshall’s VentureBeat.  A product review by Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal.  The ultimate prize: a TechCrunch blog post.

In the reality-distorted mind of the typical entrepreneur, a new startup is one blog post away from generating the flywheel effect that launches that startup into the next YouTube, Facebook or Twitter.

As co-founder of a travel search engine UpTake, I was right there with the rest of the entrepreneurs, desperately seeking love from the blogosphere during our 2007-2008 launch.

At first I played the game.  I hired a PR firm.  I fired a PR firm.  I hired another PR firm.  That firm sent out massive amounts of email and made lots of phone calls.  We annoyed a number of people but we did get some coverage. We did everything by the book.

After a while, I observed that the companies that did the best did not play the game.  Instead of begging for media, they became media.

At UpTake we followed their example.  We raided the PR budget and used the money to hire over 50 bloggers to create a widely read travel industry blog, and seven other consumer travel blogs.  Now we get the press releases and the annoying PR emails.
** 1. Be Robert Scoble. (Or if you’re not Robert Scoble, hire one.) **

Back in 2003, Scoble joined Microsoft to be a video blogger at a nascent Microsoft blog called Channel 9.  He then started a blog called Scobleizer, where he proceeded to occasionally complain about Microsoft products.  In the era of command-and-control public relations, a guy like Scoble wouldn’t be able to say a thing to the press without a handler scripting out his every answer.

The personality, the celebrity, the transparency, and the independent editorial perspective — all made Scobleizer a media outlet in its own right.  Microsoft, through Scoble, had “become” media.

photo credit Kris Krug

Today Scoble works for Rackspace. Frankly, they are brilliant because they are just cut-and-pasting what Microsoft did in 2003, and on top of an intensely boring core business.  Think about it.  Who really cares about Web hosting and server collocation?  Isn’t that a totally commoditized industry at this point?  How much traditional public relations would you have to do to get the kind of noise and coverage that Scoble is producing for Rackspace?  They knew they weren’t Scoble.  So they hired one.

** 2. Stop trying to make news and start trying to break it. **

What if you just can’t become Scoble, and you can’t afford to hire one?  My company is a good example of this.  Unfortunately, we’re too humble to play the Scoble game, and we’re too poor to hire one. So what to do? So our solution was to stop trying to make news, and start trying to break news.

Honestly, our product just doesn’t have enough story angles to get the press we need to build our business.  A traditional PR approach is to try to manufacturer story angles.  The thinking goes something like this: “Maybe we can field some research and get some factoids.  Maybe we can jump on a trend.  Maybe we can reposition our product as something else.”  Well, after a while, this got futile and boring.  So we took a large part of our PR budget, and launched a blog network – 7 blogs, 50 bloggers, who collectively are a lot funnier and more interesting than all those “story angles” we kept brainstorming.

Now we’re breaking industry stories. We’re talking about industry trends.  We’re covering other companies’ launches.  We’re getting invited to cover conferences as bloggers. We’ve built real relationships with people in the media rather than just pitching stories.  And yes, now we’re getting to see all the PR sins of all the other companies who are still playing the game by the book.

Another great example is a guy named Brian Solis.  Brian’s day job is straight-up PR firm called Future-Works.  He’s supposed to be begging bloggers for stories.  Instead, he launches his *own* blog, bub.blicio.us, and starts covering the industry himself! Then he hires bloggers from other top blogs.  Then he takes incredible pictures and shares them out for everyone to use.  Who do you think gets the love for their clients?

** 3. Don’t wait for your media target list to write about you.  Just start writing about *them*. **

Now that you’re in the media (well, sort of), you don’t have to wait around for David Pogue of the New York Times to write about you.  You can just start writing about him! Try this Judo move: writing a critique of something he just wrote that has nothing to do with your company.

Try to stir up some controversy.

Be a little snarky, but stay nice, and try to engage in an interesting conversation that moves his thinking forward. Liberally sprinkle in the right keywords to trigger his ego searches.  If it isn’t obvious by now, you’re not trying to stay “on message” with your company’s marketing plan.

So follow these three steps.  First, copy what Scoble is doing.  Second, start blogging about your competitors.  Third, get your media targets’ attention by writing about them before they write about you.

Anyone else have any ideas about how companies can “be” media? Post them in the comments below

Here’s the backstory on this experiment:

When I started my first startup in 1996, my co-founder Eric Tilenius and I were super secretive about what we were doing.  In hindsight, that was a mistake.  Not only did we look like total n00bs to the startup scene, we failed to benefit from the feedback and advice that we would have received.  Should startups keep their ideas secret?  Entrepreneur Chris Dixon posts on why its really not that dangerous to share your super-stealth idea with other people:

There are lots of benefits to talking to people.  You’ll get suggestions for improvements.  You’ll discover flaws and hopefully correct them.   You’ll learn a lot more about the sector/industry.  You’ll learn about competitive products that exist or are being built.  You’ll gauge people’s excitement level for the product and for various features.  You’ll refine your sales and investor pitch.  You might even discover your idea is a bad idea and save yourself years of hitting your head against the wall.

In terms of the risk of someone stealing your idea, there are at best a handful of people in the world who might actually drop everything and copy your idea.

First of all, most people will probably think your idea is stupid.  This does not mean your idea is stupid.  In fact, if everyone loves your idea, I might be worried that it’s not forward thinking enough.

He goes on to describe the different people you might talk to and how virtually none of them will steal their idea.  Go read his post.  I largely agree with Chris.

Talking about your idea with people you know is one thing.  Blogging it out onto the internet for everyone to find is another.  So this list is for some of those ideas that I don’t mind sharing broadly with people I know, but I don’t want findable in Google for the 4-5 people in the world that might actually steal my ideas and run with them!

I’ve also had times when I’ve wanted to share thoughts and opinions with my professional community but didn’t want those thoughts hanging out in the Google index and the Wayback Machine for all eternity.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m willing to rant and act out in public to get traffic, links, and notoriety as much as the rest of you!  But sometimes there are things that I just don’t want on the public record.

What topics?  I’m generally blogging, Tweeting, and thinking about social media, China, online travel, and entrepreneurship.  It will be the same stuff.

How often?  Probably once a month.  We’ll see how this goes!

Sign up here: http://eepurl.com/d3Lk

After you sign up, you’ll have to confirm your email address.  I’m trying out MailChimp for this mailing list.