7 Ways to make Your Geeky Startup Media-Friendly

Thursday September 13, 2012 , 3 min Read

Everyone wants eyeballs. Most of us want to be published in blogs and papers. Getting media attention is probably the best way to prove to family and friends that starting up was probably not that bad an idea. The moment you get covered by a popular blog or newspaper/magazine, there is one more badge that goes on the ‘media’ page. We get a huge number of requests for getting featured and doing a story. Being humanly impossible to cover all, we try and sieve out the one that catches our attention more then the other Now, in this startup frenzy, how does a cloud infrastructure company grab attention against much more ‘bubblier’ startups that deal with movies or food or sports? Here are a few tips:

1) Use Numbers

All journalists are crazy about numbers. Statistics make great headlines even though 83% of those are false. You might be doing something great with PLM infrastructures or developing a network efficiency enhancer or you know what, but you’ll have numbers. Play with them. You’ll get noticed.

2) Create Awesome Content and tell the world

You might be in a real quandary on how to reach out directly to your target customers. That is something which mankind still doesn’t have an exact answer to. However there are people everywhere. Create good content, things people would like to know about and then just tell people. If you’re developing software architecture, you might want to make an infographic drawing a parallel with a civil engineer. That wouldn’t directly reach your target market but some student studying civil engineering might share it with his more than 1000 ‘friends’ and his uncle might become your customer. So, make good content and give subtle hints about yourself within it.

3) Give Tips

If you’re in a zone people don’t understand, make them understand. Give tips. Tell them about pitfalls, advantages, challenges, etc. No one wants to write about dull topics but if you have knowledge to disburse, they’ll grab on to you.

4) Collaborate

Always look at ways on how you can associate with other names. It might be the tiniest deal or association but that is ‘news’. Collaborating is not only good for your business; it will also keep you fresh. Collusions and allusions; they’re always great to have.

5) Be Persistent

Media acts busy and to a certain extent it is, but if you give it something worthy, they won’t miss it. Pushing something more than 3 times is not something one would recommend. Change your message, rework on something fresh and send it out to the media guys again, also the same story can have different angles… see if it makes a compelling features story or business story and reach out accordingly.

6) Give Exclusives

Everyone loves exclusivity. If you have a lot of things churning up, give each publication a different exclusive. Media guys love ‘exclusive interviews’. They’ll go out of their way to promote it.

7) Maintain Relationships

Relationships always help. A media relationship is not a one time thing. You’ll need it over and over again. And they usually have some interesting gossip every time, so you might just land upon something that would help your business in a grand way. Use them as your allies.

So, no matter what your startup deals with, you can always be the one to walk on the Red Carpet. Leverage stuff.

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