NY Enterprise Tech Meet Up Delivers Tips on How to Get Coverage for Your Startup
We are big fans of New York Enterprise Tech Meet Up. The event brings together the NYC enterprise IT community’s leading movers and shakers and we attend whenever we can.
At their January event we met some great people — including the CTO of Canrock Ventures and the managing director of Aegis. We also viewed an impressive demo from VTS, one of the leading SaaS providers in the commercial real estate market. However, the evening’s main event was an all-star media panel on how to get press coverage for your enterprise tech startup. The panel featured:
· Jonathan Shieber (TechCrunch)
· Alex Konrad (Forbes)
· Jing Cao (Bloomberg)
· Robert Hackett (Fortune)
We work with all these journalists and it’s always interesting to hear them live and talking about the stories they want to cover and how they like to work. In particular, events like these help us get “inside” the mind of these reporters. In media relations, it is essential to be able to look at your client’s news as if you were in the shoes of a reporter. By providing us with a better perspective on these reporters’ interests and processes, we can ensure that we are able to provide them with the resources they need to develop stories that they want to write and their readers want to read.
Alex Konrad, Forbes
· Hates voicemail, email him.
· Likes warm introductions from people who know him.
· Likes to talk about embargo timing and company milestones to see if he can get news early and learn about company milestones that really matter for his readers. Just because it is important to the company doesn’t mean it is important to the rest of the world.
· Likes pitches that show how startups and growth companies are chipping away at big companies’ market share.
Jonathan Shieber, TechCrunch
· Email him twice. But don’t send him a third email to follow-up — it will tick him off. If you haven’t heard back after the second email, assume he’s not interested.
· Wants marketing and PR people to know his publication’s audience and understand when news is appropriate for a trade publication vs. business publication.
· Likes getting new voices onto the site and profiling new companies — but he needs to know why your voice matters and what is unique about your perspective or company. He holds contributed writers to the same standards as staff writers.
Jing Cao, Bloomberg
· Looking for news that has broad market impact.
· Exclusives help with coverage but do not guarantee coverage.
· Likes to do meet and greets over coffee.
· If your company is eating away at established industry leaders she wants to know about it.
Robert Hackett, Fortune
· Don’t come to him with product announcements, they’re not really his thing.
· When pitching him, keep it short and sweet.
· Covers cybersecurity mostly at this point.
· When sending him a story idea, think about why the story will be interesting to the world, and not just interesting to people at your company or in your specific industry.
· Likes to learn about new technologies.
To really understand the personalities and preferences of tech reporters we have brought in quite a few to our offices. (Check out our latest interviews with Bloomburg West and Fusion) Have a reporter in mind you’d like profiled? Email sharonk@eastwick.com.
All together it was a great night. Looking forward to the next one on Wednesday, February 15 at Work-Bench. Hope to see you there!
P.S. Don’t forget to get there early. Otherwise all the snacks will be gone.
