Friend and fellow entrepreneur, Aruni Gunasegaram, got a sweet PR mention this Memorial Day weekend on Fred Wilson’s blog.  Fred’s blog, A VC, has probably 10k daily readers and PageRank of 6.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you should take note because what Aruni did cost her $0 got her some incredibly valuable PR visibility and link juice.  Here’s how she did it:

First, she got the idea to partner with eMailOurMilitary, to offer active service military deployed overseas free use of her product, Baby Insights.  Baby Insights is a service that allows new mothers to track virtually ever detail of a newborn’s life– eating, sleeping, pooping– all on a PDA.  Cool idea and giving it away is a great way to honor our military because the difficulty of being separated from a new baby obviously greatly compounds the sacrifice of service.

Next, she wrote up a press release, posted it on PRWeb, then posted on her blog about it.  Then she announced it on Twitter with a link to her blog post. 

Finally, she sent Fred Wilson a direct message via Twitter saying (paraphrased) “Hey, if you’re going to post on Memorial Day please consider mentioning this partnership,” with a link to her blog post. 

Indeed, Fred wrote a great Memorial Day tribute to the Armed Forces and included a mention at the end of the post, saying “And speaking of military life, here’s a neat example of two women who met on twitter who have teamed up to deliver a service to families separated by military service,” with a link to Aruni’s blog.

Here are a few reasons I think this was a great example of effective DIY PR:

• Aruni was active on Fred’s blog as a commenter prior to pitching him, so he recognized her, if not had the beginnings of a relationship by that point (this is a perfect example of the conversational PR model Brian Solis wrote about this weekend).
• Fred has written a lot about Twitter and Aruni’s post mentions that she met the other founder on Twitter, which Fred no doubt liked (and mentions in his post)
• Timing - her news was timely– she announced a partnership right before Memorial Day, and it dovetailed perfectly with the idea of honoring the military
• Soft target - it was a slow news day - it was a bit of a gamble that Fred would be posting on Monday, but it paid off because he was likely receiving very few other timely and relevant pitches.

Fred is definitely an A-List blogger, and even if getting coverage on his blog doesn’t necessarily bring lots of Aruni’s target customers to her site, she benefits in several ways:

#1 Her company earns recognition and validation from a respected influencer, #2 her blog gains the all-important link juice, which she can then redirect toward her product pages, and #3 she becomes top of mind in the online baby space for other potential partners.  I know Aruni has been doing a lot of work to raise her site’s visibility, so big congrats!

I’m posting a few takeaways today from Friday’s CEOs Best Practices Meeting.  David Altounian from iTaggit organized and hosted 12 companies at River Place Country Club with the goal of sharing “what’s working” and “what’s not” in B2C web companies.  The scene was a mix of pre-fundraising, bootstrapped, angel-backed, vc-backed, pre-revenue, and profitable companies.  Companies included ApartmentRatings.com, Babblesoft, Edioma, iTaggit, KeyIngredient, Mindbites, Moximity, MusicGorilla, NaturallyCurly, OtherInbox, VolunteerSpot, and Wowio.  Here are my takeaways in no particular order:

• Interesting business models are emerging in mobile apps, but app integration is a costly problem for startups ($60k per platform port).
• Selling display advertising to CPG advertisers requires going direct to the brand, skipping the agency.
• Link exchanges aren’t working but “strategic partnerships” are — you need a highly relationship-based approach for this path.
• Several companies have tried multiple PR firms without success - The pirate perspective: start building your media list early, do you own PR in-house, and hire a firm once you’re comfortable with it having 50/50 (and maybe a little less) odds of success.
• Videos posted on YouTube are driving traffic - there’s a new trend in people turning to YouTube searches first for information on how to do things; these don’t have to be so-called “viral video” a simple ‘How To’ instruction video will suffice.
• Recruiting - Finding Ruby and Java developers in Austin is a serious problem.
• The fundraising environment is very difficult - some attribute it to a disconnect between consumers and investors.

The last point is one that’s probably most debated.  Here’s my perspective over the last year of attending CTAN screenings and presentations: people like to invest in what they know and/or enjoy.  The number of folks in Austin who have earned their money from consumer web offerings AND who are active angels is quite small compared to angels who came from service businesses, enterprise software, systems management software, semiconductors, and Dell. 

That said, I’ve seen a number of non-B2C angels step up to consumer startups.  But when they do, they tend to be fairly cautious.  For early-stage (seed and/or Series A) Austin consumer web companies, here’s my take on the profile of successful angel raises:

Angels: A working product, a scalable model, revenue, and a willingness to exit.  It also really helps to have a serial entrepreneur as a founder.  Your raise should be between $250k and $1M.

Some smaller funds like G51 have been active B2C funders, as have a few out-of-town VC’s like True Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and DAG Ventures.  Here’s my take on the profile of successful VC raises:

VC’s: A working product, a scalable model, a compelling, innovative, and defensible take on an emerging market, and the potential for a billion dollar exit in 5-7 years.  Your raise should be $1M or more, although there was some talk that $1-$3M is no man’s land right now.  If the founders are first time entrepreneurs, it also doesn’t hurt to have some ivy on their resumes.

Agree or disagree, feel free to comment.

So you’re an entrepreneur reading the latest “pr sucks” meme to hit the Internets and thinking, “shit, we were counting on PR to drive 1,000 beta sign-ups in the first 6 months… now what?”  Or you heard that your agency is listed on the ignominious prspammer blacklist.  It’s not good, Jim, not good at all.  To recap: Gina Tripani at Lifehacker created a blacklist of agencies who spam her personal email address; Todd Defren apologized; then the conversation got ugly with PR’s on one side saying, “hey, there’s bacon and tofo besides spam,” or “blacklists = bigotry against PR’s,” and “oh, by the way, quit crying, PR spam is an occupational hazard,” and bloggers saying, “wtf… why can’t you read my ‘How to Pitch Me’ instructions?” Or worse, “It’s ALL spam.” 

