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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!

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.

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.