11–20 of 29 posts
why do search engine launches get such enormous press attention?
why do search engine launches get such enormous press attention?
1. Search is hard and fascinating. 2. There's built-in conflict. Google is a huge near-monopoly. Journalists and their readers love conflict. It's the heart of any good story. 3. Most of the time, building a general purpose search engine requires a really substantial amount of capital and technical expertise. That means there's big risk involved. This ups the drama quotient. See #2 (DDG being a very big outlier here)…
btw, when the WSJ broke our embargo, I was on my way into the office. We were planning to get there around 3-4pm for the 9pm PT launch. Some folks were already there and turned the site live since the first press had gone up. But techcrunch has a policy of not posting their story if an embargo is broken, so we didn't get the TC story that we had briefed them on.
So what's the news on how/why the WSJ broke the embargo? What was their excuse?
I posted the article - and included the embargo paras, which my co-founder and I nearly cut - because I thought the backstory would be useful/interesting to the folks there, who seemed to be unaware of the pr process during the prerelease of blekko. I wanted to open that up for them.
Your comment was spot-on good advice for the ycomb co's though. I voted it up.
Really irked that wsj broke our embargo. Irritated that I wasn't in the office when our site went live after 3.33 years, irritated that we didn't get to do the last bug-fix push to production, irritated that I knew TC wouldn't post, irritated that other journos would be irritated with me, irritated that it flatted the temporal curve on the launch pop. And for what?
Time-sync on stories is actually a good thing for the news stream. I don't see why journos don't get that.
Who was their PR agency and what is the ballpark fee to coordinate a launch like this?
Sutherland Gold, a small boutique agency that represents, among others, TheFind.com. No idea on their price.
Who was their PR agency and what is the ballpark fee to coordinate a launch like this?
Sutherland Gold, a small boutique agency that represents, among others, TheFind.com. No idea on their price.
(In case anyone is curious, I have absolutely 0 financial stake in the business so I will not make a dollar wether you hire them or not, just offering to help if anyone is interested)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sutherland Gold, a small boutique agency that represents, among others, TheFind.com. No idea on their price.
I used to work at SutherlandGold and would be happy to make an intro for any companies that are interested in talking with them. Email in profile. (In case anyone is curious, I have absolutely 0 financial stake in the business so I will not make a dollar wether you hire them or not, just offering to help if anyone is interested)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work at SutherlandGold and would be happy to make an intro for any companies that are interested in talking with them. Email in profile. (In case anyone is curious, I have absolutely 0 financial stake in the business so I will not make a dollar wether you hire them or not, just offering to help if anyone is interested)
Can you give a ballpark range on prices?
You don't really pay a whole lot more for higher quality agencies (I could go into theories on why but will save that for another post). Companies almost never hire bad agencies because they can't afford good ones. Far more often it's because they don't know how to find (or identify) the good ones or because the good ones don't want to work with them (it's a big risk to an agency's reputation to take on a bad client).
If anyone wants to email me I'd be happy to go into more detail privately. If you have any general PR questions that aren't agency-specific (hiring agencies, hiring consultants, how PR can be successful, etc), I'd be happy to answer those publicly.
Edit: In case anyone is curious, other YC companies SG has worked with are Xobni (I worked on this account), Scribd (I worked on this account too), Loopt, Zumodrive and maybe others I'm forgetting.
btw, when the WSJ broke our embargo, I was on my way into the office. We were planning to get there around 3-4pm for the 9pm PT launch. Some folks were already there and turned the site live since the first press had gone up. But techcrunch has a policy of not posting their story if an embargo is broken, so we didn't get the TC story that we had briefed them on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what's the news on how/why the WSJ broke the embargo? What was their excuse?
(I'm posting a comment I initially was privately drafting for ryan in an email.) I posted the article - and included the embargo paras, which my co-founder and I nearly cut - because I thought the backstory would be useful/interesting to the folks there, who seemed to be unaware of the pr process during the prerelease of blekko. I wanted to open that up for them. Your comment was spot-on good advice for the ycomb co'…