These publications are only relevant if you're building a tech business - eg one that sells to tech businesses or consumers. If you're doing anything else then these are worse than useless because they'll distract you from things that will help your company grow. Find the media that your potential customers read and target those publications and the journalists that write for them. Build relationships with them. Respond to their tweets. Tell them you liked reading their articles. Treat them like human beings. Then pester them for coverage.
Naughty Hack: When I was building UsableHQ I signed up for a free trial on http://muckrack.com/ and scraped the entries using http://import.io to build a target list of 'journalists who write about business tools or write for business publications'. It didn't really help us considering we failed, but it felt good and with more runway it may have been useful.
EDIT: Looking at Muckrack again it looks like they've killed off the free trial. Probably because of people like me. That's a shame. I'm sure the same idea would work on any other journalist database though.
I put together a (free) guide on how to find hundreds of emails for press contacts within your specific niche (or those of people writing about your competitors) and how to contact them (which is even more important).
I can get a list of 200 or so reporters who would be very interested in hearing about my product (and often have written about competitors), and send them (personalized) emails in a few hours. I usually get about 20 write-ups when I do it right.
The funny thing is that the truly mainstream publications (e.g. NYT, Time, CNN, etc.) no longer have such a high bar about what's interesting or meaningful to the world. Rather, they're already down on their knees losing impressions to Facebook and Twitter and the only thing they care about is "what has the potential to be forwarded like crazy on social media and generate impressions".
Time magazine decided on their own to feature one of my personal little embarrassingly-simple late night Arduino hacks, and my guess is only because I made a Youtube video out of it, and that it had good potential for a witty headline that could go viral on social media with its connection to something from popular literature that everyone knows. There was absolutely zero innovation in it as far as technology goes.
Tech publications, on the other hand, tend to have a higher bar in terms of content quality and meaning to society and the world, but mainstream, non-tech consumers don't read them.
Moral of the story is, if you want to get featured on the mainstream publications, make it catchy, witty, funny, fashionable, potentially viral on its own. Oh, and use technology to realize something well-known from fantasy, science fiction, or popular movies and you'll have an instant hit on mainstream media.
It's a good point - to some degree, you design not just for your customer, but for the distribution of the message. (This is also why packaging is underrated as a product in its own right.) Design the product so that it's self-explanatory in an image, and balancing against feature deep, include a feature that has a level of novelty.
If you're going to use Muckrack, you should pay for it.
HN users might be interested in knowing that Muckrack was built by Greg Galant, who brought us the excellent and free VentureVoice podcast, where he interviewed dozens of top startup founders:
http://www.venturevoice.com/library.html
Thank you! This, fwiw, is YC's general advice. Entreprenuers sometimes chase tech press because of Meerkat valuations and stuff, but getting customers is the real way to build a business.
I agree but at launch, I think it's good to take some time to chase coverage and then stop. Here's why:
- Search results. People will google your company, and if you lay some nice groundwork at launch, there will be descriptive google results from publications that the user has at least somewhat heard of. SEO doesn't hurt
- Logos. It's proven that having a few "as seen in" logos on your website sets yourself apart from the average SaaS/app people find. There's so much junk, it's nice to easily be able to set yourself apart as at least a mildly serious thing.
- The "Oh I've heard of them" effect- if enough people see your launch, there are now a lot of people in various networks who will say "oh I've heard of them" or "oh have you heard of?" when people are describing problems. This has an effect later on.
It's good to get these things out of the way, put some logos on your website, and establish yourself early as "not just another weekend side project" and put yourself into another tier in the users' mind. After that's done, be done with it - handle the leads that come in, get good feedback, go back to work and go find your actual customers where they actually are.
Agreed. That said, the right coverage can get you customers. You just need to be strategic about which media outlets you reach out to. I'd definitely would not recommend to reach out to all 300+ media outlets.
Next step for the site will be to allow you to filter it by type of audience, so if you're building a game for example you'd just see the gaming publications. Etc.
How did you find all of these outlets? I always find that in the aggregation era, it's very tricky to find everyone covering a topic, rather than just the top 2-3 people.
I wish there was something similar for the film world.
You probably are already aware, but your twitter counts are off. TechCrunch has followers in the millions, but indicated as non-million units. You might want to check your counts. Also, allow this to be sortable in this list view (understand that there is a Google doc on the back of this).
Yeah, there seems to be something funky going on with the Twitter followers. We currently use a Google Spreadsheet Script to fetch these numbers. Will have a closer look today!
As for sorting, I think it's a limitation of embedding a Google Spreadsheet. We'll probably move away from it shortly so we have more flexibility, but for now you can visit the document directly: http://edit.submit.co/
I can't actually get the link to load here so I can't evaluate the site itself.
But on a general note: Hire an agency and spend your time growing your business in other areas and stop doing your own PR.
A good agency will help you create the proper messaging to use from your business' strategy, make sure that the announcement newsworthy, and, frankly, likely already has rapport with journalists and knows what they need to write a good story -- this will make them more effective and more efficient than you at pitching your announcement.
The opportunity cost on the pitching alone is insane so, seriously, don't do your own PR.
Site might have been briefly down (perhaps a minute) when pushing some changes. Should be back up: http://submit.com/
As for delegating your PR I'm curious to hear on your personal experience with this. I generally do my own PR and it works out really well. Doesn't cost too much time either if you know what you're doing and at least the tech media prefer to deal with the founders directly. (I happen to be in the fortunate position that tech media actually cater to my customer group, so that's where my experience lies.)
If the community is interested, you can easily build a custom list of reporters based on keyword searching their articles or twitter accounts at www.BoloHQ.com; there is a 21 day free trial. We have 32,000 profiles, mostly of tech and gaming reporters. We ask people not build massive lists (or, ahem, scrape, as I see in a comment), but have a targeted approach to interested journalists and accordingly build a relationship. E.g., you're a food delivery startup search for that and see the authors that write most frequently, set an email alert, note relationships with colleagues and in general build a communications workflow, not just spam a list, only a small subset of whom may be interested in food delivery startups. Let me know what you think. Thanks.
I saw this on Product Hunt and immediately bookmarked it. I love the simplicity and the abundance of information contained within the site. Bravo! More more!
Thanks for noticing! I acquired the domain name a while ago. There must have been some suspicious content on it before. I have reached out to Bluecoat to see if they can reconsider.
Naughty Hack: When I was building UsableHQ I signed up for a free trial on http://muckrack.com/ and scraped the entries using http://import.io to build a target list of 'journalists who write about business tools or write for business publications'. It didn't really help us considering we failed, but it felt good and with more runway it may have been useful.
EDIT: Looking at Muckrack again it looks like they've killed off the free trial. Probably because of people like me. That's a shame. I'm sure the same idea would work on any other journalist database though.