OpenCoffee - Roundtable: PR for Start-ups
Last Thursday we participated in the OpenCoffee Roundtable in Hamburg, which treated the topic “PR for start-ups”. It was an interesting get-together because entrepreneurs from Hamburg met to discuss how the PR should be handled for start-ups. Those exchanges of experience in a small group are very inspiring because it gives you the chance to also see what others are thinking, who they know and what mistakes have already been made. These were the participants of last week along with their companies:
- Frank Felix Debatin www.1000mikes.com
- Monte Miersch www.mikestar.com
- Lars Wehmeyer www.formatune.com
- Achim Schnell www.formatune.com
- Ulrich Tekniepe www.tekniepe.com
- Anne Arndt www.digicol.de
- Tobias Caldeweyher www.letsbuyit.com
- David Cordes www.sightseaing.de
- Christine Stumpf www.weblin.com
- Jonas Bandick www.docinsider.de
- Mirco Beisheim www.postalo.de
- Paul Watzlaw www.meetya.com
- Matthias Henze www.jimdo.com
- Jan Milz www.sixgroups.com
- Thomas Promny and Jürgen Lankat www.gimahhot.de
- Tobias Worzyk www.hamburg-startups.de (organiser)
Without getting too much in details our conclusions are somewhat the following:
1) When you want to do PR then you better be well prepared for it and have a significant impact on the agency, in case you use one, because only the founders can really communicate and reflect the “spirit” of the company.
2) Only when you are really creative will the PR be successful because nowadays every is overloaded with great ideas, events and stories so it is difficult to stick out.
3) When you want that a journalist writes a story about you then you must deliver them a story, that can mention you as an example, because they will definitely not write an ad about you for you.
4) In case you want to use an agency you better a get a good one that actually knows all the individual journalists and bloggers, one that does those tedious follow-up calls and knows WHEN to contact the press (Mondays and early mornings are just the worst time, according to this great Techcrunch article).
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Tags: Communication, PR, hamburg, open coffee, startups
August 14th, 2008 at 2:02 am
Good article, making me feel even more interested in going to these Open Coffee meetups.
Here are some other valuable articles regarding the value (or non-value) of a PR firm:
- from Hubspot:
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4267/The-Role-of-PR-Firms-in-Social-Media-and-Inbound-Marketing.aspx
- and from another Techcrunch blogger:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/13/the-pr-roadblock-on-the-road-to-blissful-blogging/