On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Prime Point Srinivasan<prpoint@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hi all
> Please read the interesting article in New York Times. This articles gives
> the growing relevance of social media.
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/business/05pr.html?pagewanted=all
> srinivasan
>
> July 5, 2009
>
> Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley
>
> By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
>
> Menlo Park, Calif. — Brooke Hammerling (publicist) and Erin McKean
> (entrepreneur) are in a Sand Hill Road conference room, hashing out plans to
> unveil Ms. McKean's new Web site, Wordnik.
>
> Ms. Hammerling, while popping green apple Jolly Ranchers into her mouth,
> suggests a press tour that includes briefing bloggers at influential geek
> sites like TechCrunch, All Things Digital and GigaOM.
>
> But Roger McNamee, a prominent tech investor who is backing Wordnik, is also
> in the room, and a look of exasperation passes across his face at the mere
> mention of the sites.
>
> "Why shouldn't we avoid them? They're cynical," he says, also noting his
> concern that Wordnik would probably appeal more to wordsmiths than followers
> of tech blogs. "That's where I would be most uncomfortable. They don't know
> the difference between 'they're' and 'there.' "
>
> Without missing a beat, Ms. Hammerling changes course, instantly agreeing
> with Mr. McNamee's take. "I love you for that," she intones. "I'll leave the
> tech blogs out. Let them come to me."
>
> Instead, she decides that she will "whisper in the ears" of Silicon Valley's
> Who's Who — the entrepreneurs behind tech's hottest start-ups, including Jay
> Adelson, the chief executive of Digg; Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter; and
> Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.
>
> Notably, none are journalists.
>
> This is the new world of promoting start-ups in Silicon Valley, where the
> lines between journalists and everyone else are blurring and the number of
> followers a pundit has on Twitter is sometimes viewed as more important than
> old metrics like the circulation of a newspaper.
>
> Gone are the days when snaring attention for start-ups in the Valley meant
> mentions in print and on television, or even spotlights on technology Web
> sites and blogs. Now P.R. gurus court influential voices on the social Web
> to endorse new companies, Web sites or gadgets — a transformation that
> analysts and practitioners say is likely to permanently change the role of
> P.R. in the business world, and particularly in Silicon Valley.
>
> While public relations is just one arrow in the marketing quiver for most
> companies, it plays an especially crucial role in a region where dozens of
> start-ups are born each month. Without money for advertising, these unknown
> companies have to promote themselves to potential users, investors,
> employees and partners.
>
> "Few tech companies with absolutely no P.R. have built a user base
> successfully," said Margit Wennmachers, a co-founder of OutCast
> Communications, a P.R. agency in San Francisco that opened in 1997. "They
> need P.R. to put the booster under that rocket ship."
>
> In the new world of social media, P.R. people must know hundreds of writers,
> bloggers and Twitter users instead of having six top reporters on speed
> dial. Ms. Hammerling, the latest example of the omnipresent start-up
> pitchwoman, is the doyenne of who-you-know P.R.
>
> She arrived in Silicon Valley from the East Coast in 1997, just when the
> dot-com craze was reaching a crescendo and P.R.'s pivotal role in the
> start-up world was being cemented. And the evolution of her own tactics has
> run parallel to the ever-changing marketing forays that make this area a
> singular hotbed of promotional experimentation.
>
> Dena Cook, Ms. Hammerling's business partner at Brew Media Relations,
> recalls the boom years when start-ups sent P.R. firms handsome checks that
> the firms had to return because they didn't have room for new clients. For
> start-ups that did corral a P.R. adviser, it often didn't matter if they had
> a solid business; Ms. Cook says a regional newspaper once ran a glowing
> article about one of her clients the same day the company went out of
> business.
>
> At the time, tools of the trade were largely limited to press releases and
> pitch letters, embargoes and exclusives and, of course, the legendary and
> often criticized parties. Those events included martinis and Champagne,
> lobster and shrimp, Tori Amos and Aerosmith, all to celebrate companies that
> had yet to make a cent.
>
> In those days, it took about six months to bring to market a new product or
> a start-up, Ms. Wennmachers recalls. First came East Coast tours with
> analysts and monthly publications, followed by visits to weeklies, then
> dailies.
