Getting Buzz: From 0 to (maybe) Forbes in under a week | Hacker News Reader

Getting Buzz: From 0 to (maybe) Forbes in under a week

kyro.posterous.com

81 pointsmariorz41 comments

Personally, I liked your article. It was informative and showed some of the interesting ways in which you use the medium to generate interest. Some of the methods are questionable, but you achieved your goal, and were kind enough to share it with us. A follow up post about the money generated from sales would be interesting.

Where you crossed the line: "Most of them were along the lines of 'Breaking: cure to swine flu found [link to shirt]".

This is spam, black hat, whatever you want to call it.

You got 90% of the buzz machine figured out. Now you need to learn how to play it ethically.

Compare with my version of "0 to AP under a week": http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/02/27/make-your-way-to-the...

Good Hackers have ethics.

Spam? Black hat? Do you even use Twitter? I'd advise you to go conduct a Twitter search for any given trend, and return with an assessment of the value those results carried. I'm wiling to bet that you'll find a good 99.9% of what you find to be 'spam.'

What I did was no different than what you see on television when you hear 'the cure to weight loss is here!' It's tapping into the human psyche and appealing to a very irrational part of the human mind. Just like how Apple markets their products as 'these will make you look hip instantly!' Sure, you could argue that because it was swine flu, I was dealing with a more sensitive and morally weighty issue, but I'm sure more people die every year of obesity, etc. And to be fair, the name of my account, flushirts, and the shirt linked, shirts that said 'oinkment' or 'theraswineflu,' did provide some context to those tweets.

You are more than justified in arguing that other things I did can be perceived as unethical. My use of Twitter, however, was not. I used it to directly communicate with those who were discussing a topic I happened to be catering to. And the 'Breaking:..' tweets were just a way to grab attention amidst a society in an irrational and unnecessary panic. That's how some marketing works. That's how Apple conducts its marketing, believe it or not, as subtle as it may be.

The use of twitter to interact directly with users that are interested in your space, I approve and recommend completely. It's one of the highlights of your post.

I'm objecting very specifically to announcing a cure for swine flu. I couldn't care less if 99% of the world uses those sames tactics. In my book, they are wrong.

And yes, I have been exposed to Apple marketing for quite a while now (~1985) :-)

So to get buzz I have to post hidden links, tweet sensational headlines, and lie to popular blogs?

Count me out.

Like I mentioned, this was really nothing more than an experiment. I certainly would not have done that if I was trying to generate buzz for a legitimate company. These were the efforts of a broke college student who thought it interesting to see if he could ride the swine flu hysteria. And to a certain extent, I was able to ride it. It was a great learning experience.

I have to reiterate the grandparent poster's point... The tactics you used might be great to generate buzz in one week, but they would suck to generate buzz over 6 months, because once everyone finds you're basically abusing forums for your SEO, lying to journalists, and spamming twitter, they won't want to deal with you on principle.

So this works for a throw-away company that you don't care about. That said, I'm doubtful of the wisdom of linking your name to it publicly like this. You only have one reputation...

It depends greatly on what your motives are. If you want to sleep well at night you're absolutely right. If you want to start a successful business it's not so clear cut.

I know that this is a sensitive point, particularly on HN where people tend to judge companies by the merits of their pproducts and not on their ability to market them, but cheating gets results. It's of course a fine line, but if you don't get caught and attract new customers then it's good for business.

Sad as it may be, if you want to make serious money you often have to do things you wouldn't normally do, including black-hat SEO, promising more than you can deliver and squeezing your competitor by spreading FUD and rumors.

I'm not saying that this is the only way to do business, and there are many examples of companies with an impeccable moral record that are doing well. But the bottom line is that shady tactics work if you don't get caught. And more often than not you don't.

Please, just say the dollar figure already.

If it's in the hundreds, you don't have to be too embarrassed.

I'm afraid you'll have to wait for the Forbes article.

...Which may involve "embellished" numbers right?

That's a bit cynical. The only reason he'd do such a thing would be to increase buzz.

