Getting Big Coverage: Opening the Door a Bit More

Friend and former client Phil Libin got some great "ink" this weekend with a wonderful New York Times piece featuring his company, Evernote.

Despite the fact that I talk about social media quite often, I do believe that media relations remains an important arrow in the PR quiver. The catch, however, is that because of the current environment, getting high-level coverage is more difficult than ever. Fewer reporters means that more companies are fighting for fewer spaces in fewer stories.

This particular piece, written by Damon Darlin, focuses on the concept of giving away product for free with the hope of gaining revenue later. It's a concept that's been around for quite a while, but has gained traction most recently thanks to Chris Anderson's recent book Free.

In Evernote's case, Phil went into great detail about how Evernote planned to make money, providing the reporter with an inside look at how many people have tried Evernote (1.4 million in 18 months, 4500 each day), how many walk away (75 percent) and how many users remain active (500,000).

He then goes on to outline the conversion rate to paid customers (4 percent after a year using the service) and even revenue for July ($79,000).

Most companies balk at releasing this kind of information. When reporters have asked my clients in the past about financials, often the answer was a simple "we're a private company and we don't release that information." Most companies have a long list of good reasons for refusing to provide this data, but for a reporter looking for a good story, the details are extremely important. If a company can provide them, the payoff could be huge.

This is a case in point.

New York Times: Hey , bloggers matter too!

The New York Times devotes quite a bit of space today to the changing face of PR in Silicon Valley. Not the whole tech sector, mind you. They avoid talking about the outlying areas like, oh, say, Boston, New York, Austin, Seattle, San Diego and the Research Triangle.

Regardless, the piece breathlessly follows PR execs who, shock of shocks, pitch people other than the A-list "journalists" such as the Times itself, Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, etc. Instead, the PR folks pitch bloggers and social media influencers.

Instead, [Publicist Brooke Hammerling] decides that she will “whisper in the ears” of Silicon Valley’s Who’s Who — the entrepreneurs behind tech’s hottest start-ups, including Jay Adelson, the chief executive of Digg; Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter; and Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.

Notably, none are journalists.

This is the new world of promoting start-ups in Silicon Valley, where the lines between journalists and everyone else are blurring and the number of followers a pundit has on Twitter is sometimes viewed as more important than old metrics like the circulation of a newspaper.

So nice that the Times is now only 2 years behind.

The fact is, the new PR needs to be about creating content, not just pushing it. Hammerling touches on this briefly when she points out that when she represented Flickr back in 2004 The Times touches on this briefly in referencing the 2004 PR program for Twitter headed up by Donna Sokolsky Burke, co-founder of Spark PR: "she never issued a press release for it, even when it was acquired by Yahoo. Flickr would publish news on its company blog, a few more blogs would pick it up 'and two days later, BusinessWeek would call,' she recalls."

In all, the story paints a picture of PR that's straight out of Sex in the City. Attractive women partying up a storm and hobnobbing with the who's who of influencers. It also talks about measurement in terms of followers and number of Twitter mentions, but gives short shrift to metrics such as "traffic driven" or "conversion rates."

In all, the view of PR portrayed in the piece is still about pitching and about having other people tell your story, but less focused on creating a story built on your own content.

There is so much more to do in the trenches, even here in the hinterlands.

Isn't the New York Times Already Pretty Social?

You can read all about the New York Times new social media editor nearly everywhere today. Or, you can just follow Jennifer Preston on Twitter and hear from her directly. Of course, there's the original memo announcing her new role, the CJR article telling us, um... not much, and Mike Volpe's on target criticism of her hiring, pointing out that a single person can't do it all, that social media needs to extend through out an organization. Though, to be fair, when I read the original memo I felt that her hiring was as much an internal educational move as an external outreach play.

All that being said, if all Preston takes away from this job is a few ideas from the peanut gallery like creating standardized hashtags for breaking news, then I'd call this a failed experiment.

Isn't the Times already a pretty good community? They have content, people who come to read the content and the ability for people to comment on that content. In fact, they have multiple communities, not just the readers but also the various communities they cover. Shouldn't the Times be working to galvenize those communities and strengthen them, rather than simply trying to Tweet more?

The Times, and other newspapers, should start inviting their readers to be editors. Their model should be Facebook, letting people interact and use the information as the basis of that interaction. I touched on this concept back in 2005, but I think it's much more important now.

The social media world has taught us that people follow people, but that organizations such as the New York Times and its more localized sibling the Boston Globe command trust and respect from their readers. They need to build on that, but also let the people have a say.

And not just on Twitter.

Gatehouse and Boston.com Reach Agreement

The New York Times Company and Gatehouse Media have reached an agreement on the tussle over whether Boston.com violated fair use in how it links to Gatehouse stories. This is something that has had media watchers on edge for quite a while.

No word yet on what the agreement is, exactly. In fact, the story on the Wicked Local site right now comes from the AP.

Blurring the line between distribution and competition

An interesting article in yesterday's New York Times talked about the arrest of a producer of "mixed tapes." That is, a DJ who puts together mixes of different pieces from different rap artists and then sells those through vendors.

I didn't realize the extent to which these played a role in the rap and hip hop communities, but according to the article this is a vital part of the viral marketing employed by many record labels.

The article is worth a read. But it also brings to the forefront an increasingly touchy issue: where does a distribution channel and and competition begin? Back when I bought vinyl records and dropped a few of my favorite songs onto an analog cassette for friends, the record industry never blinked an eye. But now that I can share more of my music library more easily, the record companies want it stopped.

The same goes for the news industry. The other day I heard a Boston Globe editor talk about how the bloggers help the Globe get news distributed, since most point back to articles (just as I did for the Times in this entry). He's right.

But I wonder what happens when certain blogs raise in stature. I edit a "Placeblog" called The Garden City, which has picked up quite a bit of interest lately given a local election about building a new high school. The local paper also has a blog, but it doesn't have the same number of contributors, though it often has more reporting behind it. We link to each other's stories, but are we, at some level, in competition? Where is that line?