>
> But the rise of blogs and social networks — and companies' ability to post
> information on their own sites — transformed all this. Gradually, deadlines
> disappeared, as even monthly magazines offered Web sites that published
> stories by the minute.
>
> "Now the best ideas bubble up, which is great for start-ups," Ms.
> Wennmachers says. "It's no longer, 'if you can't get so-and-so to do a
> story, you can't make it.' "
>
> For new companies' trying to get the word out, there's a healthy measure of
> liberation in all of this. For publicists, the era of e-mail, blogs and
> Twitter has the potential to turn the entire idea of P.R. professionals as
> gatekeepers on its head.
>
> Donna Sokolsky Burke, co-founder of Spark PR, another influential firm in
> San Francisco, acknowledges that the advent of social networks has upended
> all the traditional marketing and promotional practices that once helped
> make Silicon Valley, well, Silicon Valley. But she says that publicists will
> continue to play indispensable roles.
>
> "You absolutely have to be aware of power users who put things up
> on Facebook, Flickr, Yelp," Ms. Burke says. "P.R. is important because it's
> pretty intensive to figure out who they are."
>
> Exactly, Ms. Hammerling says.
>
> "I think it's key to have a personal face, to not be filtered. Does that
> mean we lose our value? Absolutely not," she says. "As the world has
> exploded into so many ways of communication, we're helping them navigate
> it."
>
> MS. BURKE says that when her firm began representing Flickr, the photo
> sharing site, in 2004, she never issued a press release for it, even when it
> was acquired by Yahoo. Flickr would publish news on its company blog, a few
> more blogs would pick it up "and two days later, BusinessWeek would call,"
> she recalls.
>
> Some business people say that because journalists would rather hear stories
> directly from the entrepreneurs who are genuinely excited about their
> companies — rather than from publicists' faking excitement — the role of
> publicists becomes less crucial. Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, a
> real estate Web site, says he has never hired a P.R. person. "Besides," he
> says, "with the real-time Web, there's no time to vet every message through
> three layers of spin."
>
> Indeed, irritation has been rising among tech reporters forced to field as
> many as 50 canned pitches a day from publicists representing start-ups
> desperate to break through.
>
> Recent missives from the influential tech bloggers Michael Arrington and
> Robert Scoble have attacked the P.R. industry as being out of touch. Rafe
> Needleman, an editor at CNET, has started a blog called Pro PR Tips that
> gives publicists elementary guidance, such as "Before you press 'send' on
> your bulk e-mail press release, make sure the site you're pitching is
> actually live."
>
> In response to dissatisfied clients and huge shifts in the media landscape,
> a new breed of publicist is emerging, says Brian D. Solis, a P.R. guy who
> writes a blog called PR 2.0. His firm, FutureWorks, has a broad definition
> of "writer," a category that includes those in mainstream media as well as
> the tens of thousands of bloggers and Twitter users who have developed avid
> followings by writing about niche topics.
>
> "Mommy bloggers are the new TechCrunch; they're such an influential crowd,"
> Mr. Solis says.
>
> Instead of calculating the impressions an article gets by estimating a
> publication's circulation and pass-along rate, Mr. Solis counts the number
> of people who tweeted about a company and their combined following, the
> number of retweets or clicks on links, as well as traffic from Facebook and
> other social networks.
>
> Despite all these new channels, Ms. Burke says it's still essential to know
> which mainstream publications to approach. If a start-up is seeking venture
> funding or new engineers, she says, Sparks PR still looks to The San Jose
> Mercury News, VentureWire or TechCrunch to get the word out.
>
> AS with so many professions in the digital era, public relations boils down
> to a juggling act, an effort to weigh and exploit the varied strengths of
> old media and new.
>
> Ms. Hammerling, at 35 years old one of the ubiquitous presences on the
> Silicon Valley publicity scene, has navigated these waters for years. In
> 1999, she got a job at MobShop, a group shopping Web site, where she got a
> taste of P.R. in boom-time Silicon Valley. She no longer had trouble getting
> reporters to call her back; instead she had trouble getting them to stop
> calling.
>
> "I didn't have to pitch; I just had to pick up the phone and say no," she
> recalls. "Everybody wanted you. How do you say no to that when your
> competition is absolutely saying, 'Yes, we'll be in Fortune and on the cover
> of Fast Company'?"