Demanding a dollar amount and judging marketing campaign's effectiveness at this early stage in the game is pointless. If (s)he made, say, $250 up until this point, that could potentially grow to $2,500 in 2 weeks or $25,000 in in 2 months, all as a result of the same campaign.

The SEO from the influx of new links is just kicking in, the public awareness of the products needs to sink in, customer base is still unstable, etc.

Success or failure at this point is just... unknown.

Isn't this what social hacks are about? To use the dynamics/mechanisms of the system to your own advantage.

Many people have a gleeful need to be mischievous; but they also feel bad about it, and so they immediately reveal their mischief, well, gleefully.

Note that this hackernews post - and your reply - increases the publicity. But on what basis could anyone possibly object to his tactics anyway?

http://flushirts.spreadshirt.com http://flushirts.spreadshirt.com http://flushirts.spreadshirt.com http://flushirts.spreadshirt.com http://flushirts.spreadshirt.com http://flushirts.spreadshirt.com http://flushirts.spreadshirt.com http://flushirts.spreadshirt.com http://flushirts.spreadshirt.com http://flushirts.spreadshirt.com (I'm not him, just making a point)

  But on what basis could anyone possibly object to 
  his tactics anyway?

Because those tactics selfishly add to the massive pile of bullshit we have to deal with every day.

[edit: not very constructive of me, true. But really, I think that's a pretty good objection.]

This is my just deserts: yesterday I took someone to task for not being clear because they were being ironic (or possibly not); and today I am being ironic, and my meaning was not understood.

From my point of view, I can't see how you (and 6 net upvoters) could possibly have misunderstood me when I follow it by spamming the forum and add "just making a point".... and that's the essential communication problem of irony. Lesson learnt. HackerNews, I salute you for requiring my principled integrity.

That's a 'lol', I never suspected.

Maybe it's more indicative of the types of statements we've come to expect here, at least I've read a few things here over the past week or so that have left me puzzled about the community, so your dry statement seemed a bit more like par for the course.

It was meant to be horror, not humour, in the spirit of Swift's "A Modest Proposal" to eat Irish babies. Actually, many people took him at face value too, so maybe I'm not doing so bad.

Yes, I feel that HN has seemed a bit more like reddit over the past week or so.

Thank goodness HN links are embedded with the 'nofollow' tag.

I'm pretty sure having links with the same color as the background can get your site penalized. Just put your link in your signature. Or edit the post a day later.

surely all forum links are no-follow?

There's a surprising number that aren't no-follow.

I think this is the power of twitter - to be able to hear word of mouth, and influence it. Like any communication, it doesn't need to be done in a misleading way.

This might be partly why twitter gets so much mainstream press/TV: it is a good thing for their advertisers.

The fellas from Heyzap seem to have timed their SwineFighter similarly and were mentioned in that same Techcrunch post. I wonder how much their marketing experience parallels that of kyro.

The tactics employed in that post are pretty much the reason I hate "search engine optimizers", "search engine marketers", et al. They're also the reason I end up on Hacker News instead of Digg and Reddit; people who expend so much energy trying to game the system end up ruining it.

While the author may have made a quick buck, they did so at the cost of their customer's trust and their own credibility. Once lost, they're impossible to regain. I think the author should follow Seth Godin or Gary Vaynerchuck for a while and learn the value of honest, permissions based marketing.

Interesting article. Even more interesting are the reponses with regard to your 'black hat' tactics of generating the buzz. There's no such thing as 'bad publicity', right?

I myself have been wondering how to generate some buzz around my own fun side-project: http://www.tjetter.com - a site that allows you to chat with random strangers, as well as read (and replay) all conversations that take place at that very moment... Not sure whether applying your tactics should be the way to proceed. Suggestions?

http://www.tjetter.com/#3jsK

Are you the one complaining about the 'godawful red'? :)

Anyway, suggestions on how to generate some buzz around this concept?

It's extremely sad to see how much investigation effort is done nowadays behind stories. More stories is not always better.

