Quick follow-up on the last post about Twitter. Last week, RedWriteWeb published some good tips about pitching them, including one related to Twitter. Marshall wrote:

“Sending a Direct Message from Twitter just ends up being another email. I tell myself, “I’ll look at that later.” How about a public Tweet that says “I’ve got news about a new ad platform targeting seniors on mobile browsers! DM me if you want it under embargo.” We’ll jump on that, because that’s the kind of thing we eat up over here. “

I agree. Use Twitter for what’s it does best, public dissemination of your news. A Direct Message on Twitter isn’t much different from an email, and hey, that’s why we have email. When I wanted to actually “pitch” reporters, I would send them personalized notes via email. If you’re like me and pitch 20+ beat writers at daily papers all over the country, the number of personalized emails you have to send quickly gets big. But that’s what pitching is all about, and Twitter ain’t for pitching.

Your goal in using Twitter for PR should be three things: #1 participate in the day-to-day industry conversation (you might just get quoted), #2 announce the “small wins,” that don’t merit a press release or a full pitch (it might just get picked up as news), and #3 over time, come to be seen as a knowledgeable source in your industry (so journalists will seek you out).

Update: Wow, Twitter’s a hot topic over at RWW… great follow-up post about how they use Twitter for journalism. Indeed, they’re looking for breaking news there. But understand the difference between pitching via Twitter (which they guide against), and using it as a way to disseminate your news. If you’re breaking something really cool, you might want to reach out to RWW personally a bit before you do the big push, then put it on Twitter the minute you post it on your blog or when your, ahem, press release goes live.  Think of it as a second chance: even if journalists ignore your pitch initially, putting it on Twitter gives them an opportunity to write about it while it’s still newsworthy. Of course, this hinges on giving journalists a good reason to follow you.

Agree? disagree?  Follow me on Twitter: jeb512

As every entrepreneur knows, speed is your friend.  There are few online services better at that than Twitter (when it’s up anyway).  Since it’s such an incredible platform for finding and disseminating news, I highly recommend you take a look at using Twitter as a PR vehicle.  I’ve compiled a few rules to consider before you start.   

1. If you have a personal Twitter account, start a new one for professional contacts.  This is marketing 101, but it’s a question of audience.  Don’t confuse your professional contacts who are following Mike-the-CEO with your friends and family who are following Mike-The-Guy-Who-Won-Last-Weekends-Drinking-Contest. That doesn’t mean your professional tweets have to be stiff and corporate, but there’s a line (think Linkedin versus Facebook).
2. Your tweets should be from you personally, so choose a Twitter id that reflects your name, not your company.  Think about it: would you rather follow “AppleCorporation” or “SteveTheAppleGuy.” People want their news from the CEO.
3. Get as many friends on Twitter as you can… put your Twitter id in your email signature, on your blog, your Linkedin profile.  Let Twitter troll your email accounts to find your existing friends who are on Twitter.  Follow them, and hopefully they’ll follow you.
4. Follow everyone who you like, respect, and matters.  As Scoble points, out, “the more people [you] follow, the smarter [you] get.” 
5. Follow journalists who cover your space (this may work better (or not) in tech).  You can find out what’s top of mind for them and add value when appropriate, or maybe react quickly with a relevant pitch, or both.
6. If you blog, announce your blog posts on Twitter.
7. Announce minor new features, upgrades, service downtime, hardware upgrades, and other helpful news about your company on Twitter.  Twitter is great for announcing the “small wins” that aren’t worthy of press releases, but are interesting and cool.
8. Twitter about things that matter to your company: new laws that suck, cool blog posts that support your vision of the future, blog posts that get it wrong.  Take a stand and give your tweets a point of view.
9. Remember, your tweets are more or less public, and cannot be undone, so exercise some basic caution about what you want “on the record.”  If you wouldn’t want it printed in tomorrow’s WSJ…
10. Billy Goat Tavern is a bar in Chicago known as a hang out for the city’s top journalists.  A barfly there could easily stay on top of the news by sitting around all day and chatting up the regulars.  But Twitter may not be that watering hole for your industry.  If Twitter isn’t a place your industry tends to hang out, decide if that’s just because you’re ahead of the curve or because your industry may never adopt Twitter.  Effective entrepreneurship is all about the right action at the right time.

PS: I know I skipped right past any explanation of Twitter, so if you’re wondering, “What is Twitter?” here’s the best video I’ve found to answer that question.   Keep in mind it’s from the perspective of the general Twitter user, so hopefully this post helps you adapt the key ideas for use in a business/public relations context.

