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PR 101 for engineers

medium.com

223 pointscraigkerstiens28 comments

I tried to turn getting press into a method that reads like a programming tutorial, and it turned out like this: https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-to-get-press-for-your-s... it's had pretty universally good reviews, including from TechCrunch writers, etc.

This is wonderful! Thanks Austen. A very scientific step-by-step approach to getting PR. I will use this for getting press for my soon to launch 'side project'. I would also encourage all other HN readers who consider themselves to be 'I'm just the coder' to read this when launching your apps, side-projects.

Thanks again! ~Sean

The AirBNB guys also described this "pyramid" concept in their old Mixergy interview (2010 I believe). I found it pretty helpful:

https://mixergy.com/interviews/airbnb-chesky-gebbia/

Really great article, I don't think I've read anything on tech PR that's this actionable in ages. You usually have a certain intuition for the points OP is trying to make (be personal, be brief, don't spam, tell something interesting), but people rarely discuss actual strategies or plans of action in detail.

This is like a more practical tech focused version of Ryan Holidays stuff, awesome!

Thanks Austin, this is a huge help! I'd love to see more posts in this style re: marketing–I'm shockingly bad at pitching and selling my own stuff. Anyone have any suggestions?

I wrote a whole book in this style. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-ultimate-growth-hacki...

Aneel makes some good points. Most PR firms serve large companies, who can afford to wait for reporters to come to them. Startups need an active outbound strategy that's focused on reporter needs, and those needs revolve around satisfying their fact-checking editors and readers who want a good story.

I was a reporter for years, and I used to talk and write about it:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzcEIIxKcYncbUk2ZjRHS1hmQUk...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzcEIIxKcYncOHd4VTBrU29ObFE...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAWZBdLVj24

I wonder how the heft of larger PR companies fits with #3 “ Sourcing Mass Media News“[0]

-- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent#Five_fil...

I was at AWS for 6 years. Believe me if I tell you that Amazon's PR is very... unique, at least in the IT industry.

I shared some of my stories here, a while ago: https://medium.com/simone-brunozzi/f-ck-you-vs-thank-you-b25...

(and of course I could do that because I am no longer employed by AWS - I left in 2014).

Happy to hear your comments about it.

>A seemingly innocuous comment on my Facebook page managed to put me in serious trouble.

Given that, do you think there'll be issues with having this blog up?

Interesting blog post. Hope you learned an important lesson - DON'T "FRIEND" WORK PEEPS HIGHER UP THAN YOU.

Interesting. My experience with Amazon was very different from yours but I still noticed a very distinct culture of hero worship. Nobody ever criticized their superiors. Nobody ever called them out for doing something stupid. And no matter what, if someone at the VP/SVP level said something, even in passing, even without much seriousness at all, all their subordinates would jump on it as fast as possible. They said jump and you lost your hearing due to the chorus of "how high?!".

I wouldn't be surprised if your facebook friend said something in passing and not thought about it for more than a second or two, but because you made some intermediary look slightly bad in the eyes of their hero, you lost your potential for promotion. Sad. I hope you've moved on.

Thanks for sharing.

That said, I don't really get your examples or your message.

It sounds more like you got ensnared in a few things that could happen at any company. You acknowledge this in the end, but you also said:

  The more I worked at Amazon, the more I felt that certain aspects of its 
  culture were so toxic for me that I was barely able to keep going.

As to your examples, it doesn't sound like your situation was like the "Bonnie Situation" at all. Your PM asked you to source PR opportunities. You reached out to an event organizer. The organizer messaged your colleagues (without necessarily violating the NDA.) You got blowback because he followed up with your company's general PR channels. (Was there a mutual expectation that he only followup with you?) Unlike the "Bonnie Situation," you weren't pulled into trouble, you were the one shooting the gun. It sounds like you'd have no way to blame "Faras." Your choices (and bad luck) led to the blowback. It'd be on you and maybe flow up to your PM. Another key difference is that there isn't an attempted cover-up for reasons disproportionate to the severity of the crime.

Also, your example re: your FB post with (happy) swearing doesn't seem unjust, especially if you're (my assumption) using your FB profile to promote AMZN products. You're saying this incident tipped you away from getting a promotion. Respectfully, I doubt that's accurate.

Your first example doesn't make any sense. You were in trouble with manager A for following the instructions of manager B. That's not "constructive" or "destructive" it's simply a breakdown in communications.

One small piece of advice for anyone following along, make sure you have measurable retention before you reach out to the press. They will inevitably get you a huge boost in downloads and/or traffic, but if you don't have a sticky product, this will have the reverse effect of driving away customers that will be almost impossible to recover.

It is interesting how many products flame out with a bad initial press reception. That can be hard to recover from. But it even happens with big companies (see Google Glass).

That said, I think there is a balance, and getting that sort of feedback early on for what is typically a pretty small investment of time and energy in terms of PR can be immensely helpful. It can be a defining moment of understanding product/market fit, especially if you get any negative press that spells out exactly what you're doing wrong.

Negative press rarely spells out exactly what you're doing wrong, though. It can be helpful, sure, but PR is not a good tool to discover product/market fit for two reasons.

First, it is way, way too slow to iterate. Second, the press is not your customer.

While I agree the press is not your customer, I disagree that it is too slow or doesn't spell things out.

For starters, if the press doesn't like your product, odds are they will give some hints as to why. They may not spell out exactly what you should change, but they should give some hints as to why they are not happy (and it may not be what they say you should change).

In terms of speed, odds are you aren't going to get a massive press hit right off the bat. It will probably be some industry/niche blogs, local publications, etc. You only need a couple to start observing trends, and from there you iterate. Roll out the improvements, test it, and hell, even reach out to the reporters and ask if they like it better. It may get you follow-up press, and even if it doesn't, hopefully you'll get some useful feedback.

If you want paying customers, then yes, you need everything in place to capture them and retain them.

If you want attention from VCs, or to boost your personal brand, it's less important to have product/market fit, a scalable product, an optimized funnel, or even a published product.

Step 0 is to figure out why you want to do press outreach in the first place.

PR = Public Relations

That'd be nice if the title could be edited.

Yeah. I came here to read about pull requests.

Are there supposed to be pictures in the text, or is this just really bad layout?

They are supposed to be captured from a twitter feed.

As someone that works in the gray areas between dev teams, press, marketing and PR I can confirm there is good advice in this post so do read it.

Huh, I expected some useful information about making pull requests ...

same here

Lol same

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