[jagermo]

few pointers: Never, and I mean, never ever, call a journalist after you sent them your news and ask them if they got your mail and when they will write about it. It's a sure way to get you blacklisted. Target your mail. A tech-blog needs other information than a local newspaper. Set up a page with pictures and link to them.

And: Get a professional PR person. You might be good, but if you let your pr be handled by "guy x in marketing" then you are no better than those companies who let their IT be handled by "my sisters brother, he really knows his way around the internet".

[Angostura]

How about you actually assess how good that 'guy in marketing is'. He/she might have been an agency PR in an earlier life, or perhaps even a journalist.

[CurtMonash]

Your fist paragraph is good. The second one, as stated in my own comment to the main, I vigorously disagree with.

[klint]

I can't say what the best long term strategy is, but I can say that as a tech journalist I almost always prefer to hear from someone involved in a company rather than a PR firm. But hiring a full-time internal PR person isn't the same thing as hiring an agency.

As inthewoods wrote, the reason for hiring a PR person is for their contacts. Agencies will make a lot of claims about how many contacts they have, but I've heard they'll often stick low-priority accounts with junior PR people or even interns (and the quality of pitches and press releases I've seen from well known agencies about unknown companies seems to confirm this).

Jagermo wrote: "i get a lot of mails from marketing people who think they know what journalists want. Most of them do not."

I get a lot of e-mails from PR people who think they know what I want, and few do. I get a lot of the same from marketing, but a lot of journalists end up in PR or marketing at some point in their careers and they often do know what other journalists want. Some people just seem to get it, whether they've been journalists or not, and some don't. I imagine it's easier to keep track on who's doing what and how good they're doing if they're internal and not outsourced to an agency, but I wouldn't know.

FWIW, some of the best pitches for startups I've gotten have come from investors.

[wilfra]

Spoken like a true PR person.

Telling every bootstrapped startup to get a professional PR person is silly. The whole purpose of articles like this is so that they can make due without one in the beginning.

[jagermo]

actually I'm a journalist and i get a lot of mails from marketing people who think they know what journalists want. Most of them do not. I have no interest in superlatives for example. Sure, you don't need one to start, but please, show me one successful startup without a professional PR person.

Edit: I think, companies need to see pr as a tool. Like your other tools. You can write all your code in Notepad. You normally don't.

[true_religion]

Show me one successful startup without a janitor?

Starting out... there's a lot of things that you may need later but simply can't afford now (cost benefit analysis): dedicated CEO, dedicated designers, dedicated OPs staff or customer support, dedicated PR staff and yes... dedicated janitorial services.

If cleaning toilets were half as baffling as PR work, we'd be seeing a lot more articles on how to train your staff to use a toilet brush.