The Submarine -->
April 2005
"Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New<br>York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because<br>the suit was also back in February,<br>January,<br>--><br>September<br>2004, June<br>2004, March<br>2004, September<br>2003,<br>February<br>2003, --><br>November<br>2002,<br>April 2002,<br>and February<br>2002.<br>April<br>2001. --><br>Times style section is two years behind Business Week in<br>matters of fashion-- or do fashions now last only a few months? -->
Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because<br>PR firms tell<br>them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered<br>during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry,<br>lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the<br>stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics,<br>crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.
I know because I spent years hunting such "press hits." Our startup spent<br>its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling<br>our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000<br>a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of<br>search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers<br>ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories. [1]
Our PR firm<br>was one of the best in the business. In 18 months, they got press<br>hits in over 60 different publications.<br>And we weren't the only ones they did great things for.<br>In 1997 I got a call from another<br>startup founder considering hiring them to promote his company. I<br>told him they were PR gods, worth every penny of their outrageous<br>fees. But I remember thinking his company's name was odd.<br>Why call an auction site "eBay"?
Symbiosis
PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR<br>firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest.<br>They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm<br>won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've<br>worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they<br>don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.
If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR<br>firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely,<br>overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories<br>for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and<br>let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good<br>PR firms won't lie to them.
A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths<br>(what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same<br>strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth<br>favors their clients.
For example, our PR firm often pitched stories about how the Web<br>let small merchants compete with big ones. This was perfectly true.<br>But the reason reporters ended up writing stories about this<br>particular truth, rather than some other one, was that small merchants<br>were our target market, and we were paying the piper.
Different publications vary greatly in their reliance on PR firms.<br>At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most of<br>their money from advertising and would give the magazines away for<br>free if advertisers would let them. [2] The average<br>trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough<br>articles to make it look like a magazine. They're so desperate for<br>"content" that some will print your press releases almost verbatim,<br>if you take the trouble to write them to read like articles.
At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times<br>and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out and<br>find their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen<br>to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically. We managed to get press<br>hits in almost every publication we wanted, but we never managed<br>to crack the print edition of the Times. [3]
The weak point of the top reporters is not laziness, but vanity.<br>You don't pitch stories to them. You have to approach them as if<br>you were a specimen under their all-seeing microscope, and make it<br>seem as if the story you want them to run is something they thought<br>of themselves.
Our greatest PR coup was a two-part one. We estimated, based on<br>some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the<br>Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral<br>enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote<br>it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20%<br>of the online store market.
This was roughly true. We really did have the biggest share of the<br>online store market, and 5000 was our best guess at its size. But<br>the way the story appeared in the press sounded a lot more definite.
Reporters like definitive statements. For example, many of the<br>stories about Jeremy Jaynes's conviction say that he was one of the<br>10 worst spammers. This "fact" originated in Spamhaus's ROKSO list,<br>which I think even Spamhaus would admit is a rough guess at the top<br>spammers. The first stories...