Last night I attended the Boston Web Innovators meeting and loved the breakout panel “An Entrepreneur’s Guide To Bootstrapping PR” with Mike Troiano, Bob Brown, Scott Kirsner, Peter Kafka and Wade Roush. The one takeaway from the journalists on the panel: Journalists don’t like PR people.

Okay, I admit, that’s probably not fair. It’s not that they don’t like PR people, it’s that they don’t think that entrepreneurs should necessarily hire PR firms to get coverage from journalists. This created a little bit of controversy at a meeting where there were lots of PR folks in attendance, and there are several blog posts today defending PR for startups (A great wrapup of the event can be found on Mike Troiano’s blog here).

In This Corner: PR

It’s understandable that the PR pros in the room were upset that a panel of Boston’s most respected tech journalists told a room full of prospective clients that one of PRs biggest selling points (media coverage) is a sham. In fact, there were several times when a panelist would point out that PR people that promise coverage are simply liars.

Looking at the posts defending PR for startups, the general theme is this: PR is not just media relations. Bobbie Carlton posted her thoughts:

There was a lot of great information served up in the panel but if I was an entrepreneur, all I would have heard was, “Run away from PR people, they are useless to you.  In fact, probably worse than useless because top reporters look down on them as a breed.”

The reality is that PR = public relations and in today’s world the best PR people are skilled communicators who coach entrepreneurs as they think about how they communicate with their communities.  (All those words have “comm” as a root for a reason. )  The relevant skills found in a traditional PR tool kit include: excellent writing and communications skills, a broad understand of business and marketing,  an understanding of what makes a good story, and thus, what a community cares about.  Maybe you are calling it a Community Manager or Content Creator but it sounds like PR to me.

In This Corner: Journalists

I think it would really be easy to classify the debate here as Journalists hate PR and, like Bobbie said, you’re probably worse off hiring them, but that’s just lazy. Journalists don’t hate PR. They hate lame pitches. They don’t want to write about boring products that aren’t interesting to their readers.

And with the explosion of tech startups over the last, say, 10 years, just imagine how many coverage requests they get each day. When all those requests come from PR people using the machine gun coverage strategy of “pitch the story to anyone with an email address regardless of what they cover”, it’s pretty easy to start seeing all PR reps as evil monsters.

Let’s go to make believe land for a second. Pretend that there are thousands of 4 foot tall pink rabbits. They’re really fuzzy and cute looking, and you want to be friends with them. But every 80% of them run over to you and bite you. After a while, I think you’d probably shy away from 4 foot tall pink rabbits even though some of them just want to have a beer with you. In fact, you might even suggest to your friends that staying away from all pink rabbits is a good strategy.

The Takeaways

If you want journalists to cover your startup, there are some really idiot-simple things you should do:

  1. Select the right journalists for what you’re pitching. Find out who covers what you’re trying to get coverage for, then talk with them. In the panel, Wade Roush noted that he covers 4 specific story topics, and if your story doesn’t fit, you should probably find someone else.
  2. Connect with a hot trend. Journalists care about things like page views, so they’re much more likely to cover something that has a connection with a hot topic. Scott Kirsner’s blog gives the following advice: “My favorite columns capture something that is changing about the local innovation scene, for better or worse… useful lessons from the front lines for entrepreneurs…a trend that people are just starting to talk about, a new industry cluster emerging, an important new area of research…or an incredible story about success or failure.”
  3. Stories about people are always the most interesting. Even if you have the hottest new technology, if it doesn’t have a story about the people involved, it’s probably not all that interesting. When I worked at matchmine, we got Boston Globe coverage because we were backed by the Kraft family…..not because we had a cool recommendation engine.
  4. Make a personal connection with the journalist you are targeting. This was the one thing they all agreed on: the best way to get coverage is to get to know the journalist, have a compelling story that fits their coverage area, and be interesting.

In the end, it’s not that journalists flat-out despise PR, they just don’t want to be overwhelmed with lame pitches for boring products without an interesting story. It doesn’t matter if its a PR rep, the company’s CEO or a 4 foot rabbit…..if they’re pitching something the journalist doesn’t care about, they’re not going to waste their time.