The take-away from what I’ve written in this blog:

If you are starting a company or trying to sell a product, you MUST take the time to read both the articles mentioned below. 

Trust that I’ve read hundreds of blogs in this space and wouldn’t make such a recommendation light-heartedly.  I’d read bits and pieces of these two blogs  in months prior, but sitting down to fully evaluate their usefulness to my startup endeavor has been something I hadn’t made time to do until now.  And man am I glad that I did.

What I thought I would be doing was comparing and contrasting two different approaches to generating PR buzz for a product.  But really the first article gives one a superb overview of what strategies should underly your PR strategy, and the second article articulates specific tactics around implementing this strategy.  I will briefly review each of the articles and offer some of my own thoughts in the space below.

The Ultimate Guide to Startup Marketing

Written by Kissmetrics, one of the leading online analytics packages available on the market,  this blog breaks down the steps any startup should take to generate a PR strategy.  It details out how to lay create marketing strategy, use social media, create inbound marketing content, and measure, test, and iterate on various initiatives.  It’s almost like this blog took all of the learnings from the Sauder MBA program relevant to starting your own online business, merged them with Lean Startup Principles, and listed them out in an extremely well-structured, logical framework.  Implementing each of the items listed in this framework might take a week and require reading 5 – 10 more blogs, but having this framework to fall back on should prove invaluable to the Shnarped Team moving forward.

The 5 Top-Performing American Apparel Ads, and How they Get PR for Free

This blog was posted by Tim Ferriss, best-selling author of the Four Hour Workweek and the Four Hour body, but was really a guest-blog from Ryan Holiday.  Ryan has used all sorts of crazy ploys to generate huge product awareness on a small budget.  The actual content of the article doesn’t really reflect the title at all, which is likely an implementation of some of the tactics he describes in the blog itself.   The article discusses how you can get people talking about your product without paying them.  Ryan explains how media has seen a fundamental shift from traditionally sourced towards more crowd-sourced.  Traditional writers might write a couple articles per week; popular bloggers need to pump out that many articles per day, and therefore making their lives easy by doing their work for them can benefit both parties.  Ryan suggests three tactics:

1. Start small.  Look for local reporters, newspapers, community centres, that you’ve established a trusting relationship over your lifetime.
2. Always appeal to self-interest.  This point created a ton of debate online, but it basically entails writing your own exciting headlines for the bloggers and writers you approach, and therefore pitching your company’s story as an opportunity for them to get the scoop as opposed to them doing you a favor.
3. Feed the monster.   This is another someone controversial tactic, however it has been extremely effective in Ryan’s own career.  Content that pulls at heart-strings,  often in a negative way, can really go viral.  Angering people with content such as the racy American Apparel ads of porn star Sasha Grey displayed on the blog evokes an emotional response, and be it positive or negative, people want to talk about it.