Ask HN: Should startups do PR?

20 points·abarrera··7 comments

I'm conducting a survey for my startup, Press42.com to see how startups interact with the press/bloggers. I would love to get the input from the HN community: http://press42.com/survey

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See these useful posts by Daniel Tenner:

http://swombat.com/2011/1/24/how-to-PR-firms-startups

http://swombat.com/2011/2/4/attention-seeking-for-startups

A technique that I think works very well for startups is to find an api in the area of your startup and slice and dice the data into some nice infographpic. Serve it up to smaller blogs that love the free information. You're just giving them what they want and building an initial relationship, if they don't actually post your data it's fine, but they'll always be happy you sent it to them.

Then just do it again, slicing from a different angle and present it to the blogs again. Once you have data posted somewhere, it's time to move on to guest posts. Use the data that was posted to ask a different blog if for your next data slice you can exclusively present the data as a guest post. They'll love this, though you'll need to write the article first before they actually agree.

Rinse and repeat the system farther up the blog, local news, online news entity, radio, TV totem pole.

Very true! A lot of bloggers tell me it's a matter of telling a story, let it be about data or something else :)

See. This Q&A is useful to you. http://www.quora.com/Is-the-press-release-really-dead?q=pres...

@VSerge, I think question #3 is meant to be interpreted as "Are you doing either of the following?".

check your Q 3, seems like the answer shouldn't be a yes/no

You're definitely right, I just updated it.

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