The Buzzstream Team, Paul our CEO, Randy our CTO, and I hit the TechCrunch party Thursday night at Pangae.  It was great to see so many friends and the number of cool ventures, many of whom are way under the radar, starting up in Austin.  Erick hit the nail on the head with regard to the investment climate in Austin driving companies to figure out how to grow by scaling a profitable business model.  I was glad he picked up on that.  And Paul made the video explaining the subtlety of not being a blogger but having a blog.  Funny stuff.

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Now that the launch conference Ultimate Smack Down — TechCrunch50 v. DEMO– is over, I figured I’d take a few minutes (now going on few hours) to look at which conference’s presenting companies were more successful in generating press this week, based on a little Google News and Blogs research.  And here are the results:

A couple observations– DEMO companies received a much more uniform amount of press coverage (i.e. Google News hits) .  The top 25% of companies at DEMO received 3.3 times more press mentions than the average of the bottom 25%.  At Techcrunch50, the difference between the top and bottom quartiles was quite a bit more extreme– 8X.  This suggests some the best TechCrunch50 companies got much more press coverage that the worst, whereas at DEMO even the least-covered did ok compared to the most-covered.

But… if you look at blog coverage, TechCrunch50 was more uniform (they ended up with roughly the same distribution of coverage between bloggers and press).  TechCrunch50 presenters got more “steady” attention from bloggers; even weak DEMO presenters got a disproportionate share of coverage from traditional press.

The companies that got the most coverage at each conference were microcosms of these events– TechCrunch50’s big press winner was Ashton Kutcher’s BlahGirls with 78 press mentions (or measured by blog posts, DropBox, with 379).  At DEMO, it was Plastic Logic with 117 press stories and 2,367 blog posts.

While this is all very interesting, it would be too strong to declare DEMO the absolute winner; I have a few thoughts and caveats:

• * Mainstream tech and business press are still attending DEMO.  Kara
  Swisher told me she was at DEMO Monday and Tuesday, and was hoping to
  swing by Techcrunch50 afterward.
• * Techcrunch50 presenters tend to be smaller startups with a small (or no) PR budget
• * DEMO offered more established companies (e.g. Best Buy) who have press who cover them regularly
• * DEMO has more presenters, increasing the likelihood of round-up stories that mention multiple companies
• * DEMO had more companies unveiling core technology, whereas Techcrunch50 was mainly about applications
• * DEMO wrapped up yesterday; Techcrunch50 just wrapped up today, so some stories may be yet to be written on Wednesday’s presenters (however I’m not sure this was a huge effect if you look at how Monday’s TC50 presenters have fared)
• * The article counts include wire service press releases — DEMO may have shown more press mentions due to press releases, which many TC50 companies may have skipped.
• * The general meta coverage has been generally blasé; WebWorkerDaily said that it was a pretty blah week overall, so they didn’t cover any of it; that trend could favor DEMO because they had the big hit– Plastic Logic.  Who woulda thought this was a hits business?

I’ve saved the searches I used for this analysis (generally “company name”, past week, sorted by date with duplicates included) here: Techcrunch50 Google News Searches; DEMOFall08 Google News Searches.  In a few cases (Rudder, Yammer, Footnote) I had to search company+conference to filter out false positives, which I did manually (so it’s not saved in these searches).

The saved searches are “live” and will continue to update as more articles are filed and echo press comes in, so that should be fun to watch.  Email me if you’d like the spreadsheet (jeremy at buzzstream dot com).

Update: Found a great post from Allen Stern, who was on the ground at both conferences.

Wow.  The blogosphere has erupted into a near riot after Robert Scoble’s “companies launching at DEMO suck” series of blog posts.  The discussion has understandably been emotion-filled, but other than some really good link-bait, I’m not sure much value is coming out of it.

What I’ve been thinking about a lot though is how the “big conference launch” fits into our plans here at BuzzStream.  We’re a micro-financed business, so we look long and hard before undertaking a big expense like a conference launch.  I think the beat down that some of the DEMO companies took occurred because their approach to launch marketing doesn’t match the economics of their business.  There’s been a lot of talk about how the economics of building a product have changed.  The economics have never been better for starting a business and the way that companies get funded and products get built has fundamentally changed.  The problem is that, while a lot of companies have bought into the “micro” strategy for developing a product (small team, low financial commitment, etc.), they’re holding on to the traditional, big bang approach to getting the word out.  There’s nothing wrong with this approach for the traditional VC-funded company, but I’m not sure it makes sense for businesses like ours.

