Dogpatch Labs - San Francisco held a fun meetup last night with the topic of PR for Startups. The meeting was a fairly informal general Q&A session with prepared questions from Ryan Spoon and Mike Hirshland of Polaris Ventures, answered by Venture Beat's Anthony Ha and Techcrunch's Jason Kincaid.
My co-founder, Joe, makes a good point that the meeting did an awesome job of showing us that these journalists are real people. Not just faceless robots who don't act like the rest of us. In fact it was definitely good to see that they were truly trying to get the best stories and has the same frustrations as normal humans do. Biggest take-away from the Q&A session was to treat them like real people.
Some other things:
Don't use buzzwords when you pitch through emails. Buzzwords just makes your product even more ambiguous.
Talk about competitors as well to jumpstart your description. Sometimes it's better just to use a starting place, and then describe your differences and how you're better. It probably won't necessarily mean the competitor will be mentioned, just that the writer will understand you better and faster.
The pitch should be only a few sentences otherwise it's too complicated for the writers to wrap their heads around in the short amount of time they're able to read. It might be nice to include a really short video to your product, though I'd suggest at least telling them it's only 1 minute long.
Timing is important! 48 hours before a launch is a good time to make first contact with a writer. As soon as possible when you raise a substantial round of funding, and if you put out a feature that isn't just awesome for existing users, but something really cool for people who have never heard about your product.
Feature pitches should be strategic. Don't try to get press for features that only make existing users excited. If it's something that will really draw other people who have never used your product, then it's worth pitching.
There's a ton of other things you can do, but just talk to them like real people, and treat them nicely! They're not out to get you, they're just doing their jobs. Hopefully your product will speak for itself.
Here are a few photos from the event:
