Swedish Startups - How to get a write-up for your startup

Many startups are struggling with doing their own PR, and this can be a challenging task. Some tips on getting your media on.

In brief:

Why do some startups get articles published about them all the time? It has nothing to do with your PR agency. What makes your early stage venture interesting and tilts the media in your favor?  A pitch with exclusivity and currency. Exclusivity means you let the media know, right in the email header, that you are pitching them alone, one writer at a time with days inbetween. Currency is media speek for "story is relevant, current, and has enough element of (whatever) to interest our readers".

After you have made sure you have currency and exclusivity worked out, work on your pitch, have all relevant information together, including brief bios of the founders, one sentence description of your idea and what stage you are in, and any numbers you can share. In the press pack, make sure to  have a picture of your website, logo and development team. Do not send a PDF file, send a link to where the PDF can be downloaded and include all the text of the pitch as text in your email, starting with, you guessed it, exclusivity and currency.

How do you get  attention? Be interesting.  Having a great service or product that is newsworthy is all it takes for us.
But even if you cannot write good copy, at least have  a one page document that you put in the body of the email, a brief introduction.

Get an information page up on your site. With news.  Do not confuse microblogging about what you ate for lunch with valuable input on  your business.   I do not want to feed through your twitter feed to get an idea about what you do.

An editor is looking for relevant, exclusive and fresh information.  Help them by having it on your website. If you are in stealth mode, a press release, sent as a link in your email, is good.

You want to cover the following

• founders -brief bio
• geographic location
• age of company
• funding
• company idea
• any relevant numbers, like users, hits, posts, sales, and growth in percent

Early on, you want to decide who handles media relations and it should be on their todo list with at least once a week media pitch.  Make the pitches personal and offer exclusivity. And of course, this means you should not be clogging mailboxes for the same person with the same pitch! Follow this simple rule, a personal targeted exclusive story offered in a way of interest to the medium selected, and you are above 90 percent  PR persons out there, that love nothing better than to indiscreminately carpet bomb mailboxes with PDF press releases. Use the writer's first name!

A picture won't hurt. Having  a picture that represents your business model -infographic is good too  -everyone hates the boring screenshot. Eloqa did an infographic that really got great exposure, by adding value.  Videos are also good.

You would be surprised how many startups email me - "please feature us" without any relevant information!

Ok, we have the basics covered. Now let's discuss how we can make you more interesting.

The entrepreneurial saga is one that needs no extra romanticism - there is the challenge of all-nighters, being broke, eating bad food and risking sanity, all for that exhilarating rush. There are however key events that make a startup's chances to get media attention much larger. The big one is funding. But, my dear sir, says the reader, that's the big one because it happens so rarely! Surely there are other events in a  startups life worthy of attention. Indeed there are. The list of newsworthy factors is a long one. Does any of the founders have a track record? Are you donating time to help your community? Are you traveling to a convention? All of these are recent newspaper articles about small companies.

There are many books written on  the topic of Newsworthiness and countless more PR books. A great pitch case study at TechCrunch

Don't be an asshole, Deckard!

The following will make sure you don't get media attention

• Lier Lier, pants on fire! Lying about exclusivity. If you send an email promising exclusivity but it has CCs to multiple writers, you have made the biggest fail of your short and mathetic media manipulating carrer. Don't lie to professional liers, it gets you nowhere except the spamlist.
• Nobody likes a whiner. Being rude gets you nowhere fast. No, I won't explain why I did not write about your groupon clone, even though you emailed me 10 same press releases the same week!
• Call me, call me! Asking the media to call you as "a simple phonecall is so much more convenient to explain your genius idea". I am not a secretary looking forward to a half hour of rambling followed by putting your rambling in order!

It is up to you if you want to set aside time to read up on the topic or if it is better off being spent on more development. Thinking about your pitch to media early on could very well be the crucial factor. Or then again, maybe it's the product and the truth is in the pudding.