Lately I’ve had some conversations with folks about Austin’s, shall we say “weak environment” for consumer web startups.  I actually think Austin is doing OK… (maybe not as well as Silicon Valley and Seattle, but not too bad all things considered).  I like to think I’m up-to-date on what’s going on in Austin, but lately it seems like I’m discovering more and more Austin consumer web companies. So I’m creating a big list to keep track of them all. Email me if you know about more and I’ll add them to the list. Also, check out AustinStartup.com.

ApartmentHomeLiving.com
ApartmentRatings.com
Babblesoft
Bazaarvoice
BedandBreakfast.com
Bones in Motion
Creditcards.com
Dwellgo.com
eSessions.net
Expertvillage.com
Giganews
Golfsmith
Homeaway.com
Indeed.com
Itaggit.com
Mindbites
Minggl
Naturallycurly.com
Otherinbox.com
Peoplepad
Pickaprof.com
Pluck
QikCom
Qipit
QuickGifts.com
RottenNeighbor.com
Shangby
Slacker
UCareer.net
Uship.com

The next High Tech Happy Hour is Thursday 4/17 at Hi-Lo at 6th & Lavaca.

UPDATE: New listings

7 Billion People
DadLabs
Dream Jobs
Edioma.com
KeyIngredient.com
POPHoundz.com
RateGenius
Snap Pages
Texas Hunt & Fish
VolunteerSpot.com
Voyant
WeAreTeachers
WiredReach
Wowio.com

I’m a recently-exited entrepreneur and I have a few things to say about getting PR for startups.

My background: I co-founded ApartmentRatings.com in 2000, built the site to over 100 million page views per year, and sold it last year (after seven years) to a fairly large Internet company from LA. In
the process, we never spent a dollar on PPC advertising or PR agencies, and we bootstrapped all the way.

My goal is tell other entrepreneurs and marketing people, and basically anyone who’s trying to figure out a way to get their product or service to take off, about our mistakes and what worked for us.

This first post was inspired by two things: Jason Calcanis’ post about ideas to help startups save money and a SXSW session called startup metrics for pirates. Yarr. (Ok, that’s it for my pirate schtick.)

One of the items on Jason’s list is, “Really think about if you need that $15,000 a month PR firm.” Fred Wilson and Mark Cuban agreed.

ApartmentRatings.com never had a PR agency and we got full page stories in the NY Times and Washington Post, A1 in the Wall Street Journal, an NPR interview, and write-ups in dozens of blogs like SearchEngineWatch and other major market daily papers.

With the press, we attracted a lot of good traffic (and clippings my parents could show their friends), but the thing that was more important to me was that we got lots of valuable organic links from highly reputed sites. I basically viewed PR as a form of SEO strategy. I strongly feel that PR is the most potent SEO
strategy on the planet because there are fewer more credible sources than newspapers and a good blog post from even a long-tail blog often gets picked up by A-listers and mainstream media.

This blog is going to go in some depth on how we did it, but here’s my first suggestion:

Don’t buy a media list from Bacon’s or Vocus; build it yourself with Google Alerts.

Go to Google Alerts and create some searches that will surface reporters you’d care about (and more importantly who might care about you). You can search competitor names, related companies, or basically anything you think would be in stories written by reporters who might cover you. If you do this right, you
should get 10+ stories a day in your Inbox that will be written by reporters who are covering your space. They are your media list.

Make a Spreadsheet to Store Reporters Addresses

Make a list in Excel with the reporter’s name, email and phone, and some notes about what they wrote, and start building your list. Many major papers put the reporter’s email address somewhere on their stories, so the easiest thing is to just copy it off the story. This is also true of phone numbers. If that doesn’t work, I’d visit a publication’s “Contact Us” page to figure out what the email standard is for their newspaper. If that doesn’t work, you can always guess that it’s either first.last@domainname.com or flast@domainname.com. I know it sounds like a time consuming pain-in-the-arse, but you gotta do what you gotta do. This is “pirate” PR my friends… do what works. A little bit easier is the phone number… you can often get the main number
for the publication by Googling “Publication name, city, state” and if that doesn’t work, look it up from
their DNS records.

So that’s your first lesson in pirate PR. Build a media list based on what reporters are actually writing (not by the categories that Bacons or Vocus have encoded to them), and lookup reporters email and phone numbers for free.