So what’s actionable for the entrepreneur?

If you have an agency on the blacklist, I wouldn’t worry about it.  No serious blogger is going to use the list.  For starters, if people like Brian Solis are banned, there’s a problem with the list.  Second, if anyone can add to the list, good firms will be blacklisted for pretty weak reasons.  For a serious tech blogger, the risk of missing quality tips is too high.  Indeed, Gina isn’t proposing to apply the blacklist to tips @ lifehacker, just her personal email.  But there’s a more insidious risk: you or your PR people may already be blacklisted by bloggers and not even know it.  Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook all have easy “spam” flagging, which bloggers are undoubtedly using.

As Warren Buffet says in his ads for  Borsheim’s, “If you don’t know diamonds, know your jeweler.”  The same applies here… really know who is contacting the media on your behalf.  Find out if they’re using backchannels like Twitter, AIM, and Facebook messaging to contact the press.  Find out which feeds they’re subscribed to (and do these correspond to the top blogs in your industry?).  Are they giving bloggers an OPML file?  If they give you a wild look and a bs line like, “oh, we’re exploring and adopting new technologies all the time,” that’s a very bad sign.  It roughly translates to, “No, we are too busy spamming the crap out of the media to have actually started using any of  this new stuff.”  One more thing you should ask: do they generate media lists from Vocus or Cision and/or send bulk pitches from within there? If so, be worried.  If so, it indicates they are doing extraordinarily little research on the reporters they’re reaching out to, not personalizing their outreach, and basically spraying and praying your pitch to journalists.  There’s a very good chance they’re already ending up in the spam folder.

If you’re doing the outreach yourself or have a freelancer, internal marketing manager, or Evangelist assigned to the job, here are a few thoughts:

1. It’s about following directions.  People not reading Gina’s site and abiding by this following statement, “Please, no press releases or Lifehacker story pitches to my personal email address,” is what set off the blacklist.  So you need to get of our your feed reader occasionally and look for the “How to Pitch Me” page on the blogger’s site.  If they don’t have one, my first email would not be a pitch but rather, “I wanted to send you some PR news, is this the right way to contact you?”
2. It’s about targeting.  The prspammer wiki describes the companies listed on it as having sent, “unsolicited (and almost always irrelevant) product pitches…” As an entrepreneur, if I had significant news (funding, product announcement, private beta invites, etc.), I’d want my team spreading it as wide as reasonably possible.  If a reporter wrote about a competitor, they’re relevant to me.  If they cover my industry, they’re relevant.  If they wrote about a topic that’s relevant to my customers or end-users, they’re relevant.
3. It’s about personalization AND context.  Now, even if you’ve built a carefully targeted and relevant list, the journalists you want to pitch may not see the connection between their beat and your news, so it’s your job to provide the context (”You may recall you wrote that story about our competitor, XYZ.  I wanted to tell you about our news…”).  Maybe using Word Mail Merge to personalize greetings (e.g. “Hi Mitch…”), is your idea of a personal email.  You need to take it a step further.  I think it’s fine to send the same basic press release (and consider sending a social media release if you do), but you need that precious little personalized blurb at the top that says, “Hi Gina, I commented on your post about X, and I wanted to tell you about Y news that relates.  I know you said Z in your post, but we’d love to get your take on our product because we think it does a better job addressing A, B, C issues that you discussed.”

So you’re probably thinking, “How do we build a broad yet targeted media list?  How we ensure that we aren’t  contacting a blogger the wrong way?  How do we personally convey why we’ve targeted a particular journalist?”  There’s the rub.

Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day.  Even if you hire an agency, you can’t expect them to instantly have a list of perfectly targeted media.  So if you’re doing it yourself, the first step is to setup a bunch of Google Alerts for your keywords, subscribe to (and read) relevant blogs, and build your media list slowly over time based on the coverage you discover.  Use delicious or Diigo to bookmark the most relevant stories.  Then when you’re ready to send some news, you or your agency has a realistic starting point for doing it in a targeted, personalized, contextual way.

Guy Kawasaki advises entrepreneurs to use the 10/20/30 rule in creating Powerpoint stacks to pitch VC’s: 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 pt font.  Here’s my 30/20/10/5 rule for companies that do their own PR pitches:

• 30 minutes per day. Spend 30 minutes a day reading Google Alerts, Reader, and bookmarking relevant coverage in your space.  Use this process to build your media list (keep it in Excel or Access or whatever works for you).
• 20 seconds. When you create a pitch, use this test: ask a non-tech spouse or friend to read it.  Count to 20, then take it away.  Ask them what they can remember.  Did they understand the hook?   If not, revise.
• 10 journalists per segment.  When I did PR outreach for ApartmentRatings, I often had 50+ journalists I was planning to contact.  But I would always break my lists down into interest groups of no more than 10 each, based on stated interests or coverage memes.  This kind of granularity allows you to more effectively address their interests and, if all goes well, get their attention.
• 5 days.  Brian Solis says, “Allowing journalists and bloggers adequate time to prepare advance is critical. Determine…who should be part of the initial news discussions…find the people that would be interested…as determined by their previous work and coverage.“, in a great post about relationship building in blogger outreach. I’d advise that you start reaching out to key bloggers five days before you release news on your blog.  You can’t expect them to cover your story the same day it starts hitting the general news.