>
> Then, in 2001, after getting "more press than I've ever seen," she says,
> MobShop died. "It shows that P.R. can't be the end-all and be-all," she
> says. "Everyone knew who they were, but at the end of the day, they couldn't
> make any money."
>
> Many other small P.R. shops that had sprouted up went out of business or
> were acquired. Ms. Hammerling moved back to New York, where she eventually
> joined the Zeno Group, an offshoot of Edelman. There, she focused on getting
> to know journalists and making sure that she was at every tech conference
> and party.
>
> One day in 2005, she went into her managers' office to tell them she wanted
> to focus more on her relationships with the media and less on writing press
> releases and handling administrative tasks.
>
> "There are no stars in P.R.," she says one boss told her — the job should be
> about behind-the-scenes teamwork, not individual personalities. "That
> literally hit me like a ton of bricks," she says. She quit. (Citing firm
> policy, Zeno declined to comment on Ms. Hammerling's tenure.)
>
> Ms. Hammerling then hired a financial manager, persuaded some of Zeno's
> clients to come with her and started a new firm in New York that she named
> Brew (her childhood nickname).
>
> From the get-go, she focused on one-on-one communication and relationships
> with hundreds of writers and pundits. Over the years, her contact list
> swelled to the point that her stories now overflow with dropped names. There
> are the e-mail messages from Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle,
> and the time she handled a client's crisis from her BlackBerry while
> traveling to St. Barts to join the former Hollywood überagent Michael
> Ovitz and his family on his yacht. Or the time she was in her bikini at a
> Mexican resort, checking her e-mail at the hotel's computer, when Ron
> Conway, a veteran tech investor, walked in.
>
> Or the purportedly secret poker party she threw in her suite at a recent
> tech conference: "All my friends were there — Arianna was there, the Twitter
> boys were there," referring to Arianna Huffingtonof The Huffington Post and
> Evan Williams and Biz Stone, Twitter's co-founders.
>
> "Arianna told me I was a great hostess, and I thought I was going to die,"
> she said, putting on a Greek accent to imitate Ms. Huffington: "I'm Greek, I
> know what it's like to be a hostess." (She would repeat this story several
> times in the weeks a reporter spent following her around.)
>
> Though Ms. Hammerling may be known in the Valley more for whom she knows
> than for the clients she represents, she shares something else with Ms.
> Huffington: an astute understanding of how valuable strategic name-dropping
> can be. It is the currency she uses to make sure people know she is someone
> worth knowing, and it has paid off.
>
> "I will listen to her pitch on some little fledgling start-up I have no
> interest in, in part because of the coterie of connections she brings with
> her," says Dennis Kneale, the media and technology editor at CNBC.
>
> Ms. Hammerling's connections have been crucial for Brew in finding and
> serving clients, says Ms. Cook, her business partner: "Without question,
> that allows us to play at a different level, because we're not just doing
> P.R. and media relations; we're connecting people at the highest level,
> helping deals get done."
>
> Ms. Hammerling landed Brew's most successful client, NetSuite, through her
> relationship with Mr. Ellison, who was a co-founder of the business software
> company. While dating an R.E.M. band member she met Bono, lead singer of U2,
> and then Roger McNamee, Bono's investment partner. When Mr. McNamee
> personally invested in Wordnik, he called Ms. Hammerling.
>
> All of which gives rise to a series of Brooke-isms: how many executives and
> reporters are "dear friends," how she "worships at the altar" of a NetSuite
> board member and likes a team of venture capitalists so much that "I just
> want to put them in my pocket." Yet by most accounts, the relationships she
> builds are real and deep.
>
> "She drops names like a boat anchor, so shamelessly, but at the same time,
> it's, 'Larry, Larry,' and I think she's lying and then I get on the phone
> and it's Larry Ellison. She got him on the cellphone; I didn't," says a
> journalist who did not want to be identified to avoid the professional risk
> of offending Ms. Hammerling.
>
> Her job is all-consuming. This last spring, she held bicoastal 35th birthday
> parties for herself in New York and San Francisco. The guest lists were
> filled with clients and reporters.
>
> "They're my real friends," she says. "My job has become my life and my life
> imitates my work, but I love that."