Blog comments almost certainly don't help with SEO, since every major platform uses the rel=nofollow on them. Forums may not have that, but most of them are poorly indexed by search engines (if at all) so those likely weren't much help either.

I'm not sure entirely fabricating a 'leak' is what Arrington meant when he said 'create a story'. Such advice from journalists (and I've been one) usually means 'give me some angle, give me some reason to write about you' not 'make stuff up'. :|

Sure, and I'm not saying he was advocating that. I'm just trying to show that I took his advice, fabricated or not, in giving them an interesting story - something beyond your usual 'hey, we made this cool site, please write about us.'

Why aren't there any women's t-shirts on the site?

I thought this was going to be a really interesting article leading to some amount of dollars. Unfortunately, it climaxed with a call from a (nameless) Forbes reporter.

I suggest you delete this post, and stop telling people about the secrets of SEO you learned from a t-shirt site.

Better yet, write a follow-up post saying how successful you were.

Well, firstly, I didn't submit this. Secondly, I thought this might serve to benefit some people who have trouble with marketing by explaining my own story and how I utilized every day resources. And thirdly, I could have very well posted the name of the reporter, but wasn't sure if that was proper etiquette.

You clearly knew what your readers were interested in knowing... so why choose not to say the amount, and instead say you got a call from someone in Forbes? Can you please tell me why the last sentence in your article says you made a nice sum of cash, instead of listing a dollar figure?

Call me a cynic, but I'd guess that the dollar amount you made would have seriously detracted from the veracity of your article. Maybe after Forbes covers your shirts, the figure will be worth sharing...

In the mean time, let me offer some words of advice to the entrepreneurs who might be misled by this article. The way to a successful product isn't a sham-wow with a trendy swine flu t-shirt site - the way to success is to focus on serving your users, and making your product better.

Tell me... did Posterous get to the level of success it has today with the tactics of making swine flu shirts? Maybe you have a more interesting story to share.

The point is not abt making-flu-shirts-is-bad attitude. It's about creating publicity for a product/service.

Here, Kyro makes shirts and he made special flu shirts when flu was the buzz. There's nothing wrong abt it.

The method of publicity and the product/service are connected. It's not like Mozilla selling flu-tshirts because they want to spread the browser. It's spreadshirts making flu shirts because they want to spread the word that they make shirts

'Misled by this article.'

I hope you do realize that I wasn't trying to build a company for the long haul. I'm not telling entrepreneurs to market their products in a sham-wow way. I wrote that in an attempt to inspire entrepreneurs by letting them know that all they need are the tools they are given and their creativity to generate buzz. This was mostly a response to the submissions I've seen in the past where people complain about how hard it is to get attention for their product. That SEO is still worth something. That Twitter can prove to be an invaluable tool. And that creating an interesting story is the way to get blogged.

I'm not trying to build the next Apple, man. This was clearly a gimmick I whipped up in no time and tried to push to the limit given the resources I have and no money.

Also, in response to your last line, PlentyofFish comes to mind.

I don't think anyone would argue with the fact that success ultimately depends on having a great product and providing great customer service.

I think this highlights an important point: the best product in the world will fail without customers and awareness. This point is clearly fundamental but one easily missed by hackers living inside their products.

I've intentionally put zero marketing and promotion into my startup as I'm completing a full-time undergraduate degree and can't provide high quality customer service to a large customer base. The product is great in so far as those that use it (about a dozen) love it. But since no-one knows of it, the customer base barely stays in double figures.

The end result is interesting and the process is worth noting. The tactics used to generate the buzz may be questionable in places. Change the implementation as per any ethical concerns and you have an interesting buzz-generating framework starting point.

This is a tad off topic but I can’t help myself because this attitude drives me crazy. I will never understand people who think "I don’t like something so it should be taken down"

The web and blogs in particular provide a system for documenting different perspectives. So even if someone is wrong their post provides insight into why people believe something that is incorrect. Plus it might inspire someone else to write a thoughtful post explaining why the idea was wrong which makes it even more valuable.

Bottom Line is, imho, every piece of thoughtful information increases the value of the system as a whole.

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