FACT: There’s too much that has to be done for these conferences in so little time, so something is almost guaranteed to suffer. For many of the DEMO companies, their marketing efforts appear to have taken the hit.

The cost and time required for the traditional, big-bang, big conference launch adds up quickly…and yeah, I know, TechCrunch 50 is free, but the entry fee is just where your costs begin.  Let’s look at an example.  My co-founder, Jeremy Bencken, was invited to present at DEMO to launch Tenant Market a couple of years ago.  In addition to the entry fee, he calculated the following costs for even a bare-bones approach:

1. devote 80 hours to prep time.  At $100 an hour, that’s $8K.
2. Speaking coach - $5K
3. Travel - three nights for three people - $6K
4. PR rep - $10k to $20K (lots of variation depending on the quality of the PR professional and the required retainer)
5. Booth, collateral, SWAG, etc. - $3K to $5K

So you’re looking at around $40K in addition to the entry fee.  On top of this, doing a big launch is similar to moving into a bigger house and suddenly realizing you need new furniture, art, etc.  If you look at what Scoble is keying off of, it’s the website of the DEMO companies….another big cost, and one you wouldn’t associate at first with the cost of a big conference launch.  When you go with the big launch though, you’re now expected to have the perfectly designed marketing website with the perfectly crafted message leading to the app that scales to an unlimited number of users.  LOTS more time and money for that.  For us, it just doesn’t make financial sense.  And we don’t view it as necessary either because we don’t think it’s aligned with how most micro-financed businesses typically grow.

Again, I’m not suggesting that shows like DEMO and TechCrunch 50 aren’t valuable.  For the right company, there are few marketing vehicles that can have as big of an impact.  A good showing can single-handedly change the trajectory of a company and put it on the map.  But we just don’t think that the big bang launch is aligned with the economics for a micro-financed business…and we look at going down that route as more than just a marketing decision.  It’s a decision that impacts the company’s core strategy.

For us, it just feels more comfortable to go with a more measured, “slow burn” approach to our launch.  We look at the initial launch as just a step in the process….and hopefully along the way our product will grow, our message will get better, we’ll continue to build relationships and our skills at link building, blogger relations and social media marketing will continue to improve.

There are lots of strategies for building backlinks to your site and let’s face it, they’re all hard (except for the ones that are ‘banned’)– linkbait, competitor backlink mining + begging, crazy n-way reciprocal linking, paid links, content syndication, etc.

But there’s a little-known strategy many user-generated content sites could take advantage of: creating reports for reporters.  The goal is to create information tools that help reporters get data from your site and make it really easy for them to cite you and link to you (without ever having to call you).

In a way, it’s like the old PR strategy of listing yourself as an expert on Profnet, and then hoping that when a reporter needs a quote, they’ll call you.  More modern examples include Google Trends and Google Zeitgeist.  Trulia, Zillow, and Hotpads all offer heatmaps.  And at my old site, ApartmentRatings.com, we created average apartment rental pricing charts by MSA.

The benefits of this approach are:

1. your website can get cited and linked even if a reporter doesn’t have time to interview you,
2. you can exert some control over the content, making it necessary for the reporter to link back to it,
3. this tactic tends to generate increasing links over time (which is sort of the opposite of how a linkbaiting campaign works)
4. and of course there’s the brand benefit of being seen as a go-to source and leader in your industry.

What should you build? Charts, tables, statistics, snapshots, trends… something interesting, based on the largest  sample set you can muster, and if possible, geographically-segmented (since local reporters are more interested in trends in their city and/or state).  Obviously your opportunities here will depend a lot on your website’s actual data, legal restrictions, your creativity, and your dev resrouces, but here are a few ideas:

• What are your users searching for? Offer reports showing search trends.
• Collecting leads? Offer reports showing buyer trends.
• Aggregating data from multiple sources? Offer a report averaging the data and highlighting trends.

Once you set up reports, your data should automatically update over time.  And of course, you should think about it from the perspective of a reporter- is your information quotable, do your graphs look nice enough to reprint, are the trends easy to understand, is it clear how the data was gathered and how many data points are represented, do you provide access to the underlying data so the reporter can give the data to their art department, can they embed your charts on another site (and if so, is your HTML setup to properly give you a text link back), if a reporter has a question is there an email or phone number readily available.