Early stage and bootstrapped startups must embrace DIY (Do it Yourself) or outsourced PR as their product reaches advanced alpha in order to build strategic visibility without losing precious time.

It all starts with answering a several important questions:

Who are your customers?
Where do they go for information?
What are they looking for?
Why would they need this product?
How can it help them do something they couldn’t do before and better than anything else out there?
What will be the most compelling things to convince them to give it a shot?
How can you tell your story in a way that matters to the people you’re trying to reach without speaking “at” them?

PR is not an afterthought.

You need PR to help you carry your product or service to the very people who will help your company grow.

Simply relying on features and word of mouth simply isn’t going to cut it. This is a real world and the reality is that customers aren’t looking for you. You have to compete for mindshare. Those companies who don’t proactively tell their story will find themselves missing from the radar screens of their customers while their competition earns their business – regardless of whether or not it’s an inferior solution.

In order to be successful in Public Relations, you need to grasp what it is, what it isn’t, and how it works and why. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to build the right team, determine the best strategies to amplify visibility and gain traction, or have the ability to effectively measure it.

I’ve created an ebook for startups and VCs based on a previous post to help steer them in the right direction on the road to visibility, attention, and resonance. It will go through several revisions in the future, but at the moment, it’s a great place to start.

Table of Contents:

1. Understand what PR is and isn’t.
2. Don’t under value PR.
3. PR is not a switch.
4. Initial and consistent coverage takes time.
5. Get a spokesperson.
6. PR is not the only tool in the shed.
7. PR at the Head, Across Chasms, and in the Long Tail.
8. Engage in social media.
9. Support and reward your PR program.
10. Keep good people.
11. Keep an open line of communication.
12. Establish realistic metrics.
13. Do not launch your company or product at a conference.
14. Do not start contacting people on your own.
15. Breaking News.
16. PR and Social Media Enable a new form of outbound customer service.
17. PR isn’t charity.
18. You’re not the only company with a great story.

Download as a Word Doc.

Download as a PDF.

Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Plaxo, or Facebook

My friend Zoli Erdos let me know about two important events coming up this week. On November 8, 2006, make plans to attend The Art of Start and Launch Silicon Valley produced by SVASE and Garage.com.

The Art of the Start is a conference dedicated to helping entrepreneurs succeed. It runs from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Start-up authority and popular business author Guy Kawasaki and experts from Garage, along with Silicon Valley leaders and mavericks, venture capitalists, and successful start-up CEOs will explore the art of starting up.Conference attendees will learn:How things have changed on the investment scene.What it takes to get funded today.How to run and build your business by crafting an ecosystem. How to get a reasonable valuation.So check out the conference agenda and ask yourself what you could learn at this exciting conference…a lot!

But wait…there’s more.

Make sure you also check out Launch: Silicon Valley!

Starting one hour after The Art of Start, Launch: Silicon Valley will kick things off at 4:30 in the same location.

The first ever “Launch: Silicon Valley” event is designed to uncover and showcase the most exciting startups in high technology.

Launch: Silicon Valley will feature new companies that are ready for launch, but are not already well-known. These are companies who have a product or service available (as of November 8), but have not been out for more than several months.

30 startups with innovative solutions to real world problems have been selected to exhibit, serving markets including Medical Devices, Security, Clean Energy, Enterprise Search, Gaming, CAD, Digital Media, BioTech, Consumer, and Web 2.0.

Launch: Silicon Valley is not a pitchfest or a beauty pageant. Companies will not be pitching for funding; they will be looking for buzz, customers, mindshare, and possibly talent and partners.
“The drought of the past few years is over and venture capital is flowing again. But starting a high tech business is no less challenging and demanding than it’s ever been, even in an environment of venture capital overhang,” according to Garage.com.

Location:Microsoft Building 1, 1065 La Avenida St, Mountain View, CA 94043

Tags: zoli svase garage garage.com zolir+erdos startup artofstart launch+siliconvalley silicon+valley web+2.0 web2.0 guy+kawasaki guykawasaki microsoft launch vc venturecapital venture+capital

What started as methodologies and technologies to enhance the dynamic between site, applications and their users has blown up into what many are calling Dotbomb 2.0.

