Five Tips for B2B Startups Considering PR and Social Media

I was recently asked for five tips for B2B startups considering PR and social media. I came up with these five somewhat random tips, and will come up with more next month. This is not meant to be comprehensive but they are intended to help be specific to the process of PR and social media.

Let me know what you think.

1.      If your startup has never engaged in PR before, ask the following questions:

·        Are you ready? We’ve had some clients who thought they were ready to launch but weren’t. It can take time to actually be ready – but you don’t necessarily need a finalized product or service. You do need to have strong positioning and compelling messages, a clear understanding of what differentiates your business from the competition. This can be a challenge since startups often pivot their business model until they get traction.

·        Who will be coordinating the PR program? Will it be the founder, a marketing executive, an office manager, or someone else? And will that person have the time and resources? We’ve worked with people at those levels, and have made it work but it can be difficult if PR is just another plate they need to keep spinning.

·        Do you need ongoing PR or is project-based a better fit? From an agency perspective, an ongoing PR campaign is better – and not just from a cash flow perspective but because it enables long-term strategies -- but that may not be ideal for cash-stretched startups with not a lot of news. Talk to your prospective agency; if they aren’t interested in project work until your startup has established a regular flow of news, they might not be the right agency for you.

2.      Are you goals realistic? There are two levels to this:

·        Are you realistic in terms of your story, resources, customers, etc.? You may have a great product and a great proof of concept, but if you don’t have a paying customer, some media won’t be able to cover you. (This is particularly true in B2B markets.) We’ve also been told by clients that they want to launch within two months but when we get in, we find they’re not ready (see #1, above).

·        Are you realistic in terms of your goals based on your budgets and internal resources? Recently a prospective customer with the related businesses asked us to 1) Pitch radio and podcast interviews for both businesses 2) Get bloggers to write about them; 3) Identify speaking opportunities; 4) Provide content to external sites that will create back links; and 5) Maximize earned media. All these goals were reasonable – except his budget had only enough in it to pursue only one of these goals, not all five of them.

·        Are you realistic in terms of outcomes? You may have a great announcement but the media and those on social media may not be able to write about it. A reporter once turned down a story about a $30 investment round because he had declined to cover a larger round that had been announced the week before.

3.      Can you be a thought leader? To be successful and to engage with current and prospective customers on social media, you need to continually develop new content on topics relevant to your customers. You can use these pieces to show that you understand your customers’ pain points and can help them address them. These thought leadership pieces don’t have to be white papers and case studies – they can be 300-word articles. But it is important to make sure these pieces are useful and not all about you.

4.      Even if you don’t have the budget yet, plan for marketing integration. That means, make sure whoever is writing your thought leadership content also knows what your keywords are. Make sure your sales keeps you informed about key trends affecting your customers as well as customer wins and milestones – those are things that can be turned into articles and press releases. Make sure whoever is handling your social media is aware of what everyone else is doing – they can post content about your latest article or case study, about your trade show booth or speaking opportunity or sales promotion. Even at small startups, it’s interesting how many of those activities are kept in separate in a silo. But you can generate much more traction if you leverage all the sales and marketing efforts your undertaking. And, if you’re not investing in all these tactics yet, that’s okay; just keep them in mind for when you do.

5.      When focusing on social media, keep in mind: clients don’t like to be marketed to. So make sure only one in 10 posts is a true marketing post – the rest can be about your industry, your region, but especially about your clients pain points as well as about your company’s personality and values. More than ever, people want to do business with companies they like, and social media is a great way to create and enhance your company’s personality.

What's in a Startups' Name: Five Things to Consider from a Social Media/PR Perspective

Parents often agonize before selecting a name for their child. They often study books of names to check on potential meanings. They might even check the Social Security annual list of popular names.

When it comes to entrepreneurs deciding on a name for their company, it can seem like a different story.

Instead of taking the founder's name (Ford, Dell, etc.) or picking two words to convey something about the company (Best Buy or Home Depot), many startups picks one-word corporate names that aren't usually descriptive and often have unusual letter selections, favoring lessor used letters like V (Fivver) X,(Ameex Tech) Y (Lyft) or Z (Zlio), a number (29 Prime, Netcomm3) or some combination (X5 Networks) . 

