Anatomy of blekko's press launch | Hacker News Reader

Anatomy of blekko's press launch

skrenta.com

52 pointsjsrfded27 comments

The Mashable piece alone received more than 1,400 retweets.

How many of those 1400 retweets are just bots automatically retweeting anything coming from Mashable? The dark secret of twitter marketing is that the number of tweets can be so misleading because of the bot activity. You'll also see a ton of twitter bots when you get coverage on RWW, and I'm sure others.

And yes, I've actually watched live coverage of articles I'm interested in (e.g. covering my sites) spread and checked out most tweets that came up. It's quite easy for a human to spot a bot vs real user tweeting once you look at their twitter stream. Most are bots.

btw, when the WSJ broke our embargo, I was on my way into the office. We were planning to get there around 3-4pm for the 9pm PT launch. Some folks were already there and turned the site live since the first press had gone up.

But techcrunch has a policy of not posting their story if an embargo is broken, so we didn't get the TC story that we had briefed them on.

So what's the news on how/why the WSJ broke the embargo? What was their excuse?

(I'm posting a comment I initially was privately drafting for ryan in an email.)

I posted the article - and included the embargo paras, which my co-founder and I nearly cut - because I thought the backstory would be useful/interesting to the folks there, who seemed to be unaware of the pr process during the prerelease of blekko. I wanted to open that up for them.

Your comment was spot-on good advice for the ycomb co's though. I voted it up.

Really irked that wsj broke our embargo. Irritated that I wasn't in the office when our site went live after 3.33 years, irritated that we didn't get to do the last bug-fix push to production, irritated that I knew TC wouldn't post, irritated that other journos would be irritated with me, irritated that it flatted the temporal curve on the launch pop. And for what?

Time-sync on stories is actually a good thing for the news stream. I don't see why journos don't get that.

FYI, The Wall Street Journal stopped honoring embargoes last year. Your PR firm knew this.

Jason, to be fair so did TechCrunch but you still honor embargoes often. Glass houses, ya know.

This is true, though to my knowledge if we agree to an embargo (as in, you ask, I actually say "Yes" as opposed to you just blasting a press release to my inbox) then we don't generally break them. At least that's my policy.

Not saying you lie about honoring them (I can personally say you never have lied to me about it), just that a public "we don't honor embargoes" stance isn't always a valid indictment.

PR makes me yearn for the simple, honest world of SEO.

TechCrunch goes one step further. Often Arrington will get the PR firm handling the press release to allow them to publish their story a solid 10 minutes before anyone else. If the embargo is set for 9pm PST, TechCrunch often shoots for 8:50 and most of the time they are allowed. As a result, they break the story and get a ton of inbound traffic.

Not sure why anyone would shamelessly downvote me. I wasn't lying. This sort of thing happens every night.

Just look at Brightcove 5's launch that happened a few hours ago (9pm PST). TC posted their story at 8:50pm, everyone else followed at 9pm PST.

Interesting that he specifically calls out their PR firm as being good. Seems that most of the advice I've seen lately goes in the other direction, eschewing a PR firm entirely in favor of more guerrilla-style marketing.

I think in the end, like most other things, it depends on the type of company you're trying to build. In Blekko's case they're trying to build a search engine, so they want to get as much mainstream press as possible. Someone like GitHub, for example, with a much more technical and focused user base, did just fine by going to conferences and buying developers free drinks.

As a journalist who agreed to Blekko's embargo, I'll give you my take. Very few companies can get journalists to agree to an embargo. Most startups don't have the luxury. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Zynga, Foursquare can do it. It's a question of importance and dilution. When you agree to an embargo, you don't know how many other sites you are competing against and you judge whether it's important enough to cover even if you don't get much interest in your version of the story.

Blekko, as a well-funded entrant with great tech cred trying to bust into a very interesting and nearly monopolized field, clearly counted.

If you are smaller and don't have that buzz, you don't have that luxury. Depending on your size and market, you don't need a PR firm (a good PR advisor is worthwhile). For many companies, it's better to figure out the place and writer you really want to cover you and offer an exclusive. You can then get follow-on press from other places by offering them untold angles -- especially ones that that writer or place would be interested in.

As a journalist, I hate embargoes, even as I understand why and how they are useful.

But the best advice I can give is not to think of blogs/publications as simply places to exploit. Writers can smell that from far off. Learn to cultivate relationships. Be a source. Critique our stories. Suggest trend stories and cool stuff other people are working on. Ask to talk off the record when you meet us at events and conferences. Learn to speak openly and honestly on the record.

In turn, you'll likely find writers you like. Writers will tell you things off the record (things we can't print) and are people who may write about you not just in this venture, but in your next. Writers are, like you, part of the tech ecosystem.

Did you actually have a specific written agreement with the WSJ not to publish until Monday?

Because they (admirably, IMHO) have a policy of disregarding these ridiculous one-sided embargo agreements. If you want them to hold back on a story, you have to ask them FIRST. You can't just spam them a press release that says pretty please don't publish this yet on the top.

Typically the only exception is if you're giving them an exclusive (and, again, you need to get that in writing before you send them your top secret press release)

Really excellent article. A launch is way more than just pushing a site from dev to production.

why do search engine launches get such enormous press attention?

1. Search is hard and fascinating. 2. There's built-in conflict. Google is a huge near-monopoly. Journalists and their readers love conflict. It's the heart of any good story. 3. Most of the time, building a general purpose search engine requires a really substantial amount of capital and technical expertise. That means there's big risk involved. This ups the drama quotient. See #2 (DDG being a very big outlier here).

Don't forget the institutional imperative: Google is a competitive threat to people who buy ink by the barrel. Anything that takes them down a peg is newsworthy. See also Facebook, who do not have the "we're do-gooders, leave us alone" PR shield that Google assiduously cultivates.

Actually, I think that's wrong. A very small number of media owners think that. And even they did, they'd have to think that search in general, not just Google is the threat.

Anyone writing about tech and especially those writing digitally knows that search drives tons of traffic. And no tech reporter I know would ever take direction on coverage from the business side of their publication.

Blekko got written about because they are a great story.

I don't think DuckDuckGo has received the same amount of coverage, actually, so I'm not sure all search engine launches get such enormous productivity.

Who was their PR agency and what is the ballpark fee to coordinate a launch like this?

Sutherland Gold, a small boutique agency that represents, among others, TheFind.com. No idea on their price.

I haven't yet had a chance to work with SG, but they are great people and would be my first choice if I were hiring a PR firm.

I used to work at SutherlandGold and would be happy to make an intro for any companies that are interested in talking with them. Email in profile.

(In case anyone is curious, I have absolutely 0 financial stake in the business so I will not make a dollar wether you hire them or not, just offering to help if anyone is interested)

Can you give a ballpark range on prices?

Like anything, it depends. I'd rather not say too much about SG's pricing publicly (since I don't work there and don't speak for them) but it's similar to other agencies in the same market. Ballpark, that means 10k-30k depending on your company's reputation, the scope of work, which people from the agency are on your team and compensation structure.

You don't really pay a whole lot more for higher quality agencies (I could go into theories on why but will save that for another post). Companies almost never hire bad agencies because they can't afford good ones. Far more often it's because they don't know how to find (or identify) the good ones or because the good ones don't want to work with them (it's a big risk to an agency's reputation to take on a bad client).

If anyone wants to email me I'd be happy to go into more detail privately. If you have any general PR questions that aren't agency-specific (hiring agencies, hiring consultants, how PR can be successful, etc), I'd be happy to answer those publicly.

Edit: In case anyone is curious, other YC companies SG has worked with are Xobni (I worked on this account), Scribd (I worked on this account too), Loopt, Zumodrive and maybe others I'm forgetting.

Usually a retainer at $10K+ a month, and usually more for a launch like this depending on the number of resources you need.

Some smaller firms may take a lower retainer, take stock or defer payments. It all depends - but ~$10k is average.

People have different opinions, but I believe that with a startup, especially in the early years, the CEO has to be actively involved in PR. You should build relationships with bloggers who cover your space and/or have an interest in your company. If you do this well, it is worth more than any amount of money you will spend on a PR agency (it will also give your company a more authentic voice, rather than a dozen re-bloggers regurgitating your releases).

In the case of Blekko, their PR agency would have contacted all the media outlets, setup the briefing times, but together the release and then followed up with each reporter. There is a lot that can go wrong, and it usually does. The blekko PR team should have known that with so many outlets covering this launch, the chances of somebody breaking the embargo and pissing off the other outlets was near 100%.

I sat through tons of briefings at TC, and when a blogger asks who else is covering the launch, you can gauge pretty quickly if the embargo is going to be broken or not. It is so frustrating when an embargo is broken, because you put the work in only for it to be wasted - and there are no repercussions for anybody breaking an embargo, which is why TC simply threw them out. It is a complicated world with a lot of internal industry politics between outlets, firms and companies and a good PR firm should be able to guide you through that (but most don't).

If you have a product launch coming up and you are trying to decide if you need PR or not, try emailing one or two bloggers now and let them know you have a launch coming up in 2-3 weeks (or whenever) and see the reaction. If you get nothing, you might need help with your messaging (the attention span of a blogger with an inbound cold email is around 7 seconds - so you need to be snappy). If you get interest, then handle it yourself and get to know the industry, which will be very important for you in the long-term (and something you should do even if you do have PR).

You should also be building your own profile with the company blog and perhaps your own personal blog. If you become a source of stories or links for a blogger you will find it easier to get your own stories out (quid pro quo).

If you need some tips feel free to email me (email in profile) - I both spent a long time at TC and in startups before that, and startup again now.

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