The evolution of Web 2.0 is out of control now that the marketers have gotten a hold of it. Today’s self appointed Web 2.0 leaders are really nothing at all close to the original philosophies and beliefs of how to make a better, evolving, more interactive web experience.

Companies with silly names with unbelievably horrible business models grace the headlines of the blogsphere, with many of the company founders, programmers, and marketing staffers become cult-like celebrities. These companies seem to make rounds from blog to blog, new tech events to unconferences, and it’s almost always the same cast and crew. The funny thing is that I don’t remember any of these folks from the classic Industry Standard rooftop parties who later became the first to RSVP for the wave of Pink Slip parties. Maybe they learned something.

On any given day, run a Web2.0 or Web+2.0 search in flickr, it’s overwhelming. From new companies, events, anatomy of 2.0 charts and albums of inbred barbecues, to analyses of Web 2.0 logos and popular fonts and colors. It’s just unbelievable to see how quickly the 2.0 cachet is eroding, which is ultimately expediting the backlash lead by those who are simply sick and tired of the hype. I think Michael Arrington said it best when he quietly removed the “Tracking Web 2.0” tagline from his site.

Don’t get me wrong. Web 2.0 (at its core) is NOT dead. Its foundation still carries on and is empowering many sites and new technologies to improve the web.

Image from oreillynet.com.

But wait. There’s help! Dead 2.0 put together a list of action items for the so-called Web 2.0 camp to help them get back on track:

1. Have a revenue model, right now.

2. Be a complete business, not just a feature.

3. Affect real people, not just bloggers.

4. Get a real, memorable name. If you don’t have one now, figure out when you’ll make the switch. The world only has so much room for YubNub’s, Twttr’s, Renkoo’s, Gada.be’s, CoolIris’es, and edgeio’s.

5. If applicable, get unaffiliated with Web 2.0, because it is hype and will have a very negative backlash in a little while.

6. Find some friends who don’t drink the kool-aid and get their honest feedback.

7. If you are revolutionary, make sure that a revolution is coming. Most evolutionary plays should be approached with exit strategy top of mind at all times.

8. Fit your business into an existing food chain.

9. Do not expect to be Google and, just as importantly, do not expect them to buy you.

10. Ignore the hype and have fun. Getting a link from Arrington or Scoble will sure help your traffic and publicity, but it’s no guarantee that anything substantial is coming down the road.

I found this interesting image on flickr which demonstrates the transition from static to read/write.

Robert Scoble posted a link, stating, “I love the “Dead2.0″ blog. It reminds me not to drink too much of my own hype juice.”

The comments were also insightful, Christopher Coulter said:

Only 11? It could reach 30 easy.

12. Avoid tech conference insider-baseball games and Flickr ‘photo-ops’ as ‘marketing’. Fish-flopping around to all the ‘be seen and heard’ trendy tech conferences, doesn’t even rate a blip to those outside the haze.

13. Stop using buzzwords in everyday conversations, assuming they actually mean anything, if I hear one more “long tail” or “paradigm shifts”, or crazy “Singularity” theories, or new new talk about “progressive-enhancements”, and all the blogger-navel gazing “grassroots” or anything Cluetrainish…I will literally scream.

14. Stop considering VCs as ‘customers’…all one giant big kids game of ‘telephone’.

Exactly.

Those behind # 12 and 13 are some of the biggest punch drinkers of them all and are confusing celebrity with visionary and revolution with evolution.

At a recent event, someone asked what I was up to. After I gave my 60 second pitch, they nodded their head and replied, “That’s disruptive.” While I was flattered, I thought, “Disruptive? Nah, progressive, but not disruptive.” But then it dawned on me. I was at a new tech networking event, so everything is “disruptive” and “social…” and “tagable.”

It is the marketers or the marketing-savvy technologists and company founders who have spoiled this once promising category for the rest of us. Just go visit the archives from Valleyschwag one year from now to see how many of the original companies that provided fashionable junk and clever trinkets are still around.

The best marketers are those who can still have fun in the 2.0 crowd, but realize that businesses have real customers and the majority of their customers have needs outside of bubble 2.0. Market to them using their direct channels of influence. You may be surprised to find out just how many 1.0 tactics you still need to take in order to create and grow a successful business.

Digg this!

Tags: Web 2.0, Dead2.0, Marketing, PR, stirr, Svase, flickr, web2.0, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Tim O’Reilly, Brian Solis