>
> Her effervescent personality and proximity to the people she works with have
> sometimes set tongues wagging in Silicon Valley. "That prejudice is
> something we all suffer through," she says. "When smart women interact with
> smart men, there is always a dynamic there."
>
> She ponders the issue further.
>
> "I had to struggle when I was younger to be taken seriously and not just be
> considered to be a cute girl," she adds. "If I gain 100 pounds and my skin
> broke out and I had glasses and frizzy hair, would I be as effective at my
> job? Yes, because of the relationships I built."
>
> If there's a madness in her lifestyle, there's still a method behind what
> she does. And time spent perched on her shoulder offers some insights into
> how the publicity game is shifting.
>
> MS. HAMMERLING'S presentation on Erin McKean's start-up, Wordnik, is a case
> study in how relationships still matter in the Valley (as they do
> elsewhere). But it also shows how the Web's amplification of many voices,
> and not just those of professional writers, has transformed P.R.
>
> Ms. McKean — the former editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary and
> author of a blog about dresses and sewing — is an unlikely tech
> entrepreneur, and Ms. Hammerling is her guide through Silicon Valley. As
> they discuss whom to pitch Wordnik to, each name that came up elicits a
> knowing squeal from Ms. Hammerling.
>
> A tech blogger? "A dear friend," she says.
>
> The writers of DailyCandy? "They are all my friends."
>
> Barbara Wallraff, who writes Word Court, a syndicated column about language?
> "I love her, love her," Ms. Hammerling says, her voice rising.
>
> Biz Stone, of Twitter? "I was just talking to Biz on the plane and he's
> excited about Wordnik; I'll ping him."
>
> Executives from Amazon.com, a potential partner for Wordnik? "We could get
> in front of the top guys there," Ms. Hammerling responds with a coy smile.
>
> "It didn't matter what name we came up with, Brooke knew them, or knew
> somebody who knew them," Ms. McKean says later. "If she is not the mayor of
> the town, then at least she runs the post office and knows where everybody
> gets their mail."
>
> In the end, Ms. McKean and Wordnik's advisers and investors decide to talk
> to a handful of bloggers who focus on language and to only one tech blogger,
> Caroline McCarthy at CNET, because, as Ms. Hammerling notes, "she could have
> fun with it, as opposed to writing a business story."
>
> Ms. Hammerling plans to approach one journalist, Quentin Hardy at Forbes,
> not because she wants him to write about Wordnik in the magazine but because
> she hopes he'll mention it on his personal Twitter and Facebook feeds.
>
> "I don't know if this is a Forbes story at this point," she says. "I see it
> more of Quentin as an influencer, Quentin the person." Wordnik hasn't
> announced how it will make money, and its backers are worried that some
> reporters and writers will pick apart that fact. So the group decides that
> Wordnik will be presented as a "project" instead of as a "company."
>
> A few weeks later, Ms. Hammerling sets up a phone call with Ms. McKean and
> Mr. Adelson, the Digg C.E.O. He advises her on building mobile sites, offers
> to share Digg's research on user-generated content and asks her to call back
> when she's ready for partnerships.
>
> When Wordnik went live last month, Mr. Adelson tweeted about it. Digg's
> founder, Kevin Rose, later tweeted to his then 759,310 followers that
> Wordnik was "truly amazing." Most of the other tweets and blog posts
> described Wordnik as "an ongoing project," adopting the language the P.R.
> team had decided on.
>
> BY 6:30 p.m. on the day Wordnik went live, Brew's staff had calculated that
> 1.43 million people had seen tweets about it. CNET and a handful of blogs
> also wrote about the site. None of the coverage was in print, and most
> wasn't by professional journalists.
>
> The publicity sent 40,000 people to Wordnik's Web site to perform 170,000
> searches the following week and caught the attention of reporters at USA
> Today and The Wall Street Journal who hoped to write articles. A couple of
> media companies have contacted Wordnik to talk about potential partnerships
> and mentioned that they read the tweets of Mr. Adelson or Mr. Rose.
>
> Ms. Hammerling says the approach she took with Wordnik accounts for about a
> third of Brew's pitches and is becoming more common. Today, she says, people
> want to broadcast on Twitter. Tomorrow, the medium could change. But the
> core of her job won't, she says:
>
> "It will morph, but it's still about relationships."
>
>
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