Sometimes the startup's name combines two words into one to let you know what they do (Pinterest) while others seem to convey something but don't -- like SuperFish (a visual search company). And often enough the name is a deliberately misspelled variant (Bizness Apps or SeaSnax).

We're not in the naming business but we do work with startups that sometimes pick trendy-sounding names that cause problems for them with the media -- that's why I'm writing about this now. And this is not based on a current client. 
But we've compiled five considerations as you're developing a name for your startup.

1. There's a thin line between interesting corporate names and dumb ones. Make sure you pick a name on the right side of that line. Not sure? Check out this article: "The 15 Dumbest Names for Web 2.0 Startups." (If you represent one of those companies, don't blame me; I just pointed out the blog post.) For an example of successful naming, check out this Eddie Izzard clip about the singer once known as Jerry Dorsey.
2. Your name is also your major brand identify. (Again someone else can help you pick wisely, for example, check out "5 Startup Naming Rules from SXSW.") Which means, you should make sure a URL, Twitter ID, and other social media platforms are available for your startup. Keep in mind: even if your name is a made up name, with odd spelling, someone else could already have that name, as we found out for a couple of past clients with rather unusual names. (This was not a case of brandjacking because the Twitter IDs had been created before the startups had been a gleam in the eye of the founders.) This left the clients with two options 1) Find another way to represent your company and brand, or 2) Try to negotiate and buy the URL, Twitter or Instagram ID. There is a downside to both those options.
3. Make sure you and all your employees know how to spell it. That's not as simple as it sounds, even if you're working with a naming company. Take real companies like SwiftPage, Onesource Virtual, epTonics, Stemexpress and Jaybird -- all of them have capitalization errors -- it should be Swiftpage and OneSource, and EPTonics but there's nothing inherent in those names to guide you. So you can be sure people won't necessarily know how to spell your brand. It can get worse. I knew of a company that used an exclamation point to replace the "I" that was the first letter in its name; all the coverage we generated in national media outlets refused to use the "!"; instead they used an "I."
4. Make sure you and your employees know how to pronounce your company, including how to pronounce the vowels and which syllable to emphasis. For example, the Brits pronounce a lot of words differently; like Al-u-MIN-e-uhm for Aluminum or herb with a strong H as if it were short for Herbert. Inconsistent pronunciation could put customers and employees in an awkward situation of having to correct other people.
5. If you make up a name, you should research to make sure it doesn't have any not-safe-for-work connotations. Or ironic implications. The famous example is the Chevy Nova, which did not sell as expected when exported to Latin America -- that's because someone forgot to see if Nova meant something else in Spanish. It does: it means no go or doesn't go. With a new name, it might have sold well in Spanish-speaking countries. But it's helpful to have a story about why your corporate name fits your culture, market, etc. We've come across (non-clients especially) whose companies have interesting name but no compelling backstory. The backstory can be important because it can help make the company name more memorable.

My goal here is not to embarrass any organization but we've found that sometimes these issues are not considered when companies are named, and by the time they're ready to launch, it can be too late to make a change. And that can affect how we pitch the client to the media. (It's not good for anyone if we have to spend much of our time on the phone explaining how to pronounce the client's name.)

Let me know if you have any PR- or social media-related stories regarding poorly thought out corporate names.

7 Tips on Developing a 3rd-Party Spokespeople Database

One things many companies, especially start-ups, need to do is to recruit customers to serve as third-party spokespeople to provide quotes for the media and analysts as well as talk with prospective customers.

One of the challenges of enlisting customers is to make sure you have a database set up to take advantage of the customers, their different stories -- so that they don't remain only in the heads of the sales people.

Here are some steps to consider as you develop a compelling customer spokesperson program:

1. Create a template of contact info: The template is important to make it easy to gather and search among your different customer. The template should include sections that include the general story for which they could serve as a spokesperson as well as customer segment, internal sales rep, etc. 
2. Write a letter to explain this initiative: To explain what you're looking in terms of the program and their help. This will help customers understand their commitment.
3. Design media training guidelines: This is to help customers know how to describe your company and product. (You might be surprised that even enthusiastic clients might not describe you and your product the way you would like them too.)
4. Develop standard internal interview questions: This will make the database consistent so you will have a better idea of what the customer is willing to do, which can range from a willingness to talk with the media based on a background-only basis (i.e., not for direct attribution), talking to the media on a first-name-only basis (Norman, a father of three, said…), providing an attributed quote willing to provide photo, willing to talk only to analysts or some customers, only, etc.
5. Create a process to triage media opportunities. This is important to help work with reporters, who are often on deadline, along with customers, who are often busy working on their own jobs. Part of that process should streamline the demands on your customers, provide your customers with background on the opportunity so they can feel comfortable conducting the interview, easily confirm interview times, and provide them with any resulting coverage (which they can use internally).
6. Distribute periodic updates/info about your company: Once you have identified the customers who have agreed to serve as spokespeople, and once you have interviewed them, you need to make sure they are up-to-speed on the latest developments in your products and company -- so that they can talk to reporters about current products and direction.  Depending on the number of customers willing to serve as spokespeople, these updates can be distributed as part of a newsletter or as part of personalized outreach to these customers.
7. Check in personally to make sure the client continues to be happy. Beyond updates on your business, it's important to check in to make sure your client continues to be happy. This is an important way to maintain the quality of your third-party spokesperson program. For example, customers may move within or leave their organization, and the worst time to find out is when you're trying to get them to talk with a reporter on deadline. Periodic check-ins enable you to keep the list current. 

Following these tips by themselves won't guarantee a successful third-party spokesperson program. But they are essential to running a smooth, efficient program. 

Book Review: "No Time Marketing" Can Help Startups Start Their PR & Marketing Campaigns

Everyone's looking for signs of a sustained recovery -- and it's certainly not the stock market.

What I've seen is an increase in the confidence among CEOs and COOs of startup companies that I've been meeting. CEOs and founders of startups always have a lot of passion for their companies -- if not, they shouldn't be running the company.

What's different is that these executives aren't just focused on developing their products -- they're also very interested in providing marketing and PR support for their products. We haven't really seen that in a few years.

The challenge, however, is that they still need to budget and staff their marketing and PR functions at a time when their investors and board members may be reluctant, still, to fund PR.

That's where No Time Marketing may be able to help. Written by Alyssa Dver, a former chief marketing officer, No Time Marketing is a short book (just 115 pages) that does a great job of capturing the essentials of marketing for busy executives, providing tips and actionable questions that can help startups develop a marketing plan.

Chapter 2 contains a very good marketing inventory, designed to help companies figure out what they have and what they need in order to make sure they're targeting the right customers with appropriate messages and materials.

In the course of meeting with potential investors and customers, many executives may have already asked themselves some of these marketing-oriented questions, but I bet they haven't thought through all the questions Dver offers or as systematically, looking at prospects and customers, the buying process, marketing channels, competition and market. The No Time Marketing inventory is a good list, but even with 30 questions it doesn't feel overwhelming. That's important because too many questions covering every possibility (such as does the management team for your tech company agree on how to pronounce its mashup-type name) would make the exercise less effective.

In fact, the book is designed so that every step or exercise can be completed in 30 minutes or less. That's really important for a busy startup executive who does not have the time or staff to handle marketing.

The inventory leads to a good chapter on getting to know your customers better followed by a brief chapter on how to position your company. Even if startups have developed a compelling investor presentation about the needs the company seeks to fill, they still may have overlooked how to describe their business. (I recently met a CEO who, when asked for his elevator pitch, realized he didn't have one even though he has angel investors, a beta product and beta customers; it took him five minutes to explain what the company does -- at which time he realized they needed to work on their positioning.)

The rest of the book addresses pricing, acquiring leads and fostering leads. Chapter 6 on acquiring leads provides a good list of lead generation methods that includes

• Advertising
• Direct mail
• Email and newsletters
• PR
• Trade shows, conferences and association meetings
• Face-to-face seminars
• Webinars and teleseminars
• Telemarketing
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Customer loyalty programs
• Referral programs
  

She also provides some templates to set goals and measure success -- an important element that can sometimes be overlooked.

The book also includes 10 marketing truths. The most important may be the first:

"Marketing is as much an art as it is a science. Plan, test, execute, and measure, but never be surprised by uncertainty and change."

No Time Marketing can help startups looking for a no-nonsense guide to conducting marketing -- helpful even if they decide to work with an agency.

Readers of this blog can save 15% on the purchase of No Time Marketing. Click here to order and use the coupon: birnbach.